Baking soda is one of the first alternative products that had university research. Most organic products are available now and the toxic chemicals simply are never needed. They don’t work well anyway.
The research done on baking soda is from Cornell University. Dr. Kenneth Horst and his staff discovered that baking soda mixed with water and sprayed on plants gave very effective fungal disease control. They later discovered the closely related product potassium bicarbonate worked even better and of course the potassium in many parts of the world is more beneficial to the soil than the sodium in baking soda. They also did research on combining products with horticultural oil and also had good to excellent results. In most cases results were as good or even better than toxic fungicides that are on the market. This is a good example though of EPA registered products now that contain potassium bicarbonate that are still ignored by the people that recommend the toxic chemicals. By the way, cornmeal juice works even better. We’ll get the research done someday. In the meantime we just use this wonderful food material with great success.