Growing barley, barley, barley can be stupid, stupid, stupid.
Agriculture Canada plant pathologist Kelly Turkington said farmers who
need continuous supplies of livestock feed have other cropping options
that will produce high quality feed and minimize crop disease.
Turkington said many Alberta farmers think they can grow repeated crops
of barley and stay free from disease if they use the most resistant
variety on the market and stick with it year after year.
The result is often the opposite of what the farmer wants.
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“If you go back to that field with the same barley variety, what you’re
doing is selecting for resistance to the pathogen you’re worried
about,” said Turkington.
“You’ll teach that pathogen to attack that specific variety. We’ve seen
some pretty spectacular cases of that in Alberta, where many people do
barley silage production of barley-barley-barley.”
Cereal crop diseases can be hard to identify, Turkington said, but
farmers may notice after growing the same barley variety for two or
three years that “by the end of the season that crop looks pretty
ragged.”
Turkington said breaking the disease problem can be as easy as
switching to another variety of barley.
“If it has a different basis for resistance to the pathogen we have
found it reduces the level of the disease,” said Turkington in an
interview at a Crop Diseases Council meeting.
Turkington also urged growers to consider other feed crops, such as
oats or triticale, to knock back disease threats.
Oats following barley or wheat will greatly disrupt a field’s disease
population, he said.
The best solution is a regular crop rotation which gives diseases
little chance to establish themselves because they are never exposed to
one crop or variety for a prolonged period.
“You’re letting mother nature take care of the disease issue for you,”
said Turkington.
Diseases that do appear will be on a much smaller scale and should
allow growers to tackle them before the crop is wiped out.
