BASF: timely fungicide application key to soybean production

A mild winter has soybean growers on alert for the disease pressure that may have over-wintered in fields and pose a threat to this year's crop. The increase in disease pressure this year means it's even more important for growers to intensively manage fields and control disease to produce a healthy, high-yielding crop.

With the high profit potential in soybeans, protecting the crop to get the most out of every acre is increasingly important.

Though weather uncertainty is always an issue for growers, planning ahead is a crucial first step toward success.

"To protect profit potential, growers need to plan early to control disease," said Nick Fassler, Technical Market Manager, BASF. "Staying ahead of soybean diseases and planning for a well-timed fungicide application is important to control damaging diseases."

Growers should take the time to actively evaluate weed-control programs and look for early-season disease pressure, Fassler said. Diseases such as Septoria brown spot and frogeye leaf spot are common late-season diseases to watch for. Protecting soybeans from these diseases will keep plants healthy so they can produce higher yields and profit.

"With soybeans planted earlier than usual in many areas this year, we can anticipate larger, healthier, more vegetative growth of the plants earlier in the season," Fassler said.
"The larger plant size increases the number of nodes to develop pods on. It's important to apply a fungicide to protect the soybean plant during the reproductive stages and through grain fill."

To protect soybean crops, growers should consider a well-timed application of Priaxor® fungicide (active ingredient: pyraclostrobin + fluxapyroxad), which provides preventative and post-infection disease control from some of the toughest fungal diseases.

Priaxor, the latest fungicide from BASF, contains F500® - the same active ingredient as Headline® fungicide - and Xemium® fungicide, a new active ingredient, providing an additional mode of action in row crops.

In BASF research from 2009 through 2011, soybeans treated with Priaxor showed nearly 17 percent less severity of Septoria brown spot compared to untreated soybean checks.

"By combining F500 with Xemium, we've taken the best soybean fungicide available and made it better," Fassler said. "These chemistries have similar, broad disease control spectrums that overlap nicely. This allows Priaxor to protect crops from some of the toughest foliar diseases in order to consistently achieve high yield potential."

Research shows that Priaxor provides consistent performance. In more than 75 trials conducted by BASF in 2010 and 2011, Priaxor-treated soybeans had higher yields than untreated acres 87 percent of the time. In comparison, the current leader in the soybean market, Headline, out-yielded untreated checks 83 percent of the time.