Have you ever noticed dark, sunken spots in your pepper fruits? Take a good look at the picture. It is called anthracnose disease of pepper.
The anthracnose disease reduces your peppers' fruit quality, making them
not suitable for the market. This leads to heavy losses in pepper farms.
Pepper anthracnose disease can affect all types of pepper. This includes habanero pepper, chilli pepper, bell or sweet pepper.
One of my trainee farmers called me to say that he has a disease
incidence that has damaged almost all the fruits on his pepper farm. I visited
the farm and identified the disease to be pepper anthracnose.
Consequently, I decided to write this article in order to educate
farmers on how to identify, prevent and control anthracnose disease in their
How to identify Anthracnose disease in a pepper farm?
Anthracnose disease affects a wide range of vegetable crops. It is
caused by fungi of the genus Colletotrichum. It spreads faster during warm, wet
While the symptoms are similar, the fungi that cause the disease are
different from host to host.
The specific one that causes anthracnose in peppers is called
The name of the
disease anthracnose actually means "coal disease". This can give you
clues on what to look for. Pepper anthracnose is identified by dark spots on
pepper fruits, leaves,and stems, frequently sunken, that later become
How to prevent anthracnose disease from infecting your farm.
Prevention is always the best form of defence or control against all
vegetable farm diseases. Prevention is also cheaper and easier than
We should not allow diseases like anthracnose to invade our farms before
we start taking preventive measures against them.
Like every other vegetable disease, the first preventive measure against
anthracnose disease is to grow resistant pepper varieties. This will help
reduce the cost of chemical controls.
Anthracnose disease can also be prevented by using recommended spacing
that allows for good ventilation and fast drying out of plants after rain or
Do not enter the pepper farm during the early morning or rainy days when there is so much moisture on the pepper farm. Only enter when the leaves are dried out. This will prevent disease spread in your pepper farm.
Routine application of fungicides containing metalaxyl, mancozeb and
carbendazim also controls them. Make sure to apply your fungicides every week
and don't miss it. Also, switch to other fungicides with different active
ingredients and modes of action to prevent fungicide resistance by the disease.
Control and Treatment of Anthracnose in Pepper Farm
Let's assume you let your guard down and your pepper farm got infected by anthracnose disease, how do you get to treat the farm or control the disease.
- Remove and burn infected fruits and badly infected pepper plants to control the spread of the disease.
- If the pepper farm is overcrowded and poorly ventilated like the one in the video below, you need to prune or remove some plants to allow for proper ventilation.
- Apply a mix of Mancozeb + carbendazim for two consecutive days, followed by copper +metalaxyl for another 2 consecutive days.
- Repeat again after Seven day with Mancozeb or another two days
- Continue spraying the fungicides every week interchanging with different active ingredients until the anthracnose disease is cleared from the farm.