This is the time of year when fusarium can come like a thief in the night, slipping in while the victims are sleeping.
And it will be days or weeks before farmers wake up to discover whether their cereal crops’ potential has been stolen by the fungus.
“Nobody’s highlighting it as a big problem, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” said John Hollinger, who compiles Manitoba Agriculture’s weekly crop progress survey.
“You don’t know you have it until it’s too late.”
Saskatchewan Agriculture plant pathologist Penny Pearse said farmers are now stranded in fusarium limbo, between the period when it was possible to spray for the disease and the period in which damage appears.
Read Also
Canola support gets mixed response
A series of canola industry support measures announced by the federal government are being met with mixed reviews.
“The symptoms wouldn’t be showing up yet,” said Pearse.
Fusarium is a common problem in Manitoba’s Red River Valley and often appears in southwestern Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan.
The disease, which eats kernels of wheat and barley and can live in oat hulls, can knock an entire region’s crops out of human consumption and animal feed markets.
Farmers who invested in cereal crops that are heavily infected lose money and livestock feeders have to pay high freight charges to haul uninfected cereal grains from other parts of the Prairies or the United States.
The disease infects cereal crops at the flowering stage, but is not visible until the crop is headed and filling – a gap of a few weeks.
If a producer wants to protect his crop against fusarium infection, he must spray during flowering. The only way to make the decision is to base it on an analysis or hunch about the risk of the disease during flowering.
Warmth and humidity are key factors that cause fusarium to spread from the soil to the crop, so a farmer needs to watch whether his wheat, barley or oats are flowering at the same time as high humidity.
Hollinger said the wet spring had created perfect conditions for fusarium infection.
“We were pretty worried about it earlier on, because the conditions were just right for fusarium to spread, but it hasn’t been all that wet in the last few weeks,” said Hollinger.
Most cereal crops in Manitoba probably did not experience the dangerous combination of warmth and humidity at flowering time, so they may be safe. But seeding this spring was spread over a long period, so some crops are likely to have been flowering during risky periods.
Spraying under way
Hollinger said some farmers in central Manitoba have been spraying for fusarium, as well as for other cereal diseases.
Pearse said conditions in eastern Saskatchewan weren’t generally bad enough to make many farmers act.
“I don’t think too many people would have sprayed.”
In early August, Pearse and other disease experts will examine cereal grain fields for signs of infection. Many crops are headed and have begun filling, so problems should appear if infections have occurred.
Saskatchewan has been lucky in recent years, Pearse said. The dry conditions kept the disease down and only in the province’s southeast were significant incidents reported.
And Saskatchewan has not suffered as much from the graminearum variety of fusarium, which is the most dangerous because it produces the toxin that makes infected crop inedible.
But Pearse said fusarium is always waiting to come back.
“We’re kind of in the middle now,” she said.
“We’ve been keeping clean but a series of wet and humid years would certainly bring it on.”
