Manitoba bean growers have some things to gripe about this year but anthracnose isn’t one of them.
Coming into the 2004-05 crop year the disease was a primary concern for the province’s flourishing bean industry. There had been a lot of infected fields in 2003 and people in the bean industry wanted to keep the devastating fungal disease from setting roots in the province.
“If we allow the disease to get established here then we’re going to really destroy our reputation as a bean producing area,” Manitoba Pulse Growers Association president Don Sissons said earlier this summer.
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It turns out that was the least of growers’ worries. According to industry estimates, wet weather and fall frosts destroyed more than half of Manitoba’s 280,000 acre bean crop.
The one bit of good news in an otherwise dismal year appeared in a late August survey of growers that showed there was less anthracnose pressure in the province than there had been the previous three years, said Bob Conner, a pulse crop pathologist at Agriculture Canada’s research centre in Morden, Man.
“The indications are promising that maybe things are improving.”
He attributes that to a combination of better management practices and improved resistance in new cultivars.
Growers in Ontario and Michigan know how crippling anthracnose can be. In years past it has wiped out large portions of the crop in those key bean-growing areas.
“Sometimes fields are just plowed under because the disease is so severe,” said Conner.
Even when the disease doesn’t have a major effect on yields it leads to a downgrading of quality due to the brown lesions it imprints on the seeds.
“It’s quite unsightly and beans are sold primarily on their appearance,” he said.
In an effort to avoid that kind of blow to its burgeoning bean sector, a Manitoba industry group devised an education platform for its growers last fall, advising them how to combat the disease by using clean seed, treatment options and registered fungicides during spring and summer.
The communications strategy also stressed the importance of spreading out rotations.
“It used to be the joke that the favourite rotation for some farmers was a bean-snow-bean rotation,” said Conner.
Bad habits like that contributed to an outbreak of the disease in prime production areas, such as near Winkler, Man., but growers appear to have heeded the warnings of groups like the Manitoba Pulse Growers Association.
Significant strides have also been made in breeding programs.
The United States Department of Agriculture recently announced it had developed the first new line of commercial pinto beans resistant to anthracnose. The disease recently emerged as a threat in Minnesota and North Dakota, where 350,000 acres of pintos are grown.
Conner said the press release is misleading because Canadian researchers have already identified three pinto bean cultivars (CDC Pintium, GTS 900 and Topaz) that are resistant to the predominant race of anthracnose found in Manitoba and Ontario.
Many Manitoba growers planted the early-maturing CDC Pintium this year because they got a late start on seeding.
They also seeded a lot of Envoy, a navy bean resistant to all strains of the disease.
Pulse breeders across the country have made a commitment to continue incorporating anthra-cnose resistance into new bean varieties and have developed good markers to identify desirable genes for that purpose, said Conner.
