How does BEETcast work?

Weather INnovations Incorporated has developed an advisory system to help growers decide when to apply fungicides for the control of Cercospora leafspot in sugarbeets. This advisory utilizes air temperature and leaf wetness.

BEETcast™ rates each day on a scale of 0 to 4, with a value of '4' indicating the weather conditions were very favourable for the disease. A '0' indicates that either the number of hours the leaves were wet was low, or the temperature was too cool for the leafspot disease to grow. These disease severity values (DSVs) are accumulated daily until a threshold is reached, indicating a spray application is appropriate. The counter is then "zeroed" and additional spray applications are based on the next interval of cumulative DSVs.

This program maximizes the dollars spent on disease control, by suggesting the most effective timing of fungicide applications. WIN provides this critical information in a timely manner, via the internet. This information can be immediately used by growers to make informed decisions. Growers can tailor their spray program based on their own preferred level of risk management. A fungicide spray program for the control of Cercospora leafspot is based on:

WIN’s extensive weather station network provides the data used to indicate the critical spray dates based on "favourable weather conditions", but only the grower can determine the other factors.