Synergistic strategies for sustainable crop protection: Harnessing soil solarization and biofumigants to combat Damping-off pathogens in Solanaceous vegetable crops

Abstract

This study demonstrates the effectiveness of a biofumigants derived from cauliflower leaves and soil solarization technique in combating soil-borne pathogens namely Pythium ultimum, Fusarium oxysporum, Rhizoctonia solani and Sclerotium rolfsii causing damping-off disease in major solanaceous crops such as tomato, chilli and capsicum. Results showed that soil solarization increased the average maximum soil temperature to 41.8°C with an increase of 5.4°C at 5cm soil depth over unsolarized beds. Integration of soil solarization with cauliflower leaves as soil amendment for the period of 40 days at 5cm soil depth was found most effective in reducing the viability of P. ultimum, F. oxysporum, R. solani and S. rolfsii to 5.3, 2.6, 4.6 and 3.6 per cent in comparison to 92.6, 77.3, 83.3 and 80.3 in control respectively. With the increase in the duration of soil solarization from 15 to 40 days, the potential of the pathogens to cause the disease reduced significantly at 5cm soil depth and incidence of the damping-off reduced from 63.3 to 16.6 per cent in tomato; 66.6 to 20.0 per cent in chilli and 70.0 to 23.3 per cent in capsicum. Through this integrated approach, the viability of soil-borne pathogens can be minimized, thereby improves the overall plant health. Thus, these findings give significant evidence for the potential of soil solarization technique and plant-derived biofumigants, paving the way for a newer domain in crop protection in a sustainable manner.