If you’re a cereal farmer, you will be very aware of the threat that disease poses to your profitability. Along with crop nutrition, disease control is a key factor in protecting crop health in the spring. Our focus is on protecting the yields of your crops through disease identification and control. Our aim is to provide a frame work. Firstly, to identify the key diseases and then to provide a plan to control those diseases.

If you are growing wheat or barley you will be familiar with names like Septoria leaf spot, scald, powdery mildew, rust and maybe tan spot. Within New Zealand we are fortunate that wheat and barley are only attacked by a handful of important diseases. While there are additional diseases, they tend to be relatively uncommon and often only have a minor impact on crop yield. This means it is feasible to identify them all with a good degree of certainty.

Wheat and barley – respond differently to disease attack. Of course, wheat and barley are both attacked by disease and if infected, both can suffer devastating yield losses, but what considerations need to be made between these crops when deciding on the best course of action?

Bayer is proud to provide services designed to help you choose the best fungicide programme. Effective, timely and responsible disease control is critical to growing a high yielding, profitable crop that you can be proud of. To do this you will be relying upon your knowledge, supported by expert advice from your merchant agronomist. But how does Bayer and its customers ensure the advice given is the best and that it is relevant in a New Zealand context?

Fungicides are precious. They play a critical part in delivering high quality, profitable yields. But they are under threat. We have so few types of fungicides available for use on arable crops, especially in New Zealand. The risk that a fungicide group will quickly become ineffective due to fungi becoming ineffective or resistant is very real. We have to protect what we have.