Fungicide performance in cereals and oilseed rape

Our fungicide performance work provides high-quality, independent information on the relative efficacy of fungicides against key diseases in wheat, barley and oilseed rape.

Knowledge of the potential power of an active ingredient (or product) is essential in disease management. First and foremost, it will help you gauge the potential return on your spray investments. Critically, it can be used to develop effective fungicide programmes that balance the need to control disease with the need to protect chemistry from fungicide resistance.

Data released at the Agronomy Conference on 11 December 2024.

*For key charts, visit the disease target web pages (via the links below). These pages feature multi-year and multi-site data, which provide the best indication of efficacy. For all the latest results, such as single year charts, download the all-data PDF (via the link above).

• Septoria tritici
• Yellow rust
• Brown rust
• Fusarium head blight

• Rhynchosporium
• Ramularia
• Net blotch
• Mildew (historic data)

• Light leaf spot
• Phoma leaf spot and stem canker
• Sclerotinia (historic data)

Integrated pest management (IPM) is at the heart of disease management. A well-designed rotation (to minimise disease pressure) and an appropriate variety (to resist the main diseases present) will lay a solid foundation and reduce the requirement for chemistry.

Where sprays are necessary, our efficacy results can be used to help build fungicide programmes – based on mixtures of active ingredients and products – appropriate to the local disease-threat profile and in keeping with best practice anti-resistance guidelines.

The trials are located in areas most likely to produce high pressure for the target disease(s). We use varieties that are highly susceptible to the target disease(s).

Dose-response curves

• Generally, when more fungicide is applied, less disease will be present in a crop
• The visible disease present at a range of doses can be shown on dose-response curves in a graph
• Curves are published for ‘protectant’ and ‘eradicant’ situations, where applicable
• If you are interested in the details behind the trials, including our research partners and historic data, visit our guide to fungicide performance page

The data archive includes annual fungicide performance data since 2008.

Fungicide performance information has been generated as part of this trial series for many years:

• Wheat since 1994
• Barley since 2002
• Oilseed rape since 2006