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Post by Dan Wittmer on Jul 28, 2015 9:02:35 GMT
Is there anything we could add either in furrow, or spray on young corn to help prevent nclb?
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Post by Jim Martindale on Jul 28, 2015 9:03:53 GMT
I’m sure that the folks selling Headline will tell you that using it the seed trench will be the cure. I don’t think so and they can’t prove it either to my knowledge. I would suggest that the best defense is an aggressive offense. What I mean by this is that the plant’s main source of protection is the soil biological system which produces natural antibiotics that are fatal to innumerable pathogens including pathogenic fungi and bacteria many of whom gain entry from the soil directly into the plant thru the root system. The truly effective rhizoshere creates a defensive shield thru its aggressive offense to invade the root zone and colonize the root hairs, some living simultaneously inside the plants cells and the soil (endomycorrhizae). Any fungicide is an indiscriminate killer of these beneficial organisms. Why would one kill the good guys to get to the bad ones? as the Frank Dean saying goes. “The sure way to get to use Headline twice is to use it once”. The only exception to this type of indiscriminate action by something which is fungicidal is urea phosphite. Its only problem is that it depends on concentration in the plant sap to be effective. Secondly, over time it becomes plant food when it gets oxidized in the plant sap to a Phosphate and nitrogen (from the urea fraction of the compound). Even more problematic is the fact that most of these products are made using water. Water contains oxygen, of course, so the product becomes useless as a phosPHITE, over time as it sits on the shelf. This same reaction is what takes place in the plant sap which contains a lot of water. So as the plant grows and the volume of plant sap increases, then the phosPHITE is oxidized to phosphate to be able to be used in the production of glucose (from ATP). The subject of your question becomes a little more complex in a couple of ways. Number 1, there are certain microbes which are known trigger organisms for what is called SAR. Systemically Acquired Resistance is a product of the close association of the plant system and the colonizing microbial complex. It is now recognized that bacillus Subtilus is one of those organisms. Research has shown that if a wheat plant is exposed to this organism before it is exposed to Fusarium Graminearum (responsible for DON in grain and other plant tissues) the plant control the growth of the F.G. organism. Now the 2nd part of this is that the plant still has to be prepared to develop the immunity. That means that the early plant development must contain certain “potentials” to be able to develop the immunity. In mammalian species we know that this requires the transmittance of certain key immunoglobins to the infant. These substances contain a host of micro-minerals as catalysts to their production. These are all enzymes or proteins and require a metal for synthesis. So anything which interferes with the uptake or availability of micro-mineral nutrition to the plant and/or rhizoshere organisms will undermine this capacity for self-defense down the developmental road. So to finally answer your question, yes, you can add beneficial mycorrhizal organisms to the seed trench. I would like to think that they will not only persist but also multiply into the indefinite future. Adding them indefinitely into the future will depend on various cultural practices which you employ that may or may not promote them. The use of glyphosate types of chemicals has clearly been shown to have an adverse impact on many if not most of these invaluable organisms. One of the best inoculating products is KaPreAG from Lido Chem. Secondly, you can add a small amount of urea phosphite made without water (Prudent 42 or 16- depending on the label requirements in the respective state you buy it in) at a rate of no more than 6 oz. per acre in 30” rows. I have been using 1 qt./acre of Presto Gold to accomplish this for many years. This leads to the next aspect of your question, which I dealt with preliminarily in the paragraph in red. This year I had several clients who stopped or drastically reduced the amount of phosphate that they were using in the seed furrow except for the one quart of 16% P level in Presto Gold. Obviously that is a big reduction in P applied when compared to 4-5 gpa of 24% phosphate from a seed-safe starter. The results were obvious first on a farm with high organic levels that always struggles over early micro-mineral nutrition. These struggles nearly disappeared in ’15. The NovaCrop sap testing has revealed that high concentrations of P in plant sap are associated with low levels of many micro-minerals. Going back to our discussion of SAR now, perhaps you can see that it maybe that the solution to improving plant health is not just a function of adding something. It may just as well be a function leaving something out or reducing something we have been adding which is precipitating a problem later on down the road. Until the soil rhizoshere is better prepared to perform the nurturing of the plant that is required for SAR to function at a high level, it may be necessary to make sequential application of the Prudent product. It can be tank mixed with MegaMag foliar but not premixed. Of course it is already in Presto Gold. So all together you have three points of intervention with Prudent.
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