| Michigan website designed to help producers combat potato disease |
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| By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station (MAES) plant pathologists Willie Kirk and Phil Wharton have developed a new website to help growers control and manage potato diseases, located at www.potato diseases.org
They also developed a booklet as part of the same project, titled A Pocket Guide to Disease Scouting in Michigan Potatoes (bulletin number E-2998). Both the website and guide provide descriptions of diseases, photographs and ways to distinguish between diseases with similar symptoms.
Wharton, however, warns against using these tools to make a definitive diagnosis of potato disease. Instead, if a grower detects disease, they should make a preliminary diagnosis on their own with the scouting guide and website, and then send a sample of the diseased potato to the Michigan State University Center for Plant Diagnostic Services or to their local extension office.
This is important, Wharton said, because late blight, for example, is a serious disease that requires aggressive, expensive treatment; yet, late blight looks like gray mold, a much less serious disease. Growers shouldn’t take the chance of making a mistake distinguishing between such diseases, he said.
There is a small cost to have a sample tested.
Wharton is excited about the new website and how it can help growers. “This gave us the opportunity to develop the website further,” Wharton said. “In its old form, it was just a potato lab site. The new website goes into a lot more detail.”
The site is getting a lot of use. “Between Aug. 12 and Sept. 11, we had 3,900 page views,” Wharton said. “We had 300 visits from Michigan last month.”
In addition to photographs and descriptions of diseases, the website features more than a dozen potato research articles and extension bulletins, all available in PDF format for downloading or viewing online. This is a recent development – the bulletins office used to charge for them, but is now making many of them available for free in electronic format.
The scouting guide isn’t available online, at least not yet, but Wharton says it may be in the future. He is willing to send it electronically for free to anyone who asks for it, however.
“The scouting guide distills all the information from the bulletins on potato disease,” he said. “We have a bulletin on all the major diseases in Michigan.”
Wharton and Kirk received a grant to develop the website and scouting guide from Generating Research and Extension to meet Economic and Environmental Needs (GREEEN), a public-private partnership associated with MSU and extension. The Michigan Potato Industry Commission also helped fund the research.
For more information on the website, go to www.potatodiseases.org or call Wharton at his office at 517-355-4754.
This farm news was published in the Sept. 19, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
| 9/19/2007 |
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