Ray Mazinke has years of experience fighting fusarium head blight. When he rises to speak at the third annual Canadian workshop on fusaium head blight in Winnipeg later this month, his message will go something like this: he’s still fighting.
Mazinke farms near Morris, Man., and is also a part-time agronomist and consultant for a crop protection company. His farm is in the Red River Valley where fusarium, or scab, has been a problem for most of the past decade.
From his experiences battling the cereal crop disease, Mazinke has learned there is no one magical fix for the problem. His approach is to use a variety of tactics.
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“The bottom line is this is not a problem that there is a single magic bullet for.”
He has made significant changes to his crop rotations, cutting back on wheat and barley production, two of the crops most vulnerable to the disease. In fact, because of the risk, he has dropped wheat all together.
Oats help to fill the gap in crop rotations. Mazinke also grows some millet and markets the seed for bird food. Although that helps, he points out that there are limits on how much millet he can grow because “there are only so many birds in the world” to eat the seed.
He has also learned there are crops that may survive fusarium relatively unscathed, but still help spread the disease. Corn is an example. While the plant can become infected, the grain is typically not damaged.
However, as the plant breaks down in the field, the pathogens can be returned to the soil to infect future cereal crops.
“There are a lot of crops that are still carriers.”
Mazinke has tried fungicides with good results but not as good as he would like. The fungicide suppresses the disease, but does not eliminate yield and grade losses.
He thinks better opportunity lies in developing wheat and barley crops with improved resistance to fusarium.
Although years of drier weather could also help, he is careful what he asks for, because he does not want to be plagued by drought as parts of Saskatchewan and Alberta were in the last few years.
Signs of trouble
A couple of years ago, a crop protection company hired Mazinke to do speaking engagements in Alberta, letting people there know what was happening in Manitoba with fusarium.
He encountered some simmering hostility toward imports of cereal grains from Manitoba because of concerns that they could spread fusarium into Alberta.
Part of Mazinke’s reply was that Manitoba producers were driven by necessity.
Their own feed market is driven by hog production, but hogs have a low tolerance for the mycotoxins associated with fusarium-infected grain. So pig producers import a lot of their feed needs and Manitoba cereal producers try to sell their feed to Alberta feedlots because cattle tolerate the toxins better than hogs.
In the spring of 2002, Alberta was considering a zero-tolerance policy toward imports of fusarium-infected seed and feed.
Such a ban was not implemented provincially but was adopted by a number of counties and at least one municipal district.
Mazinke mills hog feed, but said he does not use barley as an ingredient because of the difficulty getting steady mycotoxin-free supplies.
“That would have been unheard of 10 years ago.”
The workshop on fusarium will be held Dec. 9-12 in Winnipeg. Mazinke is scheduled to speak Dec. 11.
The workshop brings together the knowledge and experiences of producers, researchers, government officials and industry representatives with a direct stake in how fusarium affects the quality and volumes of cereal crops grown in Canada.
A wide range of topics will be discussed.
