|
Syngenta Crop Protection yesterday launched its Syntinel RustTracker system, an early-warning Web-based system that provides growers with tools to obtain information regarding outbreaks of Asian soybean rust and assess their potential for risk associated with the disease.
The Syntinel RustTracker uses Geographical Information System (GIS) mapping technology in combination with information from Syngenta's Syntinel spore traps, data collected from weather forecasts, and USDA's sentinel plots, when they become available.
RustTracker, available on http://www.soybeanrust.com, will help growers assess their potential for risk associated with rust.
"With the possibility of soybean rust outbreaks looming on the horizon, growers must have detailed forecasting information if they are to be successful managers rather than victims of the disease," said Valdemar Fischer, President of Syngenta Crop Protection, North America.
Syngenta developed an early-warning system for tracking soybean rust in Brazil in 2003, creating a rust management tool that became the industry blueprint.
The forecasting system also helped Brazil go from a nation that suffered more than US$ 500 million worth of damage in 2002, when the disease first arrived, to producing a record crop this season.
For the U.S., Syngenta has enlisted top private resources such as meteorologists at Accuweather.com that supply state-of-the-art weather analysis and GIS technology.
Syngenta calls itself "a world-leading agribusiness committed to sustainable agriculture through innovative research and technology." The company is a leader in crop protection, and ranks third in the high-value commercial seeds market. Sales in 2004 were approximately US$ 7.3 billion. Syngenta employs some 19,000 people in over 90 countries.
Syngenta
www.syngenta.com
www.soybeanrust.com
PRNewswire
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.