By Clint Thompson
Scab disease plays a pivotal role in the success of Southeast pecans every year. It has impacted how one South Georgia farmer has planned for future crops.
“What we’ve started doing on our operation is we have started planting new groves entirely with newer varieties, mainly scab resistance and then also timing on when they harvest, stuff like that,” said Justin Jones, located in Lee County. “But on our older groves, that is something we’re looking at now. We did some last year, and we’re going to really start doing it this year after what we’ve seen. We’re to the point now where we’re just kind of throwing good money after bad, trying to keep these varieties clean. At the end of the day, we can’t keep them as clean to get the quality that we need. It’s just, what are we doing? We need to re-figure here.”
Disease Background
Scab is a fungal disease that infects the leaves or nuts of pecan trees. If scab impacts the nut early enough in the production season, it can cause the nut to blacken and fall from the tree. It excels on trees that have received moisture. Some growers must make at least 10 fungicide applications during an average year to manage the disease.
The persistent summer rains led this to be a scab-heavy season for growers in Southwest Georgia, where Jones is located.
“It has been pretty daggum wet. I don’t know exactly what the rainfall is, but it seems like we have had a pretty hard regiment spraying compared to the past few years,” Jones said. “One good thing about it, though, is we have had a lot of rain, but we have also had good weather with it. So instead of getting like week-long overcast, cloudy, rainy days, we’ve had thunderstorms and then they get out of here and we got sunshine back again the next morning or so.
“We’ve enjoyed the rain and it’s been a hindrance in spraying, but at least we have had the sunshine pretty regular compared to the last few years.”