Winner’s View: Maury Boyd On Effective Spray Protocol
June 21, 2011 
This Q&A series is the first of six installments featuring Florida Grower’s 2011 Citrus Achievement Award winner Maury Boyd addressing important issues of the day. This month, the president of Winter Garden-based McKinnon Corporation discusses area-wide sprays and other challenges beyond HLB.
Q: Please give a little background on your use of area-wide sprays and their effectiveness?
A: We started using ultra low volume by the Beck Brothers from Winter Garden. My manager Tim Willis has an airplane hangar at the Immokalee Airport adjacent to Steve Fletcher, a friend of Tim’s, owner of Fletcher Flying Services. They both decided to try low volume/reduced volume to lower the cost from the usual 10 gallons per acre. They started spraying at the reduced volume, Phil Stansly (UF/IFAS) noticed, and the rest of the story is Gulf Citrus got involved networking other growers resulting in a rather large aerial wide spraying.
Q: In addition to HLB, what other agronomic challenges have you seen in your groves in recent years?
A: Citrus black spot (CBS) was found in our oldest South Florida grove, about 10 miles south of Immokalee. The epicenter of infection is believed to be adjacent on our northern side, not far from the property line. We removed the citrus blighted trees, Carrizo rootstock, and added Headline (pyraclostrobin, BASF). No positives were found this season. The question still is, how did the disease arrive at this site?
Another issue is citrus blight. The trees die beginning around 10 or so years until the grove is economically ravaged. We have delayed resetting until we get a handle on preventing HLB.
I would hope we also can prevent citrus blight on resets but it does not seem so. We are considering clearing all the trees and restarting over by block.
Finally, there’s canker. We continue to see what we can do with no copper. Though in Central Florida, we did use some on grapefruit and navels.
Special thanks to Chemtura AgroSolutions for sponsoring the Citrus Achievement Award program.
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