November 2024 - 41

FRESH VIEWS
mitigation plan for lower priority diseases that don't
affect your bottom line.
Mix it up
Decisions that impact diseases occur at every step of
crop production - from variety selection to final harvest
and storage. There are many disease management
tactics available to growers, and the most important thing
to remember is to combine multiple tactics when building
a disease management " toolbox " for your operation.
When considering resources to use, it helps to
consider the integrated pest management (IPM) pyramid.
Prevention should be an even more important part of
your production, more so than disease management.
These strategies include selecting resistant varieties
when available, sanitation and use of clean seeds,
propagules or transplants.
Cultural tactics that reduce pathogen establishment or
eliminate existing populations should then be considered.
These methods include appropriate site selection,
environmental management, vector management, crop
rotation and balanced fertility and irrigation.
Physical and mechanical methods of disease
management include use of protected culture,
mulching, tillage, solarization and soil steaming. Use
of biologicals is growing, and biological options are
likely available to help with priority diseases in your
operation. With biologicals, it is important to get ahead
of the pathogen, so apply biologicals early and often.
Success is often dependent on the environment and
the level of disease already present, so results may be
variable. Synthetic pesticides play an important role
in disease management but should not be relied on
as the sole tactic.
Remember to stack the different tactics you use to
ensure better disease management. Talk with growers,
Extension educators and university and government
researchers to find out about new disease management
options for your crops.
Some newer resources management, including
anaerobic soil disinfestation, have shown to be effective
in vegetable production. Trialing a new management
tactic in a portion of your crop can provide valuable
insights to new management options.
Document your past successes
and failures
It is important to keep track of disease management
tactics used in your operation and whether they
are effective. Diseases never occur singly, so it can
sometimes be hard to keep track of how successful
management tactics have been for a specific disease.
Pesticide applications are easy to record, and the
impacts are usually easy to see. It can be difficult to
document the impacts of broader disease management
VEGETABLEGROWERSNEWS.COM | 41
When developing or refreshing
your operation's disease management
protocols, it is important to correctly
identify and prioritize diseases. "
strategies, such as crop rotations, variety selection and
sanitation. However, keeping good records of disease
management practices along with annual observations
will help identify practices that are reducing infections.
Whether you are a new or experienced grower, it is
important to refresh your disease management plans
to stay on top of your existing disease issues and be
prepared for new and emerging diseases.
Anna Testen is a research plant pathologist with USDAARS
in Wooster, Ohio, focused on developing disease
management strategies for controlled environment
agriculture specialty crops. She has worked on vegetable,
fruit and ornamental disease management projects in the
U.S., Ecuador, Bolivia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. For questions,
please contact the author at anna.testen@usda.gov.
http://noursefarms.com http://www.VEGETABLEGROWERSNEWS.COM
November 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of November 2024
