DISEASE ANALYSIS

Turf Diseases are capable of providing a rapid decline in turf quality. The largest difficulties when dealing with diseases are their versatility and their differing interactions with environmental conditions. Hence, their management and control is vital in ensuring we minimise disruption to the playing characteristics of our sports turf.

The most important step in managing a disease is to correctly identify it. Although some diseases can be identified quickly by visual examination of the turf, many disease problems are often more complex and require laboratory testing for a true diagnosis to occur.

Nuturf aims to provide reliable and useful diagnostic results by employing the following procedures at the time of diagnosis

• After the sample is received, it is moist incubated for 24 hours so that the disease complex is better understood. This provides an increase in diagnosis accuracy.
• During the diagnosis process, a quantitative count of the leaves infected is conducted, with the end result, a percentage infection rating (I.e. – 60% of stolons were infected with Rhizoctonia). This provides a better understanding of the disease severity.