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“Sugarbeet Report” presented by NDSU Extension, features growing tips from NDSU sugar beet specialists and researchers.
This is the Sugarbeet Report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season. Keeping Cercospora leaf spot under control is an uphill battle. Researchers are constantly searching for answers. Nate Wyatt, USDA research plant pathologist in the Sugarbeet and Potato Unit, is finding some answers. Nate, when we talk about Cercospora leaf spot, resistance always comes to mind. Is this part of your research?
Nate Wyatt:Fungicide resistance is obviously always a hot topic when we talk about Cercospora leaf spot. We have a couple of really interesting projects going on this year that I'm excited about. The first one is we're doing a lot of work tracking fungicide resistance development and changes in fields following fungicide applications throughout the year. And the reason we're doing this is because we've seen that fungicide resistance is not a static event. As we apply fungicide chemistries, for example, if you apply a Triazole, oftentimes what survives in that field is what was resistant to the Triazoles. And because of that, we detect a lot of Triazole resistance in our fields at the end of the year. But what we've noticed in our infield in season testing is that triazole resistance is not always present before a triazole gets applied. So we have lots of sensitivity to these chemistries that we can take advantage of. And then a lot of the times what we detect at the end of the season are highly resistant isolates that have been exposed multiple times. And so the exciting aspect of looking into these fungicide resistance mutations and the dynamics of this within a field is that we've started to find the tools that we thought were previously not useful because we were detecting high levels of fungicide resistance at the end of the year are actually useful tools in the middle and beginning of the season because there's actually quite a bit of sensitivity to those tools. And so really, it's a great example of why tank mixing is important. It's a great example of why we should use all of the tools available to us because it seems that Cercospora is challenged by the idea of trying to be resistant to multiple fungicide chemistries at once. And by using all of the tools available to us, we can keep it guessing and stop it from adapting to any specific pressure that we put on it.
Bruce Sundeen:Do you have any new tools to work with?
Nate Wyatt:That's an exciting part about this year too is we actually have a new fungicide chemistry available to us. The product's called Verpixo and the other major project that we're working on in collaboration with essentially all of the Cercospora researchers in the Red River Valley here, is monitoring for the development of resistance to this new fungicide chemistry. And one of the things that we can always count on Cercospora doing is finding a way to adapt to whatever we throw at it. It's not necessarily a matter of if Cercospora will develop resistance to Verpixo, we can be fairly confident that it will. And our job is to capture that and identify what the best use of our other chemistries is to balance that out and manage that resistance development long term. Because our goal is always to take all of the tools we have available and use them in the most efficient manner to keep them useful long term. And really, I think this year with the advent of Verpixo, we're going to get a really useful tool for the next couple years that can really help us combat Cercospora leaf spot, which is sorely needed.
Bruce Sundeen:Nate, does Verpixo have anyone else's attention?
Nate Wyatt:When we talk about the larger group of Cercospora researchers who are really interested in how Verpixo will impact the Cercospora population, we're talking about myself and my lab in the USDA Sugarbeet unit. We're talking about NDSU and NDSU Extension. We're talking about the University of Minnesota Extension as well as the sugar co ops in the region, Crystal Sugar, MnDAC, and Southern Minnesota. And really, this expands even past our local Red River Valley area because I know, for example, Western Sugar, Amalgamated Sugar, and the sugar producers and co ops in Michigan are also very keen on this aspect of VERPIXO and its use and the potential for resistance development. This is a US wide sugar beet issue that we need to focus on and make sure we're on top of.
Bruce Sundeen:Thanks, Nate. Our guest has been Nate Wyatt, USDA research plant pathologist in the Sugarbeet and Potato Research Unit. This is the Sugarbeet Report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season.