Don't Leave Your Crops Vulnerable to Disease

    With all the rainfall and flooding this summer, now’s the time to help protect your crops against disease. It starts with a regenerative approach to soil health and plant health.
    “Crop diseases are definitely a concern this year,” said Dennis Klockenga, CCA, a regenerative Ag crop and livestock consultant with ProfitProAG. “Wet conditions make crops more susceptible to disease.”
    Bill Banken, a ProfitProAG client, farms near Appleton, Minnesota, an area known for high-magnesium soil. These soils tend to form hard crusts, making them difficult to till. High-magnesium soils also lock up valuable crop nutrients.
    Banken, a no-tiller, couldn’t use his trash whippers when he was planting this spring, because the soil was too wet. “He was concerned that the soil would slab up,” Klockenga said. “It didn’t, thanks to his fields’ good soil structure.”
    Healthy soil supports a thriving community of biological activity, including beneficial fungi, insects and earthworms. “These create a network of pores that promote water infiltration—a key component of soil health,” Klockenga said.
    When Banken side-dressed his crop, his area continued to deal with ample rainfall. “Bill reported that his fields didn’t slab up at side-dress, even though the soil was wet,” Klockenga said.
    Contrast this with a nearby field that Banken doesn’t farm. That farm is conventionally tilled and has had major ponding challenges this year. “Tillage pulverizes the soil structure and destroys beneficial soil fungi,” Klockenga said. “As I look at farmers’ fields this summer, the crops that are doing the best are the epitome of soil health.”

Fight Crop Diseases And Protect The “Good Guys”

    While soil health is a key to plant health, this year’s abundant moisture can unleash crop diseases. For corn, that includes tar spot, Goss’s wilt, northern corn leaf blight, pythium, fusarium, rhizoctonia, common rust, anthracnose leaf blight and more. For soybeans, sudden death syndrome, downy mildew, pythium, fusarium, rhizoctonia, phomopsis, white mold, phytophthora root and stem rot, and other diseases can rob yield.
    “We recommend going with a more biological approach, rather than a chemical approach, to control diseases,” Klockenga said.
    ProfitProAG’s products put energy and nutrients back into the crop while protecting the vital network of beneficial fungi and soil microbes that boost plant health. Klockenga recommends:

• BIO EMPRUV G2 – Helps manage tar spot, Goss’s wilt, northern corn leaf blight and other diseases. It enhances colonization by beneficial bacteria and fungi. It’s a powerful protection against Goss’s wilt, which shuts down the plant’s immune system, allowing diseases and premature death. In addition, BIO EMPRUV G2 supplements a full fertilization program, as recommended in accordance with reliable soil and tissue analysis, and provides a source of immediately-available nutrients.

• Xylem Plus – This systemic fungicide provides up to a 60-day residual in the plant’s stalk and leaves to provide resistance to a host of common corn and soybean diseases, including white mold. “The general rule of thumb is every 10% increase in white mold incidence can reduce yields by 2 to 5 bushels per acre,” Klockenga said.
      Xylem Plus was put to the test in research plots at Iowa State University in 2023. Every application time and rate that was tested showed increased yield and net return. Results from other field trials with Xylem Plus in northwest Iowa revealed an 80-100% decrease in white mold incidence, as well as a 20 to 30 bushel-per-acre yield advantage, compared to untreated fields.
      Xylem Plus is a phosphite, Klockenga noted. This reduced form of phosphate serves as a biodegradable fungicide to inhibit fungal growth and protect plants against pathogens. Phosphite essentially acts as a priming agent for several plant defense responses. Published research has shown that phosphite can help control or reduce the severity of selected plant diseases.
      “Xylem Plus can be applied in-furrow or foliar, with a high-boy applicator, an airplane or a drone,” Klockenga noted.

• BioImpact+ – If you’re looking for ways to reduce chemicals while protecting your crop from yield-robbing diseases and insects, get acquainted with chitosan. This natural “super hero” is included in BioImpact+.
      Chitosan is a biopolymer derived from chitin, one of the most abundant, natural materials on earth. Chitin forms structures that strengthen cell walls in insect exoskeletons, crustacean shells and membranes in microbes like fungi.
      “You know that crunching noise you hear when you step on certain insects, like wireworms?” Klockenga asked. “That’s the exoskeleton, and you can break it down. That’s what chitosan does.”
      Chitosan is also remarkable for another reason. “Beneficial microbes that are helpful to agriculture don’t have chitin-based membranes, but harmful microbes do have chitin-based membranes,” Klockenga said. “That’s why chitosan is so powerful in crop production.”
      Chitosan triggers systemic acquired resistance (SAR) in plants. This natural mechanism stimulates non-pathogenic microbes, which confer long-lasting protection against a broad spectrum of harmful microorganisms. “It means the good guys out-compete the bad guys,” Klockenga said.
      ProfitProAG makes it easy to use chitosan. BioImpact+ is applied in a liquid form that can be incorporated with foliar fertilizer.
      “When you apply chitosan to your fields, this stimulates the plants and the biology in the soil to produce chitinase, which breaks down the membranes of harmful microbes and the exoskeletons of harmful insects like seed corn maggots and wireworms,” Klockenga said. “Suppressing insects and disease organisms this way helps you reduce the need for insecticides and fungicides, which kill the beneficial fungi along with the harmful fungi.”

    To learn more about how these products can control crop diseases in your fields, contact Klockenga at 320-333-1608, or dklockenga@profitproag.com.