Agroshield’s Bacilifol Trial Aims to Treat Diseases in Grapes

As the summer months draw to a close, grape season commences. One obstacle that growers will undoubtedly face is the fungal disease, Botrytis. We conducted an interview with Dr. Chris Becker, President of BAAR Scientific LLC, to discuss Agroshield’s Bacilifol product and how it’s being used as a foliar spray to treat various grape plant diseases. According to Dr. Becker, “Botrytis is a common fungus that affects grapes, strawberries, and even green beans in the United States. The ornamental industry also gets severe botrytis. The number one way botrytis gets going is on flower parts. Then it doesn't rear its ugly head until the fruit, over the flowers, tends to mature. So, there may be infections in grapes during bloom and mid-June, but you don't see the disease until after what we call veraison— which is when the berries start to soften. There are physical and physiological changes that may be a latent infection within developing fruit, but it doesn't start to show symptoms abroad until you get after veraison and near harvest.”

Botrytis and other grape diseases create a dilemma for growers, where infection can create significant economic losses. In this trial, Dr. Becker will be treating four replicates of three commercial lines to test the efficacy of Bacilifol against these diseases. “This trial was begun in the middle of the summer. Expecting the most disease would be vignoles, which is a very botrytis-susceptible grape variety. It will also, before the end of the year, get powdery mildew and downy mildew. Both of those are universally more severe across more grape varieties than botrytis. All grapes get anywhere from six to ten applications for powdery mildew. Downy mildews may get two to seven or eight applications, depending on the variety. Right now, traditional chemistries control either powdery mildew or downy mildew, but there are some biological products similar to Bacilifol that have shown commercial management of both of those diseases. So, I'm anxiously waiting to see how Bacilifol comes out on those two diseases as well as botrytis.”

In previous trials, Bacilifol-treated plants exhibited more height, greater biomass, and earlier flowering than the control group. We have seen good results thus far, and as the trial continues, we anticipate that Bacilifol-treated plants will experience similar results.