PULLMAN, Wash. — MoreCrop, a computer decision-support tool designed to help Northwest wheat growers predict and manage diseases has moved to the Internet’s World Wide Web, and it is now free.
“Growers in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Western Montana and Northern Utah can use MoreCrop to predict diseases and decide which disease control options to implement,” said Roland Line, a plant pathologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service at Washington State University.
MoreCrop was developed in 1993 by Line and Ramon M. Cu, a visiting scientist with USDA-ARS. WSU Cooperative Extension distributed it on two floppy diskettes for $40.
Line said the web-based system takes into account location of the farm by region, agronomic zones, crop management practices, characteristics of the wheat variety, history of the field and disease and weather.
The web version includes more information and choices than the diskette version, Line said, including more crop management options. New wheat classes and varieties and information about the varieties can be updated as well and growers can incorporate recently registered fungicides or fungicides with emergency labels into the system.
He said the system now provides information on 30 diseases instead of the 16 in the diskette version. High resolution images help growers diagnose diseases.
Line said the site is continually updated with new information as it becomes available.
MoreCrop version 2.0 requires a PC with Pentium microprocessor or equivalent, at least 16 mb. of ROM, a video card, a monitor capable of displaying true color, Microsoft Windows 95 or later, and a hard disk with at least 18 mb. of free disk space to store MoreCrop files. MoreCrop can be downloaded from the World Wide Web at: http://pnw-ag.wsu.edu/morecrop/.
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