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Plant Disease Management for Organic Crops

Steven Koike, Mark Gaskell, Calvin Fouche, Richard Smith and, Jeff Mitchell (2000)

Summary

Plant diseases create challenging problems in commercial agriculture and pose real economic threats to both conventional and organic farming systems. Plant pathogens are difficult to manage for several reasons. First of all, plant pathogens are hard to identify because they are so small. The positive identification of a pathogen often requires specialized equipment and training, and in some cases accurate diagnosis in the field is difficult. This fact sheet identifies possible ways to limit these problems in organic production systems.