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SOYBEAN FOLIAR DISEASE SCREENING PROGRAM
Dr. Rick Cartwright
Department of Plant Pathology
University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
rcartwright@uaex.edu or rcartwri@uark.edu
The soybean cultivar foliar disease screening program is a component of the statewide soybean disease screening project, funded by the Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board. This program involves many locations and personnel, and is guided by Dr. Terry Kirkpatrick and Dr. Rick Cartwright in the Department of Plant Pathology. The screening nurseries at the Kibler Station were started in 2007, with a focus on aerial blight of soybean – a poorly understood but important disease in rice/soybean rotations in eastern Arkansas, and frogeye leaf spot, one of the most important foliar diseases of soybean in the state. The goal is to secure consistent disease ratings of the more than 200 soybean cultivars available to Arkansas growers in any given year and the location of Kibler in the humid, Arkansas River Valley and the availability of overhead sprinkler irrigation make this achievement much more likely. The aerial blight ratings obtained in 2007 were the first such data collected in Arkansas, despite several years of trying in eastern Arkansas without success.
EVALUATION OF RICE GERMPLASM FOR DISEASE REACTION
Dr. Rick Cartwright
Department of Plant Pathology
University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
rcartwright@uaex.edu or rcartwri@uark.edu
In 2007, the URRN (Uniform Regional Rice Nursery) and the core collection of rice from the Dale Bumpers Center for Rice Genetics near Stuttgart were planted at the Kibler Station to collect data on foliar diseases in an overhead irrigation environment. Certain foliar diseases are very sensitive to leaf wetness and evaluations in eastern Arkansas have been hampered by the lack of research sites with overhead sprinkler system. Data from 2007 at Kibler were collected on rice blast, sheath blight and various leaf and sheath spotting diseases. Some of the information collected was entirely new, probably because of the location and environment of the Kibler site. This information was provided to the rice breeding programs of Arkansas and surrounding states for use in the development of advanced rice varieties with reasonable disease resistance traits. Given the difficulty of working with certain diseases under controlled conditions, these strategically placed and managed nurseries are vital to the development of superior rice varieties in the South.
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