Your Levy at Work

July Pest of the Month: Algal leaf spot

Name: Agal leaf spot (cephaleuros virescens)

Symptoms are mainly found on leaves but depending on the plant species it can infest twigs, limbs and fruit. The disease usually attack the leaves on low hanging branches without affecting higher foliage. Symptoms include green, yellow-green, or rust coloured leaf spots up to 5mm in size, which appear raised, roughly circular and cushion like.

Stems many develop cankers where infestation is high, and may be covered with reddish brown hairlike fruiting bodies and eventually produced rust-coloured “spores”. Fruit damage is limited to the skin with slightly sunken, cracked dark appearance.

NEW QDAF-led pest and disease webinars

by Levy Communications • NGI Updates

Growers and production staff are invited to attend a series of pest and disease webinars run by the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (QDAF).

These online events aim to enhance the Australian nursery industry’s biosecurity measures by showcasing new pest and disease contingency plans and relaying new and updated information to growers.

QDAF pathologists will run a total of four webinars, two of which are in lieu of the annual face-to-face disease workshops and will look through the lens of Integrated Crop Management (ICM).

Implementing effective IPM using BioSecure HACCP procedures

by Levy Communications • NGI Updates

Thursday, 11 June 2020

The levy funded ‘Improving pest management for the nursery industry’ (NY17009) project has moved into the second phase, seeking to perform a cost benefit analysis on the implementation of elements of an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program in production nurseries.

The project team at Greenlife Industry Australia have partnered with Biological Services, who will be using their expertise in pests and diseases, crop lifecycle, population thresholds and methods for management, to perform crop monitoring for the project and making recommendations to participating production nurseries.

During this phase, the seven participating production nurseries will begin implementing the four BioSecure HACCP procedures for ‘site surveillance’, ‘crop monitoring’, ‘materials import inspections’ and ‘materials dispatch inspections’ into their businesses.

The BioSecure HACCP procedures employed in this project will inform growers of the pest status within their crops at any given time, allowing for better decision making when selecting the most appropriate IPM management method. More

NEW Nursery industry video case study series available now

by Levy Communications • NGI Updates

Video is becoming an increasingly important medium for the levy-funded Nursery industry communications program (NY18001), to share information to equip growers and production staff with the latest levy funded information and resources to help grow their businesses.

Project provider, Cox Inall Communications, has recently completed a series of three videos which showcase how various growers across the country have been able to leverage levy-funded research and outputs to improve operations, whether that be through marketing, quality assurance or disaster recovery.

Check out the videos below! More

June Pest of the Month: Grey mould

by Levy Communications • NGI Updates

Name: Grey mould (Botrytis)

Symptoms include:

Blights, spots, blotches, wilts, cankers, rots, damping off and storage diseases. Usually the softer tissues such as petals are blighted, though leaf spotting, stem blights and rotting of cuttings and seed occur, especially in crowded situations. Early symptoms are small spots, which can extend into large areas of blight and later the characteristic grey mould comprised of masses of spores, which mostly become air-borne. Botrytis can affect plants at different stages of their life from seeds, bulbs and cuttings through to mature plants.

May Pest of the Month: Green snail

by Levy Communications • NGI Updates

Name: Green snail – Cantereus apertus

Green snail was first detected in the south-western coastal area of Western Australia in the 1980s. Its distribution in Western Australia is relatively restricted. In 2011 green snail was detected near Cobram in the north of Victoria for the first time. A restricted area has been declared around the infestation.

Green snail can significantly damage a wide range of host plants and is regarded as a serious pest. It has the potential to cause crop losses in cabbages, cauliflowers, lettuces, peas, beans, wheat, lupins, pasture grasses and native plants.