 Okay, we're gonna talk about strawberry disease management at Secor extension plant pathologist typically with strawberries. We see things like foliar diseases, root and crown routes and fruit routes. That was the case this year as well. I'm going to focus on five diseases this morning, two crown routes and thracnose and phytopthera, two fruit routes but tritus gray mold and thracnose fruit route and then Neopastoloseopsis or NPT which is a new leaf spot and fruit route found by Dr. Connor back in March with Jacob Kelly. These are the five most important that we're concerned with this past year. With the crown routes, we'll see this early on as you see on the left plants shortly for transplanting dying. Oftentimes in the springtime you might see plants such as the middle where they seem to be doing, they're struggling, older leaves are dying, upper new leaves still coming out but eventually these plants may wilt and die completely. Off to the right you see some plants that seem to recover on the right side of that row but never really reached a full, they're full vigor as their neighbors on the left on that bed that's probably phytopthera right there. So sometimes they recover but just never really take off. Very hard to distinguish the two, I feel at least I think Dr. Connor might be the only one at a stake who can do it but in the field they're hard to distinguish. We'll start off with an anthracnose crown route. You can see again a plant in the upper left hand corner that's struggling along, new leaves are coming out but the old leaves are dying off. Typically what I do is just dig up a few plants, try and cut the crown open and then look for a reddish brown discoloration in the crown and this will indicate either anthracnose or potentially phytopthera depending on conditions. An anthracnose has different phases if you will but it can detect the crowns, the petioles, the leaves, the flowers, the fruit. Plants may die after being transferred to the field as I showed you earlier and then you can't get this reddish brown firm rod of the crown and it's hard to ID in the field at least because the crowns of dying plants off I just turned brown and that could be a lot of things. Infected transplants could act as the source of disease typically. We had a significant problem last year with anthracnose this past year it was not a significant problem and as far as management I suggest of course planting disease-free material from a reputable dealer and someone who we've had luck with in the past of course. You can't try to remove dying plants as soon as possible in smaller operations you know. Sometimes you could kind of compartmentalize the disease problem and keep it from spreading and then you can follow a protective fungicide program usually beginning early in the season if you detect anthracnose and just a couple more slides of anthracnose crown rod on younger plants and then a slide I think I already showed you on the right but usually the best way to ID this is with the help of Dr. Connorsland. By topter root and crown rod it's a different animal in the way it's caused by a water mold type pathogen. Oftentimes the plants may wither and die in just a few days they don't hang on like with anthracnose crown rod and you get the discoloration of the crown as you see on the right there. Symptoms often begin in the upper part of the crown the young leaves will wilt suddenly and get complete collapse within a few days. Plans break at the upper part of the crown so when you're trying to lift these from the soil to check them they might just crack off right at that soil line or at the crown line. The crown will appear rose pink or brown early on so it's similar to anthracnose. Plants may recover but are usually stunted and if I top there's a water mold fungicide so it likes it you'll oftentimes see this in poorly drained soils or poorly pockets in the field where this pathogen will survive from year to year and where it'll first kind of take off during the season. So management I talked to one grower this year about potential fumigation because he had not rotated in three or four years. There are resistant varieties available you want to provide good soil drainage and also avoid low wet fields and those with the history of the disease. This was just two situations this past year this was a Jimmy Witt's son-in-law's farm up in Blunk County I believe but you can see some of these plants dying off and this was phytopter and you can see on the right that I was going uphill there and this was a low wet area in the field and wherever there was low wet spots that's where phytopter was taking off and you could just see it more or less moving down the row. They thought maybe it's coming in on transplants but I suspect that problem may have been in that spot previously and this was up in Chipp East area of the state visit a grower there. He also thought he had thoracic nose coming in on transplants he had plants dying pretty quickly also extending down the row. Two things I noted or I asked him I said you have that this really likes low wet areas and he said yeah this field was flooded with water for about a month earlier in 2022 and this was also the third year of strawberries in this spot it was right in front of a store which was good good for selling berries but also good for phytopter so I recommended moving to a different spot on the farm and letting this field hang out and something else for a year or two try and reduce the phytopter levels as the pathogen will survive and settle for long amounts of time. Excuse me here you can see some samples of Dr. Connor and I opened up from that field you can see some of that reddish pink discoloration in the crown so a different one difficult one to detect but Dr. Connor can do it in the lab with various techniques. We do have a couple of fruit rots that we've been working on the last couple years Dr. Vincent Dr. Connor and I have been trying to detect populations of both betridus gray mold and fruit and threknos looking for populations that are resistant to some of our more common fungicide groups so betridus on the left of course produces a gray mold in the fruit fruit and threknos on the right not much of a problem this past year but more so last year and betridus gray mold gets his name from the gray mold obviously and you can see it left to right and fruit is almost basically mummified on the right there and as it's covered with fungal mycelium the fungal body and the spores of the pathogen this is from a field in lee county last year being the thing I want to show you in this slide especially is the two fruit in the middle picture you can see that tan lesion more or less and that's sort of the initial symptoms of betridus kind of a tanish somewhat water-soaked lesion and then under the right conditions a little bit of moisture the mold starts to form very quickly and you can see this in the field as well as on your kitchen counter when those troops start to really ripen up so betridus is widespread as numerous hosts is basically year-round type pathogen it can survive in dead plant material free water and cool temperatures usually favor development but I see