A Twitter campaign has been started to track corn and soybean diseases throughout the country. While scouting this summer, farmers and agribusiness professionals are encouraged to tweet a photo with the name of the disease, county, and state to either @corndisease or @soydisease.
This campaign is part of a larger project called the Integrated Pest Information Platform for Education and Extension (iPiPE). The project's goal is to eventually create a database where growers can report and identify diseases for risk-based management and scouting efforts. The tweets of corn and soybean diseases this summer will help researchers put together prediction maps and and information for this database.
Click here for more information about the iPiPE project and how you can participate.
Most recent corn disease tweets are common rust of corn in Sunflower County, Mississippi and northern corn leaf blight found in Washington County, Iowa. The first soybean rust of the year was identified on May 24 in three southwestern Mississippi counties and tweeted on the @soydisease Twitter account.
Daren Mueller, extension plant pathologist at Iowa State University, and his integrated pest management team will sort through the soybean disease tweets, and University of Kentucky Plant Pathologist Carl Bradley will curate the corn disease tweets.
White mold in soybeans by Brandon Kleinke
Related Links:
Tweet Your Corn and Soybean Diseases in 2016
Southern rust in corn by Adam Sisson