 Hello everybody, I'm Sam Markel. I'm an extension plant pathologist at NDSU and I'm standing in a soybean field and it's September 1st so it's late in the season and behind me is a lot of damage and this is sudden death syndrome. So I'm in Richland County, we know in 2018 sudden death first showed up, we saw it for the first time and since then it's spread and it's going to continue spreading in the state. So I wanted to give you an update on what it looks like, how to scout for it and what damage it can do. So sudden death syndrome is caused by a fusarium pathogen and it's different than the other fusarium pathogens that we have in the state so it's not related to fusarium head blight of wheat for example. This one just causes sudden death syndrome in soybeans and can cause a root rot in something like dry edible beans. So early in the season when it's cool and wet this fusarium pathogen will infect the roots and when you have heat in the middle of the summer and you get frequent rainstorms it's going to facilitate the development of that pathogen and often by early August you'll start to see some foliar symptoms. So like many other pathogens that are in the soil you often start to see this show up in little pockets. So this patch behind me is quite large but there's other little pockets in the rest of this field where you have maybe just a 5 to 10 foot little oval shaped lens of the disease. This is classic sudden death syndrome symptoms where you have this yellow chlorosis so it's classic early symptoms. On this leaf instead of just the yellowing that you see between the veins you can see like on this one you see that it's starting to turn necrotic between the veins as well. So the symptoms are getting a little bit more severe and eventually the whole leaf will turn yellow leaving only the leaf veins green and necrosis throughout. So we're going to take a look at this plant still and there's other things that can do this right so brown stem rot can do this triazole injury sometimes can do this there's a few other things that can cause similar symptoms what you want to do when you have a plant that looks like this and you see all these things is you want to get into the roots and the lower stem so I just generally scrape this off and you can see right away you can see all this browning under this tissue and this is all caused by the sudden death syndrome pathogen. It's really important to keep going because sudden death causes a lot of tissue a lot of tissue damage to the xylem so this is the tissue right underneath outside of the plant you can see all this browning here but there's a lookalike called brown stem rot and so brown stem rot causes very similar foliar symptoms so we can see right here the pith in this plant is white it's healthy looks pretty good really and the outside is browning it's turning that tan brown symptom so with sudden death this is very important you have a generally a healthy pith and this browning tanning symptom on the outside of the stem right with brown stem rot this will be brown it'll look like lead in a pencil and the rest of this will be white so the symptoms are almost exactly the opposite so after the plant is infected for a while and symptoms get really severe what you'll see is only petioles left so in this plant you can see the petioles are all left there's no leaves anymore the leaves have fallen off so you have to check the roots the roots are really seriously rotted you should never be able to pull out a healthy soybean that easily so you can see that the roots are blackened browned there's not much left of them they're pretty tough looking sudden death syndrome and soybean cyst nematode act together so often when you see damage like this from sudden death you have soybean cyst nematode now you can get them one at a time you can get some death without SCN you can get SCN without sudden death and so again if you see sudden death I would get in and make sure you sample soybean cyst nematode and you really want to start managing that right now if you have soybean cyst nematode you want to be on the lookout for sudden death syndrome which is what we're seeing in this field