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The NDSU Extension weekly podcast In the Pod: Soybean Updates delivers timely insights and expert advice on soybean production.
You're listening to In The Pod, Soybean Updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension. White mold in soybeans can be a major challenge for farmers. Are the challenges the same in other states? We caught up with Dylan Mangel, extension plant pathologist with the University of Nebraska, to see how white mold impacts their soybeans. Dylan, how is white mold in Nebraska similar or different from North Dakota?
Dylan Mangel:We've actually learned a lot about white mold from North Dakota and the Northern states. I mean, historically, it's been a bigger issue there. But what we've seen over time is it just sort of moves south into Nebraska, specifically where I work. And once white mold gets a foothold, stays there. So we're starting to struggle more and more with it. And one of the reasons it's been so bad for us is we've got a very large irrigation capacity. So about half of our soybeans are irrigated or 3,000,000 acres of irrigated beans. Even though we're warmer, so white mold isn't quite as advantaged, under those irrigated conditions temperatures decrease especially in sandy soils where we're irrigating a lot. We can keep the temperatures cooler and wetter and white mold seems to just flare up. We're doing a lot of work with fungicides. We're actually experimenting with chemigation quite a bit because we have that opportunity with the irrigation going already. We're just trying to learn everything we can from the states that have been dealing with this longer to try and minimize the impact in Nebraska.
Bruce Sundeen:Do you have a specific management approach that you're doing?
Dylan Mangel:I think the most effective thing right now is fungicides, foliar fungicides. The big thing with that is just making sure they're timed appropriately. If growers, even if they select a good product, but they don't get it out there at the very precise time when it's gonna make a big difference, it's not gonna pay for itself.
Bruce Sundeen:Dylan, which fungicides do you recommend to your farmers?
Dylan Mangel:Well, I think there's a lot of options available. Some products are narrow scope. They're the Endura, for example. Very narrow scope, very effective on white mold. But there's other options available. They also are effective, but they're broader scope too. Maybe not as effective as Endura, but we put out tools, put out regional evaluations on the crop protection network for foliar fungicides of soybean that show ratings that we've experienced with these. But I'd say overall there's a lot of good options. I would say consider what other foliar things you might be dealing with as well. So if white mold is your only issue, you might want to go white mold specific. If you've got other things like frog eye leaf spot for example, you might want to consider something more broad spectrum. But overall we've got good options.
Bruce Sundeen:How do you handle the new products that are released?
Dylan Mangel:We're evaluating these products as they come. What we typically see is by the time we're evaluating, they typically look pretty good. So we're always excited when new stuff comes out. It's great to have more options, especially when some are gonna have better secondary target effects too. We're lucky we've got a lot of good tools available on the market.
Bruce Sundeen:Dylan, what about rotation? How is it in Nebraska?
Dylan Mangel:So a lot of our acres are on corn soybean rotation, and a lot are actually on a corn corn soybean rotation. That does help, but the problem with white mold is just how durable its survival structures are in the field. We seem to get into a rotation where every other year we're having bad white mold and it's just because those are the infected fields with white mold, and that's when beans are rotating back into those fields. So 2021 and 2023 were pretty bad years. 2025, we really kind of expected it to be a bad year. I think a lot of growers were very prepared to manage white mold in those cases and they knew which fields those were. We didn't have as much yield loss last year. It was also a little bit warmer, so we didn't struggle as much. The rotation just doesn't really help a whole lot specifically with this one, but I think it it certainly helps a little bit as compared to just beans on beans.
Bruce Sundeen:Thanks, Dylan. Our guest has been Dylan Mangel, extension plant pathologist at the University of Nebraska. You're listening to In the Pod, Soybean Updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension, supported by the North Dakota Soybean Council.