Civitas Update....By Popular Demand

First, my apologies for the tardiness of this post. The pre-Thanksgiving travel crunch got the best of me last week, and of course I spent the entire weekend watching football and hockey, so I am just now getting caught up! Several people have asked what happened to the Civitas update, so here it is:

Civitas is a new product for disease and insect control in turfgrasses that was developed by Suncor, formerly known as PetroCanada. The active ingredient is mineral oil, otherwise known as 'horticultural oil', which has been used for management of plant pests for many years. It has just never been used in turf because of issues with phytotoxicity. However, Suncor developed a pigment product, called Harmonizer, that is mixed with Civitas to reduce the potential for phytotoxicity. The advantage of mineral oil as a fungicide is that it has very low environmental impacts due to its low toxicity and rapid breakdown in the environment.

Because it contains oil and pigment, Civitas has a very noticeable effect on the color and appearance of the turf. The Harmonizer pigment, depending on the application rate, is a very dark green, similar to that provided by an application of Triton Flo or Tartan. Some people have complained that transfer of the pigment to shoes and clothing has been a problem, but I haven't rolled around on our research plots yet to see how big of a problem that is.

The mineral oil component of Civitas also gives the turf a distinct greasy appearance, very similar to that caused by an application of a wetting agent like Cascade. This greasy appearance is most evident in the morning and persists for several days to a week after application. Because of these unique characteristics of Civitas, I suggest that people try it out on a nursery green or putting green before treating the whole course with it.

We've been evaluating Civitas for control of various turf diseases for three years now. For a summary of our previous results, please see my post from last year entitled Civitas shows promise for control of dollar spot and brown patch. Be sure to read the comments at the bottom provided by Wakar Uddin, Bruce Clarke, and others regarding their experiences with Civitas.

We continue to see similar results against dollar spot and brown patch in our trials. However, this year we ran into serious problems with phytotoxicity when Civitas and Harmonizer was tank-mixed with Daconil and Banner Maxx. The injury appeared very quickly after the first application in May and became more severe as time went on. As you can see in the graph to the left, it is also interesting to note that half rates of the mixture components did not reduce the amount of phytotoxicity observed. Based on this result, we definitely recommend that Civitas and Harmonizer should not be mixed with Daconil and Banner, or with other fungicides until we have the opportunity to evaluate more mixtures for their safety.

We haven't seen significant phytotoxicity from applications of Civitas and Harmonizer alone in our trials, but some users have reported injury during times of severe stress, with high temperatures consistently above 90F. It makes sense that it could create problems to coat the turf leaves in oil under these types of conditions.

To summarize, Civitas has good activity against several important turf diseases like dollar spot, brown patch, anthracnose, and leaf spot diseases. Although it does not provide acceptable control alone in most cases, my opinion is that it could be useful as part of a disease control program. Civitas and Harmonizer should not be mixed with other fungicides or applied to severely stressed turf, or severe injury could result. However, if you are interested in using products that pose less risk to environment, then Civitas is a good choice.

European Turfgrass Society Conference

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the European Turfgrass Society (ETS) Conference in Angers, France. This was a great opportunity to find out what other turfgrass researchers around Europe as well as other parts of the world are currently researching. With so many turfgrass programs and scientists in the United States, it is often hard to see a diverse group of talks at any one show. For instance, scientific conferences in the United States are usually sectioned into various disciplines such as soils, pathology, physiology, entomology, etc. For this reason, I end up migrating to the pathology and more golf-related talks and often miss a lot of other things going on in turfgrass research.
At the ETS conference, all talks are given in one session spread out over several days and mixed with various opportunities to meet and discuss the latest and greatest turfgrass trends with people from across the globe. Below are some highlights of things that I found particularly interesting at this year's conference.

1. Plant Parasitic Nematodes: Kate Entwistle of The Turf Disease Centre in the UK talked about the increase in nematode activity on cool-season turfgrasses in Europe. The potential for nematodes to cause damage to cool-season turf has been a bit controversial (in my opinion) over the last few years. Many "pathologists" often suggest that any turf that cannot stand the presence of some nematodes probably has other issues more pressing than the nematodes themselves. On the other hand, many "nematologists" often state that these pathogens are in fact the primary cause of many problems. Either way, it does appear that more and more cases of this problem are showing up. Dr. Entwistle stated that some of the main differences among species found in the USA vs. Europe is that the predominant species in the Europe are Meloidogyne and Hilcotylenchus.
   
