A new strawberry disease control programme to combat powdery mildew could halve treatment costs, according to AHDB.
Trials in 2018 revealed a managed programme used significantly fewer spray applications, reducing the cost by half compared to the traditional week-long approach, while being equally effective at maintaining control of powdery mildew.
A standard seven-day fungicide programme was compare to a managed programme which uses control products only when the strawberry crop is at risk of infection.
The controlled method is based upon visual inspection for incidence of strawberry powdery mildew, the environmental risk of mildew infection (which used the NIAB EMR strawberry powdery mildew model based on temperature and humidity records) and the strawberry growth stage.
Scott Raffle, AHDB knowledge exchange manager, said: “In contrast to the seven-day fungicide programme where all permitted numbers of applications of the products had been made by the end of the season, far fewer applications had been made and a number were still available should late infection require additional control.
'This will have a welcome benefit for growers’ bottom line, but also has significant benefits for growers’ integrated pest management programmes.”
