Greening: Fundecitrus launches platform to help producers combat the disease

Fundecitrus launched today the Avalia Greening platform, which provides free access to the results of the effectiveness of commercial products and treatments launched to mitigate the damage and symptoms caused by greening in commercial orchards. The new tool brings together a database with 12 experiments carried out by Fundecitrus since 2012, with nutritional products and growth regulators widely marketed for citrus farming. 

The tool will be constantly updated to provide increasingly accurate data for the sector. According to Fundecitrus researcher Franklin Behlau, Avalia Greening is another important tool that can be used by citrus growers to guide their management decisions for a disease that still has no cure. 

“We created this platform so that citrus growers can check the results of these experiments, in addition to knowing in which region they were carried out. All in a very easy and intuitive way, Avalia Greening allows the producer to check not only the results, but also the duration, variety and region of the citrus belt where the tests were carried out”, he explains. 

In the tool, it is also possible to filter the information, segmenting it by the number of experiments with a certain compound or product, whether it occurred in irrigated or dryland orchards and what the expected effects were in the orchard. 

Rigor 

The platform’s results are subject to statistical rigor, standardization of the severity of the diseased plants evaluated, a large number of plants involved in the tests, and applications in several harvests. This provides the citrus grower with the confidence to choose whether or not to use a given symptom-mitigating product. “Given the increasing incidence of greening, the new tool is essential for professionals in the sector to be able to monitor the analyses carried out by Fundecitrus, from the oldest to the most recent.

 Avalia Greening is a source of reference information, based on very robust scientific criteria for measuring results”, says the researcher.

Driving 

Regardless of the use of treatments assessed by the tool to mitigate damage or reduce losses due to greening, it is essential that producers continue to control the psyllid so that new plantings are not made unviable. “Management requires the use of effective molecules in a rotation system, quality application and at intervals of at least ten days, inspection and elimination of diseased plants, especially in areas with medium and low incidence,” concludes Behlau. 

The Avalia Greening platform can be accessed on the Fundecitrus website (www.fundecitrus.com.br).