Scientists and crop advisers have been issuing warnings about it for years.
As predicted, Fusarium graminearum has continued its steady westward march and is now considered an ever-present potential threat to crops in southern Alberta.
The disease became a top pest on the Canadian Prairies in 1993 when it destroyed a large percentage of the Manitoba red spring wheat crop.
And while the problem in Manitoba is greater than elsewhere on the Prairies, fusarium is a disease no grower can afford to ignore.
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Across Canada, fusarium damage estimates reach about $225 million annually, an amount likely to increase as the disease spreads into central and northern Alberta, and the more virulent 3-ADON type takes hold.
The wet weather experienced in many regions during last growing season should also put producers on alert. Fusarium thrives in wet conditions.
It can affect wheat, barley, oats, rye, triticale and corn and causes grade and yield losses.
It produces deoxynivalenol, also known as DON, or vomitoxin, which can be poisonous to livestock if infected grain is fed above acceptable tolerance levels.
Pigs, dairy cattle and horses can be fed only one part per million in their feed rations, while for beef cattle the level is five parts per million.
Those tolerance levels restrict potential feedgrain markets for crops that have been downgraded due to fusarium infection.
To compound the problem, a more toxic strain, 3-ADON, is becoming more commonplace and has almost replaced its less aggressive, less toxic predecessor, 15-ADON.
In Manitoba, about 70 percent of fusarium infections are of the 3-ADON type.
Barley infected with fusarium is ineligible for malt and infected grain also causes problems for ethanol distillers, and millers.
However, all is not lost.
There are tactics farmers can use to minimize damage and economic loss.
They must acquaint themselves with the best management practices and accept that fusarium is no longer a regional problem.
The best management practices recommended to help slow fusarium infection rates include:
• Using only fusarium-free seed;
• Using proper crop rotations to capitalize on the fact that fusarium lives in stubble and breaks down in two years in small cereals like wheat and barley;
• Adjusting seeding dates so cereals in neighbouring fields are flowering at different times;
• Using crop varieties with better resistance;
• Ensuring that feed shipments are certified as safe for livestock feed with fusarium contamination below acceptable tolerance levels;
• Acceptable feedgrains must be shipped from source to the feeding location only, to limit potential spread.
Industry and governments can help by ensuring enough laboratories are available and operating so samples can be tested in a timely fashion, and that farmers are not overly burdened with too much of the added costs arising from restrictions.
Ensuring that research into more resistant varieties and new control methods are properly funded and are being carried out is also paramount.
Ultimately, producers will tackle the problem head-on, for their own economic well-being and for the sake of cereal growers across the West.
Fusarium has become a prairie-wide problem and combating it must be a prairie-wide effort.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen and D’Arce McMillan collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
