easymoney - 1/26/2026 06:36

You guys have a wonderful threat going. I just want to take one minute. This might be a little bit wordy, but I just want to clarify disease and pest pressure.

You can curl the moles healthy, beautiful crop farming the most biological way you ever imagined possible. You're still going to have disease and pest pressure show up. They're part of nature. They're not going anywhere

How our crop responds to these pressures will be different.

Aphids. They are selective. But they still have to fly into your field to discover they don't want to be in there. So you're going to get a wave of bugs come in. They're going to feed and they're going to leave.. they're not meeting up in the road. Ditch. Hey Bob, I see you're coming from that field. How was that. Oh Mark, that was terrible. Let's go over here.
But if you monitor the threshold, you'll see that it's very low. The population does not explode and the further you get into the field, the lower the population is more likely to get.
The odds of needing a broad acre insecticide have greatly diminished and possibly if you keep monitoring you might not need them.

A pathogen like rust is not select of. It's not landing on your plant seeing that it's not welcome there and then getting up and leaving it's stuck there. It's digging in and it's going to do the best it can.
But if we had high functioning healthy plants, you're not spraying three fungicide passes to try to stop the hemorrhaging of yield loss. In an extreme year you still might need to use a fungicide. But one pass on very healthy plants might be all you need
And all them other years where there's low pressure from disease. Everybody else is doing one. Maybe two passes and you're not doing any because your crop is looking just fine

As mentioned before, fungicide products have more to them than just the fungicide part. They have stress relievers and plant response triggers that can promote the plant and create a crop response even if there's no disease pressure present. So to do a yield study and say well. I thought my plants look healthy but when I ran this fungicide I still got a positive response. That doesn't mean you had disease present. The product is just doing what the product is designed to do.