2. Induced Systemic Resistance of Civitas: Dr. Tom Hsiang of the University of Guelph gave another entertaining (Great Introduction about Guelph...I may steal that one) and informative talk about his work to prove that the relatively new horticultural oil Civitas works by inducing natural plant resistance mechanisms. Utilizing Induced Systemic Resistance-related genes, his lab found that the enhanced expression of two jasmonate related genes following treatment with Civitas and inoculation of the M. nivale pathogen. In controlled experiments, Dr. Hsiang also found that Civitas reduced three diseases (dollar spot, brown patch, and Microdochium patch) by 20 to 40% when compared to an inoculated control. Based on field trials presented on this site and by some colleagues, Civitas has been shown to reduce certain diseases, but more field work is needed to work out programs and acceptable tank-mix combination's to provide complete disease suppression.
   

3. Preparation for the 2010 World Cup: Although not a scientific presentation about ongoing research, the talk by Dr. A.S. Schoeman on the preparation of the pitches for the World Cup was one of my favorite talks. Dr. Schoeman had a great fluidity to his presentation and gave some interesting facts about the upcoming events. This is the first time that Africa has hosted the World Cup and matches will be played at 10 different venues throughout South Africa. In addition to the ten stadiums, 15 training sites will be utilized and 3 sites will be used exclusively by the referees (what the heck do they need these for?). An interesting component to the preparation is that this will be the first time that matches will be played in HDTV, making the preparation that much more important. Other interesting points include:

• Most pitches will have Kikuyugrass as the base, but will be overseeded with perennial ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass
• Logos (currently used for advertising during Rugby matches) will need to be removed prior to the event since these sponsors are not the same for the World Cup.  Current sponsors are asking that their logos be applied with "extra paint" which will make their complete removal more difficult!
• A few stadiums have "cannon" style irrigation and therefore it will be difficult to pre-dampen the fields (as some teams request) prior to the game without soaking the spectators as well.

For those academics who didn't get a chance to make it to this year's conference, it is a good time to start some relevant research for the European market. The next conference will be held somewhere in England (probably London) in 2012 to coincide with the summer Olympic games. I look forward to attending ETS in 2 years and just hope that mother nature (e.g., the Iceland volcano) cooperates a little better than this year. (Full story on this on Monday).

Novel Dollar Spot Control Programs

Dollar spot has really been the only challenge this year for golf course superintendents. With the recent economic downturn we are investigating ways to help superintendents reduce fungicide expenditures while maintaining quality playing surfaces. I have mentioned our dollar spot forecasting project, in collaboration with Dr. Damon Smith at Oklahoma State University, in previous posts. We are applying the preliminary model Dr. Smith developed in Oklahoma in our environment in Wisconsin. To date, the model has accurately predicted dollar spot development and making applications based on the model has resulted in 4 fungicide applications this year. When we compare efficacy to other fungicides either applied on 14-day intervals or 21-day intervals, the forecasting model holds up well. The one exception was a high pressure weekend and some dollar spot developed in the forecasting plots. The graph at the top left of this post depicts our results so far this year. The red arrows indicate when the model triggered and the blue arrows indicate when we made a fungicide application for just the forecasting plots.

The model did trigger before June 22 as a result we made a fungicide application on June 16th. Typical dollar spot programs in the Upper Midwest start on June 1, which would result in 7 applications when repeated every 14 days. For the 21 day treatments we have made 5 applications so far. Either case we can save either 1 or 3 applications per year. Currently we are putting numbers to these savings. We are using a municipal course, high-end public, mid-range private and an elite private course. Hopefully this will make are numbers relevant for a lot of turf managers. Please stay tuned because there is more to come!

Another project we are working on is expanding early-season dollar spot control. Basically we made a single early-season application and followed those applications up with 3/4 rates of Banner Maxx/Daconil every 21 days or full rates of Banner Maxx/Daconil every 28 days. Interestingly, full rates applied on 28 day intervals are providing the same level of control as our conventional program. We have not started our economic analysis of this project, but I know we have saved at least one fungicide application in this experiment. Again please stay tuned to this project too.

I am very excited about Lane's post yesterday! I saw the data with Civatas and I was excited, but we have not tested the product in the Upper Midwest. I know Dr. Derek Settle has, yet I cannot remember what he found. Civitas is scheduled in our snow mold trials this year, so we will see how it holds up. As always nice work Lane.

Megan's story about visiting with Aron Hogden is pretty funny. Poor Aron thought she was just a normal person coming over to lecture him about spraying. Aron had no idea that he peaked the interest of a turfgrass pathologist! Megan you are lucky you got out there without an inqusition from Aron.