Soybean rust confirmed in Kentucky, zero effect on crop expected

Soybean rust was confirmed in several Kentucky counties today. It is expected to have no real impact on the state's crop due to the advanced stage of the crop, overall, and the lateness of the finds.

This is from USDA's soybean rust web site, filed by UK Extension:

Soybean rust was detected on soybean for the first time ever in Kentucky on Friday, October 6, 2006. The find was in the corner of an otherwise mature sentinel plot located at the UK Research and Education Center in Princeton. Incidence was about 40-50% and severity around 10%. Then between Sunday October 8 and Tuesday October 10, SBR was detected at various levels in six additional counties (Christian, Hopkins, Lyon, Marshall, Todd, and Union Counties). All of the finds, thus far, are in the lakes region of west Kentucky. Finds were in "mobile plots" except for the Caldwell and Union County finds, which were in sentinel plots. Incidence in additional counties was generally low (0.1-10%). With the exception of the Hopkins County find, which had extremely low severity (<0.1%), severity in the other finds was around 5-15%. For all finds, the stage of pustules was mostly uniform. This suggests to me that a large number of spores blew in sometime over the past 2 weeks and cut a pretty large swath in west Kentucky. We are in the process of looking to the west and east to see if an even larger area of spore deposition and infection may have occurred.

This find will have absolutely NO impact on the 2006 soybean crop in Kentucky or anywhere else for that matter. In fact, soybean rust will "go away" from Kentucky as soon as there is hard frost. It simply cannot survive this far north. However, these finds are of great importance to the soybean rust predictive models. Thus, we are making great effort to know the extent of infection before the frost hits (maybe tonight) or until there are no soybean leaves in which the rust can survive (the disease has NOT been seen in kudzu here). I am hoping to find a location that has decent infection that would provide for an educational opportunity or two.

The bottom line is this: The soybean rust finds will not impact Soybean in Kentucky or the US this year. But, they will help us to refine soybean rust predictive models, which will help greatly with SBR management in future crops.