NEW BIOLOGICAL PREVENTS DISEASE TO HELP AVOID A LATE SEASON BAND-AID

By Bob Fitch

Farmers are eternal optimists and always start the growing season planning, hoping and praying for a record crop. But sometimes the vision of a bumper harvest is tarnished with the unexpected arrival of diseases such as white mold or sudden death syndrome in soybeans; or Goss’ wilt, crown rot or tar spot in corn.

Local crop nutrition consultants

Verlyn Sneller and Dennis Von Arb have introduced a new product called Biomentum Foliar Plant Nutrition which helps farmers stay ahead of disease problems in both corn and soybeans. Sneller owns Terra Transitional Solutions of Orange City and Von Arb owns Nutritional Ag of Alton. Starting 15 years ago, the pair became local pioneers in the use of micronutrients and carbon to enhance crop yields. They’ve been testing the Biomentum product in local fields since 2016.

According to Von Arb, “In the last few years, we were able to test Biomentum in drought conditions. Drought challenges the nutrition of plants and actually sets them up for more diseases than rain does. A drought cycle will leave the plant devoid of that mechanism to digest nutrients from the soil. So it becomes more susceptible to diseases which don’t tend to express themselves until later in the season. That's when the real economic loss hits.”

Sneller continued, “With Biomentum, our approach is prevention. The problem with late season treatment is the damage is already done. We don’t want farmers to put a band-aid on it –because that's too expensive and usually too late. Whether we put it in furrow on soybeans or foliar it before V7 on corn, we’ve got lots of numbers from local test plots to show it works. Farmers want to see numbers – why would they use it otherwise? It’s very important to us to test every year so we can show farmers a return on investment.”

A lifetime of care starts here.

The product goes to work using the following ingredients:

Nine different mycorrhizae cultures which makes nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, calcium, iron, magnesium and manganese into a plant-available form.

Three different saprophytic fungi that recycle nature, destroy pathogenic fungi (cell wall borers), and destroy bio-nematicide fungi (insect eggs, juveniles and adults).

Nineteen different bacterial cultures.

Biomentum contributes to both plant health and soil health by breaking down and making available more of the natural and farmer-applied nutrients that are in the soil. “We're using this biological to prevent both fungal and bacterial diseases on crops,” Sneller said. “In the fall, everybody sprays a fungicide, but fungal leaf diseases are only 50 percent of the diseases that affect any crop. The rest are bacterial; and the problem is there aren't any good solutions on the market for leaf diseases like Goss's wilt in corn.” Biomentum is unique because it covers both bacterial and fungal diseases.

Diseases “plug up” the circulatory system of a plant. Biomentum helps corn and soybeans produce more exudates (biological food), increasing biological activity and, thus, helping nutrients better reach the leaves going up and the roots going down. Von Arb said, “All diseases are related to crop nutrition. The better the balance of nutrition, the better you control diseases. Healthy plants make for healthy soil. Healthy soil does not compact!” Their test plots have shown that the effect of the product is cumulative, year after year. To