Written by Phil Collinson.

I think you’d have had to be living under a rock in recent years to not pick up on the changes that are impacting on our disease management strategies. Whether it is the increased disease pressure being driven by weather patterns or the withdrawal of commonly used active ingredients such as iprodione or the new fungicide technologies needing to be applied preventatively to see the best results it is clear that things have changed and future turf management strategies will need to take a different approach to that which we currently use.

But what is the way forward? How do we decide which practices to embrace? There is certainly no shortage of advertised tonics to help with disease management and I recently saw a tweet from a greenkeeper in the States commenting that if you were to enter the industry now, that choosing the right products is probably the greatest single challenge today due to sheer volume of products available and all the claims being made!.

Now I do have to be honest and open at this stage and state I do work for ICL and so clearly there is an agenda  at play, but just like you I want to be the very best that I can be at what I do. One of the key benefits of working for ICL is having the opportunity to see and be involved in the trial work we carry out both in-house and independently through third parties. And it was whilst discussing autumn disease management trial work with my colleague Henry Bechelet that the relatively new and fully accredited turf research station, ISTI (Irish Sports Turf Institute), came up in conversation.

This is a new venture to not only provide a recognised independent  trial site but whose aims are also to provide education facilities for Irish greenkeeping as a whole.

I am very lucky in that in my job role I am encouraged to visit trial facilities to see the work being done and obviously I needed no second invitation to get a flight booked and head over to Dublin to see the new ISTI site and the trial work being carried out there for ICL and Syngenta.

And rather than only myself benefitting from this visit, I arranged for the North West BIGGA education committee to come along too as I was hoping to get a variety of greenkeepers opinions on the information coming out of the trials and how it would possibly influence their attitudes to disease management in the future.

The ISTI grounds are approximately a 30 minute drive south of Dublin Airport and our 8.00am flight coupled with a brief breakfast stop en-route got us on site at 11.00am. ISTI were great hosts and its fair to say they held up the stereotype of Irish hospitality being second to none. After a warming brew we were given an overview of the current work be done on the site and then it was time to have a look at the ICL and Syngenta Autumn/Winter Disease Management trial plots that were still ongoing.

Fundamentally the ICL trial is building from the information gleaned from previous disease management trial work showing the importance of nutrition, dew dispersants, “penetrant” wetting agents and iron applications. The ISTI site was chosen as we wanted to see what results could be achieved on Poa annua dominated golf green turf in an area of perceived high disease pressure.

The images of the control plots that had received no treatments are a testament to this. Disease levels ranged from 1% up to 25% depending on the treatment schedule and there will definitely be lessons to be learned and very worthwhile information will come out of this trial.

The Syngenta trial was looking at the latest and the new active ingredients (yes they do exist!) coming to market and showed that by deploying them correctly we can achieve fantastic levels of control and we needn’t be pessimistic about the future of disease management. It was pleasing to see the outstanding results being achieved at the same time as seeing limited applications and reduced amount of chemical being used.

Now I am aware this will sound like a sales pitch but like ICL, Syngenta continue to invest in to the turf industry to bring innovative products backed up with well researched advice and I think it is having strong principles and technical values like that mean that working together we can really meet the challenges ahead.

What worked best I hear you cry?? Well this is what was very interesting – the answer may be different for different sites! How can that be, you cry even louder?! Well one of the interesting debates between the greenkeepers during the visit surrounded the topic of “disease acceptance levels”. We had some say that their site/membership would accept the levels in the plots showing 5% disease incidence with others stating the plots showing 1% would be more in line with what they would be expected to produce.

And herein lies the nub of a good debate because we often hear of greenkeepers saying that they haven’t used a fungicide for a long period of time and we wonder what their secret might be. Sometimes it is just that they are prepared to accept a higher level of damage.  Perhaps the starting point when devising plans for managing turf in terms of disease should be the question…what level of disease is acceptable? And from there, with the information available from trial work and experiences, a plan can be put in place to prevent outbreaks breaching that limit effectively and economically.

To go back to my original question of “what is the best way forward?” then my answer would be to base our decision making on independent trials like the ones being carried out by Mark and his team at ISTI. I think reputable manufacturers really do hold some of the key answers for turf managers when plotting their management strategies. There are clear learnings to come from the ICL and Syngenta trial work and we will come forward with presentations and articles later this year with the findings once the trials are complete and fully analysed, so keep your eyes out for those.

What I will say is that the future isn’t as bleak as some would have people believe. Yes we will have to work slightly differently than we perhaps currently do, and yes there are challenges but by utilizing independent trial data that sheds light on overcoming these challenges we can all confidently be in a place to keep meeting the standards we have set ourselves in recent years.

And after hearing the feedback from the guys who came over to ISTI and from my own experiences , if you ever get the chance to visit independent trial sites then I'd highly recommend you take it – not only will you most likely be better placed to make important turf management decisions based on factual evidence but you will also be involved in some interesting and thought provoking debates with like minded people – not bad for a days work!.