Instant Insights: Improving crop disease management

This specially curated collection features four reviews of current and key research on improving crop disease management.

The first chapter reviews strategies for limiting foliar disease development in wheat and barley crops, such as crop rotations, intercropping, gene deployment and conservation tillage. It explores the effectiveness of each strategy against particular foliar diseases, as well as how these strategies can be deployed to reduce inoculum sources for residue-borne cereal leaf diseases.

The second chapter considers the use of integrated disease management (IDM) to prevent or reduce yield loss in wheat. The chapter reviews the tactics/tools used in IDM, such as scouting, disease identification and chemical control, and explores how these tactics can be implemented to maximise the effectiveness of managing diseases in wheat.

The third chapter assesses how IDM can be applied to barley production and considers the different disease threats, the tools available and possible approaches to deploying them. It also reviews the role of agronomy and how it can be used to optimise these tools.

The final chapter reviews the use of IDM in grain legume production and explores the deployment of traditional strategies, such as field and crop management, as well as advanced monitoring methods, modelling and molecular methods to control disease outbreaks in grain legumes.