It’s Time For Early-season Scouting

By: Clarke McGrath

It’s been another challenging season so far. A combination of cold temperatures creating challenges for seedlings, untimely rains impeding planting progress, and windy days wrecking spray schedules hit the highlights, or maybe lowlights, of the start of the 2018 growing season.

With soils cool and wet at soybean planting time, we are set up for more potential challenges that call for early-season scouting, with diseases toward the top of the list. For plant diseases to become a significant problem, typically three things must be in place: a host (soybean plants), pathogens (more on those below), and an environment that the pathogen can thrive in (cool plus wet equals likely early-season soybean disease pressure). Some pathogens do well in warm plus wet, so we aren’t out of the woods in that case either. Plant pathologists call this the “disease triangle.”

Dealing with disease triangle
We can’t do much about the presence of pathogens; they are plentiful in many fields. We don’t have control over the weather, and we have marginal control over the environment. We can improve drainage in areas, or work on soil structure and crop residue management, but in springs like this one, we will still have a favorable environment for early-season disease in many areas.