Q: What’s the best way to manage alternaria?
A: Alternaria area belongs in the group of soilborne pathogens, along with pythium rhizoctonia, fusarium and others, and these organisms only express themselves as a disease if there is an inadequate population of disease-suppressive organisms to keep them dampened down.
The bottom line is that these diseases only become an issue when you have a carbohydrate deficiency in the root system. It’s really that simple.
I grew up on a fruit and vegetable farm, and we grew our own seedlings in the greenhouse, and if we had problems with damping off, we had a simple solution — an old farmers trick — we just mixed up a sugar solution and sprayed the seedlings with sugar, and the damping off was stopped like you pulled the switch. Because when you get sugar onto the plant, and down to the root system, that encourages the other organisms to grow and develop to the point where they suppressed and shut down the pythium.
So, for alternaria management, and for these other potential pathogens, you need to have enough sugar in the root system in the early stages, while that seedling is developing, to allow the suppressive organism population to develop and to grow.
From John Kempf’s Eco Ag U session at the 2023 Acres U.S.A. conference. Learn more from John and many others at our 2024 conference: events.acresusa.com.
