Frogeye leaf spot, cercospora leaf blight, powdery mildew, rusts, and brown spot … these are all words a grower wishes was not part of his or her vocabulary. However, when it’s out in the field, it must be tackled and FMC hopes to help farmers beat all of these tough diseases this growing season with their new fungicide.
“I think this year is really going to be a year people need to consider this Topguard EQ because we have already seen rust showing up in wheat,” said Ken Smith, Technical Services Representative, FMC Corporation. “We saw it in the fall. We knew it was going to be here. We didn’t have the winter hard enough to kill back our rust so we’ve got rust already showing up –common rust and striped rust.”
We had the opportunity to visit with Smith this year at Commodity Classic about current conditions for Southern growers and how FMC’s Topguard EQ fits in.
A mixture of two products azoxystrobin and FMC’s patented flutriafol, Topguard EQ provides multiple modes of action to manage strobilurin resistance in soybeans, corn, wheat, and more than 20 other crops.
“We can control the wheat rust and it has worked very well for us,” Smith said. “In the last couple years in our research plots, it has been the highest yielding plots that we have had.”
A good tank-mix partner with insecticides and herbicides, Topguard EQ has proven to be effective not only on rust, but also frogeye leaf spot, gray leaf spot, cercospora leaf blight, rusts, anthracnose, powdery mildew, and more.
“With frogeye leaf spot, the flutriafol obviously is doing most of the control, and the azoxystrobin gives us our plant health that we always like to see so the Topguard EQ fits really well in that scenario,” Smith said.
Smith said growers also need to consider the weather.
“In our soybeans, if we get into another year like last year where we get rains up front, up early we are going to see some of these diseases come in early and that’s the good part about Topguard EQ,” Smith said. “It’s a long residual fungicide and so we can get out there at R1 and do a really good job. We don’t have to wait until R3 to make an application. If we have disease we get in there early, manage it, and it works like a charm for us.”
