Best Practices in Spraying Provysol Fungicide to Prevent Cercospora Leaf Spot

The MAT Sugarbeet Planting report is made possible by BASF and Provysol fungicide. Be proactive and control Cercospera leaf spot in your sugarbeets.

Earlier in this season’s sugarbeet planting report, Trevor Kraus, BASF agronomist, shared how Provysol can work to prevent cercospora in sugarbeets. But how is it different from other products on the market?

“It’s what we call an isopropanol azole, so it’s different from other triazoles,” says Kraus. “It has that high intrinsic activity which means you don’t need as much IA in the plant to have effective disease control. It gets in quickly because it likes the waxy portion of the plant versus the watery portion of the plant. Getting in quickly, giving that long residual, and being active at really low amounts of active ingredients in the plant tissue add up to really high-level disease control.”

To take advantage of most of those properties, Kraus says the earlier in the season growers can apply Provysol, the better.

“Typically, growers will start early July and try to get ahead of cercospora,” he says. “They might go out with a protective fungicide, but their first systemic fungicide being a DMI or triazole, hat’s a perfect fit for Provysol early in that rotation.”

Since there are limited chemistries on the market to combat cercospora, Kraus advises growers to rotate their products.

“We will switch to different modes of action—tin, our protectant fungicide, coppers—and protecting them with multi-site fungicides,” says Kraus. “Typically in a growing season we might use a triazole or a DMI FRAC Group three chemistry twice, but we would not recommend using Provysol twice.”