How to Avoid “What Happened to my Crop?!” Disappointment

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Farmers usually feel pretty hopeful about the potential of their crops at this time of year: the most common comment I hear in early summer is “This is going to be my year!”. By the time harvest rolls around, however, those same farmers are often disappointed that the potential they saw in June and July didn’t translate to yield. What happened?

Potato crops tend to look best in early season. In June and into July, the plants are still powered by the seed and they’re usually coming out of fair or good winter/spring moisture. I think of the crop as being like a young teenager right now – full of energy and living beyond its means. But, middle age is coming for it just like it comes for all of us.

If you dig up plants this time of year, you’ll see that pathogens lurking in the soil are already wreaking havoc below ground and biting into yield. Four or five weeks from now, once the crop goes through flower and starts senescence, disease issues will start to become obvious above ground too, and producers’ hopes for fantastic harvest will start evaporating.

In case that’s not enough bad news, here’s more. While growers can support their crop via foliar disease control, adequate nutrition and timely water throughout the growing season, soil pathogens – a potato crop’s biggest yield robbers – aren’t manageable during the season.

Though it might seem crazy to consider next year’s crop before this season is even half done, now is the best time to plan to protect your 2023 yield. Chloropicrin, sold as Strike, is a new generation, greener, more sustainable, highly effective soil fumigant. Far from being a soil sterilizer, chloropicrin works selectively to suppress disease even as it actively stimulates growth of beneficial soil microbes. A true fumigant, chloropicrin moves through the soil as a gas, managing disease throughout the treated zone.

Farmers who use chloropicrin report the same results as we see in field trials: marketable yield improvement, noticeable quality increases, suppression of common scab, a reduction in verticillium, and a breaking of the early die complex.

My biggest concern is that some producers don’t realise what they’re missing. If every year follows the same cycle of beautiful potential followed by compromised yield, producers may think that’s inescapable reality. I dare you to try even a small test plot treated with chloropicrin. Once you see the difference, you’ll join the quickly growing list of farmers who use Strike.

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