🌾 Tips for tackling blackleg of canola #shorts #GRDC

Fungicides have become an integral part of controlling blackleg disease of canola. And so with that comes the risk of fungicide resistance.

Blackleg disease is probably the most important disease of canola and can cause significant yield losses. And the use of fungicides is a really important way of minimising those yield losses and controlling disease.

The GRDC have been funding blackleg research for over 20 years, and we've been very fortunate to keep that work going since then. Blackleg is always going to be an issue for growers. They always are going to have to manage it. It's not a disease we can eradicate. It's always present at the start of every growing season. And so it's really important for growers to the tools that they have to be able to control it. And they do have many tools. Now part of the work we're doing is surveilling for fungicide resistance. So we get stubbles sent in from across the country from agronomists. We can put them through these systems, collect the spores, and we can look at the frequency of fungicide resistance in each of those paddocks and then hopefully give advice to growers to say, hey, you've got a potential problem. You might need to switch to a different chemist.