Plant Diagnostic Clinic Update

Published: July 15, 2014

The Plant Diagnostic Clinic has been re-opened for 2 months now. It has been a whirlwind of activity and a lot of learning on my part. I am grateful for all the assistance I’ve received from specialists in the Division of Plant Sciences and University of Missouri Extension. This write up highlights the issues we have been seeing with agronomic, row, crops (Table 1). These types of samples have been the majority of the submissions (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Types of plants submitted to the clinic for disease identification.

With the agronomic crops, there has been a large number of samples with chemical injury including corn, soybean, sorghum and alfalfa. The 2013 drought, long winter and fluctuating spring weather have all impact chemical degradation. The most prevalent on corn has been fomesafen carryover. With soybean there have been a lot of samples showing damage from ALS herbicide carryover from 2013, or an additive affect from use in 2013 and 2014. There are also cases where human error is to blame including tank contamination, improper use and drift. For diseases, there was a lot of Pythium root rot found infecting corn roots this spring, despite seed treatments, due to cool and wet weather conditions.