2021 Spring Insights - Flipbook - Page 5
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Jeff Bode, Regional Sales Manager
History has allowed us to realize many incentives
of why we now plan for fungicide applications
rather than taking the wait-and-see approach.
Can you believe we have been
discussing fungicide applications for
over 10 years? Products have advanced
greatly since BASF introduced us to
Headline. I still remember one of the
first fungicide trials I conducted on
DKC61-69, and how amazed we were
when we saw the yield gain.
The evolution of products has been
quick, starting with products that only
were preventative single modes of
action. We then added another mode
to bring in the curative aspect, and
most recently have products with three
modes of action that deliver consistent
control over an expanded list of
diseases as well as giving us a larger
time frame for protection against these
diseases.
Increased plant health has
always been a key benefit from
this application, whether you were
applying at the V5 growth stage or
around pollination for corn or during
pod fill for our soybean crop, and it
shows up many different ways. We see
higher forage quality when fungicide is
applied on fields that were harvested
as corn silage, and we have all seen
the videos of combining a corn field
that was only partially treated with
fungicide. It is great to see the combine
increase speed in the treated areas
of the field, and then panning to the
yield monitor to show the increased
yields. And lastly, we cannot forget
about soybeans, where we visually see
a field maturing naturally. If we look
back to just last fall, we were thankful
for those beans that were holding
some moisture rather than delivering
soybeans that were less than 10%.
While better products and increased
plant health were big gains over the
last decade, the advances in science
have given us the greatest gains. We
once had to guess and hope that the
hybrid planted was going to give a
positive return on Investment.
Today, all of River Valley
Cooperative’s seed partners provide
us with predictive responses to a
fungicide application. In addition to
these recommendations, WinField
United provides us with Response to
Fungicide (RTF) scores on many of
the hybrids that are planted today.
These scores provide predicted yields
gains in fields with limited disease
pressure. It is incredible that yield
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