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.
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
Links to this article are strongly encouraged, and this article may be republished without further permission if published as written and if credit is given to the author, Integrated Crop Management News, and Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. If this article is to be used in any other manner, permission from the author is required. This article was originally published on June 15, 2016. The information contained within may not be the most current and accurate depending on when it is accessed.
- Professor
- Extension Plant Pathologist