Every Growing Season Tells a Story
Every growing season has its own combination of challenges, from heat and drought to extra precipitation. It’s easy to focus on the most visible stress in crops, but it’s resilience that protects yield—not your reaction to each individual event. The healthiest crops are those prepared to withstand all challenges, not those that avoid stress.
Stress Begins Earlier Than We Think
Environmental stress starts long before visible symptoms appear. Early-season cool, cloudy, and wet conditions can reduce root growth and leaf area, which can eventually affect the plant’s ability to manage future stress, especially heat and drought.
Another issue that can come from these early-season cool conditions is lower photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), the main type of sunlight plants need to grow. On partly cloudy days, plants may receive 25–50% less usable sunlight, while on rainy days they can receive more than 60% less—directly impacting the plant’s resilience to future stress.
During the establishment and expansion phases of the growing season, combinations of products like Take Off® LS or Primacy ALPHA®, followed by Crop+® during late expansion and reproductive periods, help build the plant’s strength so it can withstand stress throughout the year.
Stress Doesn’t Strike Once – It Strains Over Time
As the season progresses, plants encounter different types of stress.
Acute stress includes the events that catch our attention the most and make us lose the most sleep. Frost, hail, heat, drought and wind drastically change the crop and are difficult to ignore. These co-occurring stressors are also the ones we can prepare for the least, demanding a higher level of management after they occur.
Chronic stress persists for an extended period. Like acute stress, it is largely out of our hands and can be devastating. Extended periods of drought are a perfect example. We may be able to reduce the damage, but we will not eliminate it.
Then there is compounding stress, when these stressors stack on top of one another and the plant has to fight repeatedly to survive. One day, conditions are hot and dry. Soon after, they transition to cool and wet. Add in the normal environmental pressures of the growing season, and yield potential begins to disappear.
When stress compounds, it becomes clear how important it is to prepare plants before those challenges arrive by continually building their strength throughout the season.
Disease Is Another Form of Stress
Once yield potential is weakened, plants are also more vulnerable to disease. The overall impact disease has on crops depends on three key factors: incidence, severity, and time. Together these make up the Area Under the Disease Progress Curve (AUDPC), which evaluates the effectiveness of management strategies.
We don’t think enough about the role of crop nutrition in plant disease resistance and management strategies, but we should. Plant nutrition is the first line of defense a plant has and directly influences disease resistance by affecting both its physical and biochemical defenses long before fungicides are ever introduced.
Nutrition Builds Resilience Throughout the Season
There is no doubt that fungicides are an essential tool in modern crop production. Still, they operate most effectively when the plant they are protecting is physiologically capable of mounting its own defense in parallel.
A plant in a nutritionally compromised state is a weak link in the disease management equation. Its cell walls are more permeable, its immune signaling is impaired, and its tissues are richer in low-molecular-weight compounds that pathogens exploit.
Boron, manganese, and zinc each address specific dimensions of these vulnerabilities, amplifying the protective value of fungicide applications in ways that chemical applications alone cannot.
The use of these three micronutrients also helps slow the development of resistance and is a critical component of an integrated disease management system. Boron, manganese, and zinc contribute to this integration by reducing the disease load a fungicide program must manage, lowering selection pressure on pathogen populations, and extending the useful life of chemical modes of action.
The addition of Polyamine BMZ to an integrated disease management plan is the force multiplier we were looking for, helping lower the AUDPC by reducing both severity and incidence while mitigating disease resistance over time.
Scouting still matters, as does the timing of application. But everything matters more when we continue to focus on nutrition.
End of Story: Resilience Protects Yield
Stress on your crops is inevitable. You can’t control the weather or eliminate disease pressure, as much as we’d like to.
A proactive, season-long nutrition strategy lays the foundation for healthier plants, better stress tolerance, and stronger yield potential. Nutrition isn’t simply about feeding a crop—it’s about building resilience that supports performance from emergence through harvest.
George S. Patton Jr., a general in the U.S. Army during WWII, said, “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
Our solution to managing stress is to have a plan that starts with building a more stress-resilient system.
