‘One-stop shop’ for crop disease issues

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A service that provides unbiased, research-based crop disease and pest management information to farmers and agricultural personnel is now in its 10th year.

The Crop Protection Network is a multistate and international collaboration of university and provincial Extension specialists and public and private professionals that provides free online tools, peer-reviewed publications, continuing education, videos and podcasts.

All of the information from experts is available on the CPN website free.

“We focus mostly on diseases. A lot of pathogens, just like weeds and insects, don’t respect state lines. So, having multiple people looking at problems is certainly of value,” said Daren Mueller, Iowa State University Extension plant pathologist, CPN codirector and Iowa State Integrated Pest Management program coordinator, North Central IPM Center.

Mueller was among the presenters at the recent Illinois Soybean Association’s inaugural Field Advisor Forum at Memorial Stadium in Champaign.

“The value of the work being done locally can’t be replaced and having that local knowledge is really important. Events like today and what the Illinois Soybean Association brings to the state as far as expertise, that can’t really be replaced, but it can be complemented,” Mueller said.

“We’re not doling out money for research, which is a little different than some of the other national groups, but we’re trying to be a resource for anyone in the nation that wants to get information out, especially if it’s multistate.

“At this point, CPN has input from 387 people across 42 states, and Ontario and Quebec, Canada, that have contributed at some level. It has become pretty widespread. This is really the guts of the network.

“If they want to publish a publication, we try to make sure we have the editing done. Ultimately, there’s a lot of people contributing research and that just makes it better.”

Serving as directors along with Mueller are Kiersten Wise, University of Kentucky, and Albert Tenuta, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. The board is comprised of Extension specialists from across the United States.

Funders include the U.S. Department of Agriculture, North Central IPM Center, Southern IPM Center, National Corn Growers Association, United Soybean Board, North Central Soybean Research Program, Grain Farmers of Ontario, U.S. Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative, and others.

Content

The CPN website provides publications, videos — with field updates, Crop Scout School and CPN TV — podcasts and outreach.

It also provides tools including maps, disease severity and insect defoliation, yield loss calculator, return-on-investment calculator, fungicide efficacy tool and CCA continuing education units.

The yield loss calculator is used to determine the impact of diseases and insects on corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton.

The tool is interactive and searchable by time and years, disease and disease group, insect, and geographic area. A severity estimation tool is also featured.

Recently added to the website are the fungicide efficacy tool, Bean Binoculars, and corn fungicide ROI calculator.

“Bean Binoculars is an interactive map that displays soybean production issues from across the country as they arise throughout the growing season. The tool went live in July and incorporates state Extension information. There were 70 incidences reported in 2024,” Mueller said.

“Something that we’ve added and spent a lot of time on is maps. This is something that’s important in the plant pathology world because we want to know when things are showing up, why they’re showing up and where they’re at.

“Some maps are reset every year like tar spot or southern rust, and soybean rust for those farther south. Some of the maps are permanent. Once nematode is in a county, it’s probably there for good. For each map, we try to frame in what it means, what’s the information, why is it important.

“One thing that we continue to drive is continuing education credits for CCAs. The longer webinars that we do, the CPN TV and most of the publications, not the encyclopedia articles, but really everything else, is you can take a CCA quiz at the end and each month we upload it to the Agronomy Society for credits. Those have been increasing each year.”

Growth

The website had 150,000 users in 2024, a 73% increase over the previous year. The corn portion of the website had 47% of the views in 2024 and 29.3% was soybean views, followed by wheat, 15%.

“I would say a lot of the information that we saw being consumed on the CPN page last year was related to tar spot. We also had some newer ones like corn stunt and things like that that have come up,” Mueller said.

Cotton and alfalfa was added in the past couple years.

“For the first eight or so years, the publications were mostly from internal groups and then us begging people to write information. Last year was the first year where publications were coming in that we didn’t ask for, which is great. So, we’re starting to hopefully get to tipping point where publications are coming in without a lot of energy on our end and we can just do our job of editing them, making sure they’re peer-reviewed, making sure they get posted in a timely fashion,” Mueller said.

“We have 225 encyclopedia articles. Those are very short articles with a lot of photos. We also have 122 publications, five web books, 113 educational videos and 101 podcast episodes.

“The videos are probably growing the fastest with over a 260% increase in views from the previous year. Videos include research updates, crop scout school and infield updates.

“CPN just finished its third season of podcasts, releasing 35 episodes in 2024 resulting in 4,895 downloads.”