Disease Management
Part 2, Section 2: Corn Pest Management
Corn Pest Management
DISEASE MANAGEMENT
Disease management should start with planting resistant hybrids, maintaining good soil fertility, practicing crop rotation, and monitoring fields for disease. In order to choose resistant hybrids, knowing what diseases have been present is necessary. Therefore, growers should monitor the occurrence of disease and positively identify the diseases. The best method to monitor disease pressure is through periodically scouting fields from planting through harvest. This way you can note the diseases present and disease pressure to better select hybrids the following year. Collect specimens of diseased materials that exhibit symptoms and send them to your local extension office for identification.
Although the use of foliar fungicides on corn has increased in Pennsylvania, results on yield impact have been mixed. The two most commonly applied foliar fungicide families, the triazoles and strobilurins, are both very effective in controlling diseases and have been marketed as increasing yield. Both the triazole and strobilurin families of fungicides use very site-specific modes of action and multiple fungal pathogens have developed resistance to one or, in some cases, both fungicide families. The continued use of these chemicals without adequate disease pressure or as prophylactic treatments will further increase the likelihood of resistance occurring. Once pathogens become resistant, there will be few choices to control them if the diseases become an economic threat.
