Written by cpm
Septoria’s latent phase is infuriatingly hard to predict or detect, but a better understanding of this unseen threat can bring far greater precision to fungicide programmes. CPM gains an insight. Septoria does a lot of burrowing and damage internally before any symptoms start to show. By Tom Allen-Stevens Right now, there’s a cancer in your crop. You can’t see it but it’s there – pervading the plant tissue, sucking the life out of its cells, and crucifying its potential – silently, invisibly, mercilessly. It sounds like a trailer for a B-rate horror movie, or at least a rather clumsy ploy by a pesticide manufacturer to persuade you to apply fungicide to an apparently clean crop. But it’s actually a reasonably accurate description of what Septoria tritici does during its latent phase, according to BASF’s Ben Freer. “Just because you can’t see the disease, it doesn’t mean it’s not there,” he says. “Growers think they have a happy, healthy crop, but we know that septoria does a lot of burrowing and damage internally before any symptoms start to show.” As much as 90% of leaves taken last spring from apparently disease-free, treated wheat crops were infected with septoria. The extent…
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