The Issue at Hand
By Devon Liston, Sales Agronomist

In 2004 and 2005, we saw a large shift of both public and private research dollars from traditional soybean research to soybean rust prevention. This intense move towards researching such a potentially devastating pest has magnified the fact that soybean rust did not even arrive in the western soybelt this year.

Is Someone Crying Wolf?
Although Iowa State Professor of Plant Pathology, X. B. Yang, was well-quoted for placing the western soybelt at a low risk for soybean rust this summer, scientists could not have predicted this year's relatively uneventful presence of soybean rust, even in the southern states. Often, our instinct is to base our expectations for the coming years on our immediate experience of the past season. I believe this to be a costly mistake. Although the western soybelt may be at a low risk for soybean rust, there is a percentage of risk, which means that sooner or later soybean rust will affect you.

How Should We Think About Next Year?
Assuming that you will eventually be affected by soybean rust, plan now and be prepared. Monitor your overall risk before and after planting through sentinel plot information distributed by the USDA. Although treatment before infection is the best method to control soybean rust, if the sentinel plots have not placed your geographical area at high risk, treatment would not be recommended. And remember, fungicide is of highest economic value if the soybean is in the reproductive stages of development.

Keep Your Eye on the Correct Ball
Now that you are going to take a calm, planned approach to next year's soybean rust threat, you can get back to preventing yield loss from perennial pests like soybean cyst nematode, Phytophthora root rot and soybean aphid. Interestingly, for all of the publicity that soybean rust has received in the past few years, the USDA-ARS 2004 annual report considers soybean cyst nematode, closely followed by Phytophthora root rot, to be the most destructive plant diseases of soybeans in the U.S. According to the USDA estimate, soybean cyst nematode causes an annual crop loss of 48.6 million bushels, while Phytophthora causes a 34.2 million bushel annual loss. That equates to two-thirds of all the bushels lost to soybean diseases each year in the U.S. Fortunately for producers, soybean breeders have excellent high-yielding varieties to choose from that have soybean cyst nematode and Phytophthora tolerance. The challenge is to use these varieties and place them in the right field.

For questions or more information on soybean rust or other crop concerns, contact your Hoegemeyer agronomist at 1-800-AG LINE 1 (1-800-245-4631).