The flooding from the recent Kona low storms can lead to widespread disease in crops, and a free testing program at the University of Hawaiʻi is now available to impacted farmers to check for the health of the soil and possible pathogens.
Floods can give soil-borne pathogens an opportunity to infect plants — something many farmers in Hawaiʻi were worried about after weeks of rain.
In response, the UH Mānoa’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience is reopening its Agricultural Diagnostic Service Center, giving farmers an opportunity to test soil and plant tissue as well as identify diseases and insects.
“Farmers would be definitely concerned about … (having) enough nutrients in the soil, because the floodwater might take the nutrients, soil could be washed away,” CTAHR Dean Parwinder Grewal said. “The second concern the farmers would have is whether there are pathogens, bacteria, fungi in the soil that might have come from other farms or from urban areas and whatnot.”
The testing could also reveal any pesticide and heavy metal contamination that was left on farmland by the flooding.
Farmers can go to the ADSC website for more information about how to participate in the testing program, which will be free through July 21.
Diseases are difficult to control, according to Brent Sipes, a plant pathology professor for CTAHR.
"We really can't do anything about them. They're not easy to control that way, they're not easy to manage,” he said. “It’s frustrating, but there's very little that we can do reactively to eliminate them. It's just something we have to deal with."
But he said farmers should watch out for any new symptoms in their crops.
“Be on the lookout to notice patterns that weren’t present before. If they suspect there might be a new pathogen that they haven't experienced before they should definitely seek out advice to have it diagnosed,” Sipes said.
