Fundecitrus launches Avalia Greening platform on product efficacy

The Brazilian Fundecitrus (Citrus Defense Fund) announced the launch of the Avalia Greening platform. 

The innovation freely provides practical results for commercial products and treatments launched to mitigate damages and symptoms caused by the disease, also known as huanglongbing and HLB, in commercial orchards.

The new tool brings together a database with 12 experiments conducted by Fundecitrus since 2012 involving nutritional products and growth regulators widely marketed for citrus farming. The tool will undergo constant updates to offer increasingly precise data for the sector.

According to Fundecitrus researcher Franklin Behlau, Avalia Greening is another important instrument that citrus farmers can use to guide their management decisions for a disease that still has no cure. 

"We developed this platform so that the citrus farmer can check the results of these experiments, in addition to knowing the region where they were conducted," he stated.

In a straightforward and intuitive way, Behlau explained, Avalia Greening allows producers to consult not only the results but also the duration, variety, and region of the citrus belt where the tests were carried out. 

"In the tool, it is possible to filter information, also segmenting by the number of experiments with a specific compound or product, whether it occurred in irrigated or rainfed orchards, and what effects are expected in the orchard," the researcher said in conclusion.

According to him, the platform's results adhere to statistical rigor, standardization of the severity of evaluated diseased plants, a large number of plants involved in testing, and applications across several harvests: "This gives the citrus farmer confidence to choose whether or not to use a specific symptom-mitigating product."

"Faced with the advance of greening incidence, the new tool is indispensable for sector professionals to track these analyses made by Fundecitrus, from the oldest to the most recent. Avalia Greening is a source of referential information, based on very robust scientific criteria for result assessment," Franklin Behlau said.

Regardless of whether treatments evaluated by the tool are used for damage mitigation or loss reduction due to greening, the researcher points out that it is "essential that producers continue to control the psyllid to prevent the unviability of new plantings.″

"Management requires the use of effective molecules in a rotation system, application quality, and intervals of at least ten days, as well as inspection and elimination of diseased plants, especially in areas with medium and low incidence," Behlau said in conclusion. 

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

(Editing by Leonardo Gottems, reporter for AgroPages)