Opportunities, pest and disease pressures for the upcoming 2021 season

With the excitement for the year and the 2021 growing season upon us, consider the impact that improved pest and disease control on your crops can provide. Emerging forecasts suggest improved commodity prices to come in grain and cereals, pulse crops, specialty and tree fruit crops/berries, etc. To best leverage the upcoming markets, minimize your losses and culls while keeping pest and disease pressures under control. 

This season growers will face some of the growing, newer insect pests and diseases standing in the way of optimized profitability. From the Pacific Northwest, to central Florida and unique agriculture seen everywhere between, each area faces its own particular insect, fungal, bacterial or viral pressure. Over and over again, our customers have reported faster, more thorough kill/burn-down on stubborn weeds like kosha, glyphosate-resistant thistles etc., mare’s tail and more. Across the West, insect pests like brown marmorated stink bug, citrus and pear psylla and wooly aphids continue to advance across new production acreage. In the Midwest, northern Plains, eastern corn belt and into the southeast, soy gall midge has expanded its reach. Control has been challenging. In sod production, horticultural maintenance as well as golf and sports turf environments, the bermudagrass mite has presented a particularly stubborn challenge to control across intermediate and southern US latitudes. These pests are associated not only with the troubling pathogens they carry (like Citrus Greening Disease and psylla, etc.) compounding challenges for growers. Even in Utah, the AY research team has reported sightings of a once-infrenquent turfgrass pest, the Bank’s Grass Mite.

Fungal diseases like tar spot (corn), and UG99 stem rust (wheat) and historic issues like bacterial Fire Blight in west coast tree fruit and nut production continue to present significant challenges. This is particularly the case in regions where annual pesticide application in production acreage overall – or with regard to particular chemistries, is restricted. While some control of tar spot and Fire Blight is accessible, it's not cheap. This is not the case with UG99 stem rust in wheat, now a threat to our food security. Other crops around the world facing serious pest and disease threats: banana and coffee. We're working with research collaborators in Africa to see how our technology may buy these niche commodities some time until additional solutions are developed.

Through our suite of fertility and pest control products, Aqua-Yield nanoliquids' improved ability to deliver nutrients and active chemistries into crop tissues, we here at the R&D team are excited to show how low-rate inclusion of products like NanoPro, NanoRise (and soon, our organic OMNIPro companion product) can help you stay ahead of the battle against these emerging threats to your success. If you’re looking to one or two products to address persistent, challenging pest and disease issues, consider reaching out to our field support team for some help. Keeping pesticide intact and in contact with the appropriate target tissue for an adequate time is critical to optimize your control response. This often carries with it an added challenge of a narrow application timing window in insect, nematode, fungal or bacterial development. Because of this, it’s important that every application improves delivery of what you want, where you want, when you want it.

Check out the improved control, improved production efficiency and consequent reduction of off-target pesticide exposure (from reduced lbs. AI/ac/year) with Aqua-Yield NanoShield technology today!