A Met Éireann yellow warning for potato blight has been issued for four counties today (Thursday, May 30).
Conditions conducive to the spread of potato blight are expected to develop on Sunday night (June 2) and early next week.
The national forecaster announced there will be opportunities for spraying tomorrow (Friday, May 31) and on Saturday, June 1.
The affected regions, according to Met Éireann, are Donegal, Leitrim, Mayo, and Sligo.
Pale green areas (shown in the image above) have a very low blight risk of 0-3 EBH (effective blight hours) and dark green areas have low blight risk (4-6 EBH).
Yellow areas have a medium risk of blight (7-9 EBH), orange areas have a high risk (10-12 EBH), red areas have a very high risk of blight (>12 EBH).
The umbrella group of European Union (EU) farm organisations, Copa Cogeca has said that a “European action plan to combat late blight in potatoes is needed”.
It has said the annual economic damage in the EU from potato blight is estimated at around €900 million.
The Copa Cogeca statement detailed that “potato late blight is already a significant threat to the 2024 growing season across several regions of the EU, even before potato planting is completed”.
The organisation stated that the pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, infects both the foliage and tubers of potato plants and can devastate the entire crop within just one or two weeks.
This pathogen is highly adaptive, and recent developments show that it is evolving more complex virulence spectra, enabling it to overcome an increasing number of resistance genes.
Copa Cogeca also added there is an “alarming development of combined resistance to single-site fungicide active ingredients”.
It said: “These troubling developments are drastically reducing the effectiveness of current control tools, potentially undermining future Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies.”
This poses a severe threat to European potato production, the potato supply chain, and the positive EU trade balance.
Copa Cogeca announced the EU potato sector proposes “both short-term and long-term solutions”.
In the short term, the action plan presented today, proposes among others, the creation of a stakeholder dialogue platform and the reinforcement of communications IPM strategies.
In the mid-term, Copa Cogeca stated that “signatories propose developing a coordinated approach from the crop protection sector, breeders, researchers, and European farmers”.
The organisation detailed that the “most effective way to control the spread of late blight remaining is the combined use of effective plant protection products and resistant potato varieties with combinations of different resistance genes as well as promoting best agricultural management practices”.