The growing season of 2016 has proven to be both the best and worst year to use fungicides on western Canadian crops.
If fungicides could be applied effectively, many experts said they would have been perfect for the extreme disease risk many crops faced.
But applying them effectively was difficult because of the steady string of rains.
“It’s very difficult to get that fungicide down through that crop canopy once it has closed,” said Brett Flaten, a Saskatchewan Agriculture crop management adviser.
“Often it was very unlikely to succeed.”
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Farmers across the West turned to fungicides and other crop protection products as crops grew and steady rains through June and into August created ideal disease conditions.
Farmers with wheat worried about fusarium head blight (FHB). Sclerotinia was a huge risk in many crops including lentils, canola and sunflowers.
A host of other diseases appeared to present big risks as soils remained wet for weeks, causing ongoing high humidity.
“As the crop got very sick and the canopy closed, and with the frequent rains, you had a greenhouse effect underneath that canopy,” said Flaten.
“It’s very difficult to get that fungicide down through that crop canopy once it has closed.”
For lentils this proved a critical problem. The crop has little resistance to sclerotinia, but applying fungicides was difficult due to the frequent rain.
As well, the weather stayed wet for two months, so repeated sprayings were needed to address the ongoing risk. But as the ineffectiveness of early treatments left many crops looking poor, repeated treatments got expensive and questionable.
“Both economically and timing-wise you can’t just keep spraying and spraying and spraying,” said Flaten.
“On lentils, I had quite a few calls of ‘When do I start to give up on spraying these things?’ When you have a good price out there and you’re trying to protect it, it’s difficult to know when to pull the plug (on spraying).”
A similar situation occurred in some wheat fields with fusarium, although wheat benefits from having varieties with good fusarium resistance.
Right now it’s unclear how much FHB hit farmers’ crops.
“The yields look pretty good out there, but how much (fusarium) is there, even if they sprayed for it?” wondered Flaten.
Spraying was challenging because the sprays needed to hit all the sides of heads and leaves to be effective.
The best hope to deal with ongoing wet conditions will come from future crop varieties that possess better disease resistance. This year showed that good treatments can’t always be applied in an effective manner.
Scott Anderson, the manager of agronomic services in northwestern Saskatchewan for Crop Production Services, said this year has offered farmers a lot of experience with disease and treatments, as well as a chance to see what worked and what didn’t.
“This should be a great year for growers who did test strips of fungicide to evaluate the benefit received from their use,” said Anderson.
Like Flaten, he noted that good-looking crops with good prices, such as lentils, encouraged farmers to spray to try to safeguard their investments.
“In many cases, it was not necessarily a question of if a the grower planned to spray, it was more of just ideal timing for application,” said Anderson.
He said many growers gave their lentils a second dose of fungicide because the added moisture.
The results of all that worry, work and investment will be seen in coming weeks as farmers bring in the crop and get to see how much escaped the disease.
