Health checkup based soil-borne disease management: HeSoDiM

Abstract

Soil-borne diseases have been recognized to cause significant negative impacts on crop production. Because of the difficulty of control once the disease occurred during cultivation in the fields, most farmers have been using chemicals such as soil fumigants to disinfest the field soils before planting. However, such conventional use often causes an excess use of the chemicals, leading to increase of disease control costs and inhibiting agricultural sustainability and environmental conservation. To solve the problem, it is significant to diagnose and assess the disease-occurrence potential before planting in each field and take appropriate control measures based on the potential degree. Since such decision-making system is based on health check-up system in preventive medicine, we named the system as the Health checkup-based Soil-borne Disease Management (HeSoDiM). HeSoDiM is a promising strategy to realize sustainable agriculture by decreasing input of costs and environmental stresses to arable lands. This paper mentions the outline of the HeSoDiM and artificial intelligence assisting HeSoDiM practice against 10 soil-borne diseases recently developed.