In 1993 Manitoba farmer Earl Geddes thought his Canadian prairie spring wheat crop was as good as anything he had ever produced. Then he revved up his combine and discovered nearly every ripened head was empty.
“There was just no grain going in my combine,” he said.
Fusarium head blight, an infectious fungus, had destroyed his crop on a quarter section of land. The wheat crop should have been worth $40,000 but it brought in less than $5,000.
As farmers across Manitoba reported similar losses that fall, the potential impact of fusarium headblight slowly came into focus.
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The Canadian Wheat Board said it did not know what to do with the blight-infected grain. Sales were halted and some suggested the prairie grain industry would suffer irreversible losses.
The industry was thrust into a costly and unexpected crisis.
The sudden impact of fusarium headÐblight on the prairie grain industry points to one of the biggest challenges facing producers and organizations that are caught in the middle of a crisis. Disasters are difficult to predict and reactions are hard to gauge.
Well-rehearsed response plans can help in certain crisis situations but flexibility and responsiveness are key elements to any survival strategy.
For his own salvation, Geddes switched to other crops and learned as much as he could about the disease.
At the industry level, the Western Grains Research Foundation focused its efforts on combatting the disease and plant breeders were encouraged to develop fusarium resistant wheat varieties. Throughout the industry, a major emphasis was placed on education and disease management.
“Life goes on,” said Geddes when asked how fusarium has affected his operation.
“It’s a matter of understanding where everybody else is and what they have done and what you need to do to accommodate it.”
Geddes said there is one important difference between the fusarium crisis that affected Manitoba grain producers in the early 1990s and the current BSE crisis affecting Canadian livestock producers.
The fusarium crisis was an agronomic problem that could be addressed with plant breeding, improved agronomy and crop insurance. The situation within the Canadian red meat industry is a political crisis, said Geddes.
“It’s hard to have insurance against politics,” he said.
“The BSE crisis in the livestock industry is dramatic in the extreme but it doesn’t mean we are out of growing cattle in Western Canada. We are just too good at it,” he said.
Geddes believes the BSE episode will convince producers to put more emphasis on developing their own risk management strategies.
“Every one is a small business and small businesses sometimes have to find solutions for themselves because government can’t step in and replace all the lost income,” he said.
“The nature of a producer is ‘I’ve got a problem, I’ve got to fix it some way.”
