Mining and oil company trucks don’t deserve all of the blame for creating clubroot problems for prairie farmers.
Farmers themselves sometimes cause potential problems by growing crop after crop of canola without regard for the danger.
“I think people know what they should be doing,” said Les Jacobson, president of Alberta’s Wild Rose Agricultural Producers.
“(But) in a lot of areas it’s canola-canola-canola. They’ve got clubroot. Other areas it’s canola-wheat, or canola-barley. It’s a two-year rotation. They’ve got clubroot. The areas that don’t seem to have problems are the ones where you have extended periods between canola crops.”
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Farm leaders, speaking during a panel at the Keystone Agricultural Producers association annual meeting in Winnipeg Jan. 25-27, said poor canola crop rotations and heavy resource company truck traffic on fields makes disease spread a serious issue.
Norm Hall, president of Agricultural Producers of Saskatchewan, said farmers in his province deal with off-farm vehicles from oil companies, water drillers for the potash industry, and a bevy of vehicles from Sask Power, SaskTel, SaskEnergy and “people taking pictures of nature.”
The crown corporations and the nature lovers are exempt from Saskatchewan’s new trespass laws, so controlling access to farmland is difficult.
Farm equipment dealers that move equipment from region to region could also be a source of clubroot transfer.
“We have to talk to the ag dealers association in Saskatchewan, in Alberta, here in Manitoba,” said Hall.
“Where is that machinery coming from? We have dealers that span the three provinces. Are they shipping that machinery across?”
