Fungal diseases keep limiting cotton yields despite available treatments
Knight NL, Smith LJ, Periyannan S, Kiss L
Crop Improvement
Cotton is in nearly every piece of clothing you own, and the fungal diseases quietly limiting its yields push farmers toward heavier chemical use and tighter margins that ripple into the price and sustainability of the fibers on store shelves.
Fungi attack cotton plants at almost every stage: killing seedlings in the soil, blocking the plant's internal plumbing so it wilts, and rotting the fluffy bolls before harvest. The sprays and treatments farmers use help, but none of them fully stop these diseases. Scientists in Australia are pushing for a smarter combined approach: better monitoring of which fungal strains are present, breeding cotton varieties that can fight back, and long-term field experiments to find out what actually works.
Key Findings
Seedling diseases and vascular wilts are the most widespread fungal constraints on Australian cotton production, with foliar diseases and boll rots adding pressure under favorable environmental conditions.
Registered plant protection products, including fungicides and plant defense activators, generally provide suppression rather than complete control, and efficacy data gaps remain a significant challenge.
Future disease management will require integrating pathogen diversity assessments, inoculum quantification tools, fungicide sensitivity screening, and multilocation trials alongside resistance breeding and precision agriculture.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Australian cotton crops are routinely threatened by fungal diseases that kill seedlings, clog water-conducting tissue, and rot bolls, yet the fungicides and defense-activating products registered for use there mostly suppress rather than eliminate these diseases. This review calls for combining better chemistry with soil health, resistance breeding, and large-scale field trials to build a more reliable, evidence-based disease management toolkit.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Fungal disease management in cotton using plant protection products: An Australian perspective.
Cotton production faces persistent challenges from pathogens that compromise plant establishment, yield, and fibre quality. In Australia, seedling diseases and vascular wilts are the most widesprea...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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