Delayed flood effect | Good crops in West could balance poor eastern crops for average production
Crop symptoms are duping farmers into believing root rot is rampant in Saskatchewan’s pulse crops, says an expert.
“It’s not an epidemic,” said Dale Risula, special crops specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture.
Growers are watching their pea and lentil crops slowly succumb to what they believe is spreading disease.
Larry Weber, owner of Weber Commodities, has been inundated with emails from growers complaining about disease problems causing more damage than clubroot in canola.
“By the time (the) overseas trade figures out what is going on with peas and lentils, the severity and scope of the problem, 20 to 40 percent of the production may have disappeared,” he wrote in a recent edition of his daily newsletter.
Read Also
Critical growing season is ahead for soybeans
What the weather turns out to be in the United States is going to have a significant impact on Canadian producers’ prices
“By the time they realize that this won’t go away next year or the following year, this is going to get real ugly.”
Risula has heard the complaints as well, and his team has looked into them. What they have discovered is that the culprit is flooding rather than disease.
“There’s no necessity to really panic,” he said.
In fact, he is forecasting average pulse production for the province.
Pulse crops don’t like wet feet, and a lot of lentil and pea fields stood in water for a long time this spring.
The crops are succumbing to oxygen deprivation in the soil during the early stages of crop development.
“Ultimately what happens is the plant dies, but it dies fairly slowly,” said Risula.
Little by little the plant shows advancing signs of necrosis such as browning, wilting and bending over.
It gives the appearance of a disease that is slowly spreading throughout the plant, but Risula said that is not the case.
However, the plants are more susceptible to root rot and other diseases because of the flooding stress.
There is also the mistaken impression that the disease is slowly spreading from plant to plant in a field. That is because the lowest part of a depression in a field is the first to fill up with water, so plants in the centre of the depression die quicker than those on the outskirts.
“You get an optical illusion occurring that it looks like a disease that’s spreading, but actually it’s just a time-delayed thing,” said Risula.
Root rot diseases such as fusarium, aphanomyces and rhizoctonia do not spread from plant to plant. They are soil-borne funguses.
Risula said it is difficult to say how much damage was caused by flooding because pulses are indeterminate crops that can deliver surprising results given an open fall.
Greg Kostal, president of Kostal Ag Consulting, wrote an article for Saskatchewan Pulse Growers recently speculating that 35 percent of Canada’s lentils and 25 percent of its peas are grown in the wet zone.
Risula offered a more conservative guess based on Saskatchewan Agriculture’s estimate that two to three million acres of cropland in the province have been flooded and won’t produce a crop.
He said a lot of that land is in southeastern Saskatchewan where fewer peas and lentils are part of farmer rotations than in the southwestern and central areas.
Using those estimates, Risula figures 250,000 to 300,000 acres of pulses were affected by flooding, which would represent four percent of the 7.2 million acres of peas and lentils seeded in Western Canada.
Risula believes terrific looking crops in other areas of the province will offset the flooding losses. He recently saw crops in the Outlook area that looked “just tremendous.”
“I think there is still potential for us to hit an average kind of year for pulse crop production this year,” said Risula.
“We’re still on target for that.”
Clint Jurke, agronomy specialist for western Saskatchewan with the Canola Council of Canada, said pulses are developing nicely in his area of the province.
“From what I heard from other people, the pulses are looking fantastic as a rule, particularly through the west-central areas of Saskatchewan,” he said.
