When it comes to fungicide applications, pulses can be some of the more difficult crops to work with.
Dense canopies and susceptibility to many different diseases makes disease management more complicated.
In this Pulse School episode, we talk to Tom Wolf of Agrimetrix and Sprayers101.com about how to get fungicide to the part of the plant that needs it.
“When we come into the field and look at the canopy of the crop, we want to make sure that we know which part of the canopy needs this spray. Is it the stems? Is it the leaves? Is it the upper third or lower third of the canopy? Those are some fundamental questions that can change with diseases,” explains Wolf.
Most of the fungicides available are not translocated across the plant, he notes, “so the spray does have to go exactly where it’s needed.”
“So we want to look at the leaf structure, for example. If they are large leaves and they are overlapping, then typically a large drop can make it through those kind of cascading layers. They act like umbrellas. You know the second the drop comes in and hits that leaf, that bottom leaf is shadowed. So we have to spray slightly fewer droplets in this situations… and they gradually make their way to the bottom of that canopy.”
Along with droplet size, water volume is critical.
“We need to add water volume in these situations. We’d move from you know a fifteen gallon normal water volume to perhaps a twenty or a twenty five gallon volume, depending on the canopy.”
Tom Wolf discussed the main points to keep in mind when applying fungicide to your pulse crops (filmed during the CanolaPalooza events in Saskatoon, Portage, and Lacombe):
For more Pulse School videos, click here.
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