Iowa farmers are always on the lookout for disease issues, but there are two diseases from 2025 that have farmers the most alert: tar spot and southern rust. Last year, these two diseases popped up in unexpected areas around the country, causing some of the highest damaging disease pressure on record. Unfortunately, many farmers were caught off guard by how quickly conditions favored infection and spread for tar spot and southern rust. Kim Tutor, technical marketing manager for corn and wheat fungicides at BASF, said the latter of the two diseases was the most problematic.
Tutor said the two diseases have very different latent periods, which is the time between the initial infection and when the disease starts reproducing.
Tutor said tar spot and southern rust remind her of the tortoise and the hare, with tar spot having a much slower latent period than southern rust.
Tutor said Veltyma fungicide allows farmers to be proactive rather than reactive when managing these diseases, as it has an application window that starts two weeks earlier than other products.
In fields with high disease pressure, sometimes a single-pass application system just doesn’t cut it. Tutor said they recognize that jumping to a two-pass system adds a lot to input costs, so farmers can try out their optimized application rate on a single-pass system instead of moving directly to two passes.
Of course, Tutor said a two-pass system is still an option for farmers who need it.
For more information, visit agriculture.basf.us.
