Ames, Iowa – Farmers, agronomists, crop consultants and specialists now have a place to collectively document and track corn and soybean diseases this growing season.
The Twitter accounts @corndisease and @soydisease are now being used to upload photos of crop diseases as they show up across the country. This effort is part of the Integrated Pest Information Platform for Education and Extension or “iPiPE”. Iowa State University Extention and Outreach officials say the hope is to use tweets of crop disease photos from around the country for future disease-tracking and prevention purposes.
Extension officials say that to help with the effort, take a photo of the crop disease when out scouting fields and then tweet the photo to @corndisease or @soydisease with the name of the disease, and the county and state it’s found in.
Daren Mueller, associate professor and extension plant pathology specialist at Iowa State University says that much like weather forecasting, they think this project can be used as a preventative strategy that farmers can use to get ahead of the “storm” regarding crop diseases. He says that the information gathered from the Twitter campaign will be used to help predict trends in crop diseases and allow experts to provide the necessary management tools and information to farmers.
