By Alison Robertson
The Crop Protection Network (CPN) has launched an exciting new free resource, the Crop Risk Tool, designed to give farmers the power to better understand the best time to manage foliar diseases in corn and soybeans. This tool is the culmination of many years of pathologists walking fields collecting disease data to provide field-specific risk values to guide timely and informed fungicide decisions.
The Crop Risk Tool is a web-based platform that forecasts the risk of key foliar diseases by feeding local weather data into the validated models. Currently, this tool has risk models for tar spot and gray leaf spot in corn, and white mold and frogeye leaf spot in soybeans. The risk models for corn were partially developed through the National Predictive Modeling Tool Initiative. Additional models specific for other cropping systems such as dry beans, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, carrots, and onions are also available.
Users can select fields they would like to monitor and dates they are interested in (upper left of screen, see Figure 1). Risk models are shown on the right side of the screen.
Source : iastate.edu