It is a well-known fact that the best way to control diseases, particularly those on potatoes, is to prevent them. With this in mind, the emphasis that is placed on the preventive use of crop protection products makes sense.
It is not just idle talk either: laboratory tests have proven that some SDHI products that were applied only two days after a potato had been infected with early blight, provided less than 50% control. Bear in mind that at that stage, the potato plant had not shown any lesions yet. Preventive application is therefore of utmost importance to achieve effective control.
The flipside of the disease-control coin is the cost grip in which potato farmers are often caught. Rising input costs while the potato price remains largely unchanged, makes it imperative to avoid unnecessary applications of fertiliser, pesticides and other inputs if a producer hopes to achieve the maximum return on a crop investment.
How then can potato farmers strike the optimal balance between preventative versus unnecessary control?
The solution lies in the new service that Syngenta recently established to give producers advance warning of conditions that are favourable for the development of early or late blight on potatoes.
The service combines weather predictions and disease models in order to issue warnings for areas around one or more specific weather stations. Producers register on the Syngenta website for specified months and receive notifications on Mondays and Thursdays of the disease risk predicted for the next five days. When no risk is expected, no notification is issued.
The producer can choose to receive warnings via WhatsApp or email, and to have access to other information from the relevant weather station, such as conditions that can influence the application of chemical products.
For any enquiries, contact your Syngenta representative of sales manager, or send an email to andre.labuschagne@syngenta.com
