Avalia Greening: Fundecitrus launches new tool to help growers combat the disease

Fundecitrus launched on Thursday (19^th) the Avalia Greening platform, which provides, free of charge, the results of the effectiveness of commercial products and treatments released for the mitigation of damages and symptoms caused by greening in commercial citrus groves. The new tool brings together a database with 12 experiments conducted by Fundecitrus since 2012, with widely marketed nutritional products and growth regulators for the citrus industry. The tool will have constant updates to offer increasingly refined data for the sector.

According to Fundecitrus researcher Franklin Behlau, Avalia Greening is another important tool that can be used by citrus growers to guide their management decisions for a disease that still has no cure. "We developed this platform so that the citrus grower can check the results of these experiments, as well as know in which region it was done. Everything in a very easy and intuitive way, Avalia Greening allows the producer to consult not only the results, but also the duration, the variety, and the region of the citrus belt where the tests were carried out," he explains. In the tool, it is also possible to filter the information, segmenting by the number of experiments with a certain compound or product, whether it occurred in irrigated or dry groves, and what the expected effects in the grove are.

Rigor

The results of the platform comply with statistical rigor, standardization of the severity of the evaluated diseased plants, a large number of plants involved in the testing, and applications in various harvests. This gives security to the citrus grower to choose whether or not to use a certain symptom mitigator product. "In the face of the advance of greening incidence, the new tool is essential for professionals in the sector to be able to follow these analyses made by Fundecitrus, from the oldest to the most recent. Avalia Greening is a source of reference information, based on very robust scientific criteria for the assessment of results," says the researcher.

Management

Regardless of the use of treatments evaluated by the tool for the mitigation of damages or reduction of losses due to greening, it is essential that producers continue to control the psyllid so that there is no inviability of new plantings. "Management requires the use of effective molecules in a rotation system, application quality, and at intervals of at least ten days, inspection and elimination of diseased plants, especially in areas with medium and low incidence," concludes Behlau.

The Avalia Greening platform can be accessed on the Fundecitrus website: www.fundecitrus.com.br