New hope is emerging for farmers on the eastern Prairies who have lost an estimated $1 billion over the past decade because of wheat damage caused by fusarium head blight.
Since 2001, thousands of lines from wheat breeding programs across Western Canada have been evaluated for resistance to fusarium at the University of Manitoba’s field nursery in Carman, Man.
An increasing number of lines are showing improved resistance, said U of M plant science professor Anita Brulé-Babel.
“There are some materials that are looking very good,” she said, especially the recently created lines.
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A line is one of the offspring that comes from crossing two cultivars. The goal is to create new lines that feature desired traits from the two cultivars that were crossed.
It can take seven to 10 years to move a new line from the early development stage into farmers’ hands, which means some of the most promising lines are still years away from commercialization.
Brulé-Babel said not all of the lines that show resistance will reach farmers’ fields because they need to include other important traits.
“You need the end-use qualities. It has to yield properly. It has to be the right height. It has to have other disease resistances,” she said.
“All of those other things have to be in that package.”
However, some lines could be available to farmers within the next few years, including BW297, a red spring wheat developed by a partnership between Agricore United and Agripro, a private wheat-breeding company in Colorado.
BW297 is among the lines tested at the U of M’s Carman nursery. It was rated as moderately resistant to fusarium, placing its resistance level between that of AC Barrie, a variety already grown in Western Canada, and Alsen, a U.S. variety that also is rated as moderately resistant.
BW297 was supported for registration when the Prairie Registration Recommending Committee for Grain met in February in Saskatoon. It could be widely available for commercial production on the Prairies within three years.
“There are other lines looking as good as that,” said Brulé-Babel.
“How close they are to having the rest of the package (of other desired traits), I don’t know.”
The Carman nursery will test up to 12,000 lines from wheat breeding programs across Western Canada this year.
Brubé-Babel said the same conditions that lead to fusarium infection in the field – high humidity and warm temperatures when wheat is flowering – have to be imitated in the nursery when testing.
Researchers must know two critical factors: when to expose the plants to infection and when to evaluate them for their reactions.
Fusarium attacks wheat and barley crops, driving down yields and quality. It causes toxins that make cereals unsuited for hog feed and barley unsuited for malting.
