In today’s Almond Matters, brought to you by Valent, the most effective means for foliar disease protection relies on careful monitoring combined with a management plan that alternates products to minimize resistance.
“We have a lot of tools and we like to rotate the FRAC groups,” Valent Field Market Research Representative Tino Lopez said, “so if you use one group of products in the early phase you’re probably going to be rotating to different types of products in the next application series.”
Lopez categorized different diseases into two separate groups, the springtime diseases, and summer diseases. The springtime stage of diseases primarily occur during bloom or shortly after. “We’re talking about diseases like brown rot or blossom blight, shot hole and jacket rot,” Lopez noted. The summer category includes “diseases like scab, and rust, and hull rot. Alternaria is another one that’s significant,” said Lopez.
Up until the last few weeks, many growers in California were not certain they would need to spray for the springtime foliar diseases because it had been so warm and dry. “Obviously that didn’t last very long, we now had rains and we had to react to the conditions and make sure that blossom blight and shot hole and that jacket rot did not get out of control,” Lopez stated.
Successful foliar disease protection can also require growers and PCA’s to be proactive in their fungicide applications. Lopez suggested “trying to get ahead of the disease, almost doing it on a preventative basis, because once the disease gets started you begin to suffer losses in production.”
Classifying foliar diseases by two seasons does not mean that those are the only times of year to be thinking about prevention and management. “The fact of the matter is that we have to stay on top of disease control in our intensive orchard systems, basically throughout the growing season, because they obviously can play a very devastating role if we do not make sure we take good control measures,” said Lopez.
Listen to Lopez’s interview below.