Losses are highest in warm, irrigated, production areas where sugarbeets are planted intensively.
Maintaining rotations with non-host crops such as corn or small grains and avoiding beans or alfalfa before beets will help keep soil populations of this strain of Rhizoctonia low. Once soil populations of this fungus are built up, the value of cultural controls such as rotation, avoiding cultivating soil into the row, maintaining adequate, balanced fertility for good crop growth and maintaining adequate soil drainage is greatly reduced. Where disease pressure is high, growers can plant specialty varieties with resistance, but the resistance is incomplete. Because predicting disease development and loss is difficult, growers have long wanted a control where yield potential is not compromised. Since 1995, we have explored the potential for chemical control by preventing crown infections of young plants.