Winter Agronomy Digital Roadshows 2021: IPM planning and fungicide updates

Sustainability and profitability are two cornerstones for Scottish arable production. In this session a new IPM assessment plan for Scotland will be announced to help individual businesses score their practices and explore the options that could improve how they perform using a new metric. The tool will be launched and hosted on Scotland’s Plant Health Centre of Expertise website www.Planthealthcentre.scot . This session will discuss how the tool was built with farmers and the IPM options that are considered most practical and useful by growers. Completing an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) plan annually will help ensure that opportunities to improve productivity are not missed and also help meet the market demand to see more sustainable practices and reduced reliance on pesticides.  It may also be necessary for compliance with farm assurance schemes.

The sustainable use of fungicides in arable programmes remain key to productivity and the session will present the detailed technical information on fungicide performance from 2020 trials, and discuss how new and established chemistry performed in the dry spring of 2020. The stewardship of fungicides to reduce the risk of resistance remains crucial and the annual trials are key in identifying shifts in performance and any new variants of the diseases. Key messages for the 2021 season will be picked out at the end of the technical summary.