THE use of DuPont™ Fontelis® fungicide has helped Greg Gartner of Glenroy Plains Produce, at Penola in the south-east of South Australia, grow onions that store particularly well.
Mr Gartner said he trialled Fontelis® in the 2013/14 season and used it across the onions the following season.
“We had a fair crack at it and got it on at the right stage,” he said.
“We really had no problem at all and it was probably our best storage year that we’ve had ever.
“The product seemed to work very well for us, in the rotation of chemicals that we use. It is a very important product for us.”
He said it was important to be able to store onions on a long-term basis and that wasn’t possible if the vegetable had been affected by disease or other issues through the season.
“It is vital that we put an onion in a bin at its best condition,” Mr Gartner said.
“We don’t want soft onions. We need nice, hard skinned onions with good necks on them.
“I think that is where Fontelis has come in and helped us store these onions for the long period.
“We try to store onions as long as we can and we had some really good results at the end.”
Onions on the Gartner properties are planted from early June through to September and are harvested from January onwards.
They are sold to supermarket chains, general markets and some are also sent for export.
“We are an exporting country and we need to keep those onions in good condition to get to those destinations overseas,” Mr Gartner said.
Diseases are a major issue for onion production in the area and are often associated with varied weather conditions.
“We need to actually be ahead of the weather and ahead of those challenges so we certainly need to put those products on before the disease hits,” Mr Gartner said.
“We get those humid type days that can bring on the downy and bring on botrytis and neck rot.
“The spray program is very important. We’ve got to use the products that suit those particular applications or diseases.”
He said all of the paddocks receive the same treatment throughout the year, although they did pick the areas that were destined for storage.
“We can’t pack all the onions out in the first week or month and we don’t want to do that,” he said.
“We’re there for the seven or eight months to store the product and we do pay particular attention to the crops that we want to store.
“To have good onions right at the end does prove we must have been on the right track with some of these chemicals.
“Fontelis® has obviously helped us on that particular side of things with the neck rot and the botrytis.”
Mr Gartner said they had a fairly vigorous spray program which started at the three to four leaf stage and extended throughout the season.
Agronomist advice is used to determine the program, with Fontelis® a good option early in the season when disease issues are greatest.
“We rotate of chemicals as it is very important that we don’t get resistance,” Mr Gartner said.
The spray program utilised on the enterprise ensures the onions produced are of high quality and available for storage as well as a range of end-use markets.
“If you didn’t spray them you’d end up with a lot of downy mildew. By the time you got that and you didn’t put the Fontelis® on for the neck rot and soft rot, you wouldn’t have a crop,” Mr Gartner said.
- Copy supplied by DuPont.
