Renewable Farming

Northern Leaf Blight reported in Iowa, Nebraska corn

Soil Solutions, LLC of Onawa, IA reported on their website today that Northern Leaf Blight, a fungal disease, has shown up in western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. 

They also alerted growers to watch for Goss’ wilt, a bacterial disease.  Here’s the link to the Soil Solutions report.

Also this afternoon, Iowa crop consultant Bob Streit e-mailed us to report that he and two other consultants are seeing more Goss’ wilt positive tests across Iowa. He’s citing southeast Iowa consultant Amie Bandy and northeast Iowa consultant Dr. Michael McNeill. Bob adds that another friend who closely observes crops north of Des Moines has found Goss’ wilt in those counties.

We phoned Jarrett Chambers, President of ATP Nutrition Ltd. in Canada, for further information on consultant Streit’s recommendation: Foliar-feeding ATP Nutrition’s “42Phi for Corn” as a nutritional immune system builder for corn. This product also contains copper in a form generally known to improve immunity against bacterial pressures.

Chambers noted that “We’ve favored the nutritional approach for a long time” to keep crops healthy and growing — which is the best defense against a wide array of fungal or bacterial pathogens.

We’ll be spraying 42Phi corn and soybean foliars in our test plots soon, and following up with tissue analysis. We want to get some specific measures of how much more copper and other nutrients are translocated into the new leaves when WakeUP is used as the surfactant/mobilizer.

 You can see more details on ATP Nutrition’s 42Phi for Corn at this link.

Bob Streit is also doing further testing this season with a “crop health enhancing” product which we checked in our research plots in 2014. The strips had already been infected with Goss’ wilt by August, so there was no prevention effect — just a constraint of further disease progression. 

We’re trying to reach Kevin Korus, coordinator of the University of Nebraska’s Plant and Pest Diagnostic Clinic, for an update on what he’s seeing.