Management of coffee leaf rust in Coffea canephora based on disease monitoring reduces fungicide use and management cost

One of the objectives of integrated production (IP) are rationalizing the use of pesticides. For conilon coffee (Coffea canephora), a coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix) management system based on IP principles needs to be proposed and validated. Thus, this study aimed to quantify the economic and environmental effects of rust management based on disease monitoring for decision-making regarding fungicide use in conilon coffee (integrated coffee production, ICP-Conilon). The ICP-Conilon system was compared with the conventional rust management system (CS) based on a fixed schedule of fungicide application by delineating two plots of C. canephora clonal fields. The incidence of leaf rust in the plants from each clone was quantified monthly and, in the ICP-Conilon plots, systemic fungicide was applied only to the clones/planting rows with monthly disease incidence of >= 5%. The ICP-Conilon system resulted in an average reduction of 71.3% in the fungicide volume applied/ha/year, compared to that in the CS plots. Thus, it was possible to reduce, on average, 21% of the rust management cost in clonal conilon coffee plantations.