it right through the end of harvest with the right conditions green berries do seem to be more resistant to infection as far as management you want to avoid disease transplants but that's the disease will most likely still show up I always tell growers to try to avoid allowing over ripen fruit to sit in the field I tell new growers try not to overextend themselves the second and third year which often is not the case they can remove and destroy fruit but typically once as you know once growers start picking it's hard to take time to destroy infested material they're just trying to pick and market as soon as possible so they kind of roll their eyes whenever I say that but I gotta tell them and I'll see growers do this and they put all the fruit at the end of the row which is still the source of inoculum so I'll protect the fungicide program is the best control however we're getting resistance to fungicides and multiple frack groups things like betramell and strobulins are becoming resistant and that complicates the fungicide usage in the fungicide program last year I think the three of us visited about 26 farms found resistance in basically in almost all of them of one form or another sent out letters directly to growers and we'll continue that next year this this past year was a bad year for metritis and anthracnose as far as not being able to find it finally anthracnose fruit rot didn't see too much of it this year but this is a nasty problem you can see some sort of a sunken black lesion on the fruit usually a little bit harder than what you see with tritus upper left you can see what almost looks like my thumb print on that fruit just kind of a sunken canker if you will eventually that can become tan and then black and when you have wet conditions you'll get orange a pink slime or mold growing right on top of the fruit surface so the source of this pathogen is often from nursery stock favored by rain high humidity moderate temperatures spread within the field by rain and wind and then dark lesions form on green to mature fruit and the best management is the bi-plants from a reputable nursery and I think we're having a problem now is a lot of our transplants are all coming from the same source I'm not going to get into that too far you can't plant anthracnose resistant cultivars sweet charlie being one there's a few of these I did hear that these are not as might not produce large enough fruit for many of the growers to market and they I think sweet charlie dies out early but they are available I also say monitor fields for hot spots and remove infected plants the fruit I showed you earlier was I think five fruit from a half dozen fruit from six plants the grower could have pulled those plants out destroyed them and probably stopped the disease in its tracks at that spot but that's not always the case usually not the case one thing edgier found two years ago was a use of a pre-planned dip and I think this is in the southeast regional strawberry guide certain fungicides such as switch can be used as a dip to reduce sorry I'm losing my voice too much singing this we can think reduce incidence of anthracnose and gray mold and basically before planting you submerge plants into dip for at least two minutes let them drain off and then stick them in the ground that can be a help with plants coming in that may be infected and also follow the strawberry IPM guide and it was which was just uh we were they were working on that two weeks ago last disease I want to talk about is probably the most maybe the most important in our future uh neo-pestilocyopsis or NPT for people like me that can't speak very well uh this is one that Dr. Connor and Jacob Kelly found out in Brewton back in early March it's a new disease in the U.S. sort of firstly identified in Florida a couple years ago then I believe in South Carolina and Georgia last year and we found it I should say they found it in Brewton early in March picture from Dr. Connor on the left where you can see these lesions on the on the foliage which he then identified as NPT she also had a molecular backup from University of Florida I came down to the same field a few weeks earlier first time we saw the the fruit rot phase does look like anthracnose root rot at first glance but then you see these dark dark lesions very large with the this black discoloration to it which is I believe a a servile type of fungal fruiting structure so what little we know of NPT it can cause extreme yield loss and destroy entire fields it can spread quickly to other fields once introduced especially after rain events it causes a leaf and fruit spot initially but eventually can infect the roots and crowns and cause plant death and it appears to survive in that area a management would be to limit operations when plants are wet remove infected plants if that's practical and these are some of the same fruit that I brought back from the field with the fruit rot phase but you could scrape that at some Dr. Connor show me scrape that lesion and you'll have these really cool looking slides with three tails on a multicolored so easy to identify I believe at least that those spores once you get it into the lab after that I did look around this day with the help of some of the regional agents I was working with Olivia Fuller here this is at BDA farms I believe found some leaf lesions that I thought could be NPT or could be one of the other foliar diseases I brought these back and Dr. Connor confirmed these as NPT found these lesions maybe on four or five plants in that field this was the second year for that strawberry those strawberries in that about a half acre site and we think possibly these came in on transplants that were used to replace skips in the field from the previous year so this is up I believe in Hale County in West Alabama and then with Jacob Kelly I interacted with a grower down in Baldwin County near the Florida border and what I found was the least spot phase of the disease on the left that's anthracnos in the same field on the right not the fruit rot phase but these plants are at the very last row guy at a half a row that about 15 plants are just getting hammered by the least spot phase and these are plants that he got from a friend from east Alabama just to fill out his row and and they they were infected with Neil Pestilosh so I think we've found it in three or four counties this year in the state so it's a can be a nasty disease I'm not sure how bad it's going to get but it's it's not a good thing based on some research out of Florida from two years ago fungicides may have an effect on it products like dioramans which may be rotated with a rhyme or tilt or inspire may reduce incidents limited information right now Florida was trying to identify resistant varieties with I don't think they've had any luck with that and they're also trying to develop new varieties with resistance to the disease and that'll be our our best way out of that mess and with that I'll stop I always tell my students always work with a crop that you could eat or drink in this case but some of my information but I'll stop there and answer any questions you may have or we can move on with the program