Updates to your digital toolbox: Crop Hub

This post was written by S. Jandricic and Nicole Berardi, OMAFA’s project lead on Crop Hub.

If you are looking for pest management information, the Crop Protection Hub (Crop Hub) have you covered!

Several new features and functionalities are available for the 2025 growing season, the most exciting of which is the new “sort by efficacy” feature. This allows you to sort products by how well they work for a single or multiple selected pests.

Keep reading to see all the new features and how to use them.

Table of Contents

What is Crop Hub?

The Ontario Crop Protection Hub (or Crop Hub) is OMAFA’s resource for crop protection information. Crop Hub was initially released in April 2022, replacing OMAFA’s suite of crop protection publications.

Since the initial release, the team has been collecting feedback and working on ways to improve the tool and make it easier to use.

New for the 2025 Growing Season

Multi-pest select for “List view”:

You can now access the “List view” when more than one pest is selected (see figure below). The previous version only allowed access to list view when one pest was selected.

Figure 1. An example of “list view” in crop hub, and how you can jump to insecticides for different pests you’ve selected in grid view. List view is best option if you want to print out a single pesticide to give to spray professional, or if you want to print out a guide of selected pesticides for specific pests for long-term reference.

In “List View”, you can now access all pest-specific product information including:

  • Product name
  • Active ingredient
  • Efficacy data
  • Rate
  • Product restrictions (PHI, REI, max applications)
  • Chemical group number
  • Application comments

Better Printing of Specific Choices or Summary Tables

Once you’ve completed a search on Crop Hub and selected the specific pests you’d like information on, you can click on the “print view” button from the “list view” or “efficacy view” tabs to easily print information using your browser’s print function.

We’ve taken away a lot of the whitespace in the older version of the Hub, to make printing (and referencing those pages later) more efficient. For the best results, we recommend you set the scale to 60% in your printer settings (often found under “more settings” on the left hand menu when you go to print – see image below).

Figure 2. Select “more options” when printing to scale pages down to 60% for a better print product. This image also shows an example of efficacy charts that can be printed out using Crop Hub.

TIP: To create an efficacy table like the one pictured above, select all insect/mite pests or all disease pests on “grid view” and then navigate to “efficacy view” to see the full list of pests, products and efficacy ratings. You can then click on “print view” from here and get a handy-dandy summary table.

Compare products easily

We’ve added a new filter that allows you to narrow down and compare only the products you are interested in (or have in your pesticide locker!). To use this filter, click “select to compare” on the product card in grid view or use the filter on the right-side menu. Once you’ve selected all the products of interest, click “Only show the X product(s) selected for comparison” button above the first row of product cards.

Figure 3. The new “compare” filter feature allows you to quickly find an individual product you’re looking for, or to compare several products in terms of efficacy.

Sort by efficacy

When using “Grid View” (the default view when you go into a crop), the default sorting is by product trade name, so you can find products more easily. However, once you’ve selected one or more pests, you can now choose to sort by efficacy (from highest to lowest).

To use this option, first select pests using the filter on the right-side menu. Then go up to the “Sort by” menu above the listed products. Using the arrows at the right of this, you can toggle the sort option from “by product trade name” to “efficacy (average of selected pest(s)).”

Figure 4. The new “sort by efficacy” feature allows you to find the best product for both individual pests, or for multiple pests, in order to limit pesticide applications. This can save money, time and decrease the chance for resistance developing.

This option will reorder the products based on the average efficacy ratings for the pests you’ve selected. If a product does not have efficacy on a pest, it will include a zero efficacy value when calculating the average efficacy.

If you’ve selected multiple pests, but want to see the breakdown of efficacy of the product on the individual pests if you’ve selected, you’ll still need to click the “view efficacy breakdown” button at the bottom of the pesticide card. I would strongly recommend doing this BEFORE finalizing a pesticide choice, to make sure you’ll be hitting all your target pests with products of at least a “2” efficacy rating (=”good control”, which corresponds to roughly 80% control).

Figure 5. The “view efficacy breakdown” button allows you to see how the average efficacy rating was calculated. You should always click this to make sure the product will give you good control of all pests you’ve selected.

If you have feedback on these changes or thoughts on how we can further improve Crop Hub, please email ag.info.omafa@ontario.ca or use our feedback form found on the Hub itself.



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