Alberta legislators should change an ineffective law designed to hold back the advance of fusarium.
The crop disease’s ability to downgrade grain costs growers hundreds of millions of dollars, and management strategies are needed.
However, it is now in many areas of Alberta, and restrictions on selling fusarium-infected seed are an unfair and unnecessary burden on the domestic pedigreed seed industry.
The provincial government made a commendable effort to block fusarium, but like King Canute’s effort to resist the ocean’s tides, the province’s effort proved futile.
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In 2002, Alberta named fusarium graminearum a prohibited pest and established a fusarium management plan. Graminearum is the most aggressive of the species that caused fusarium head blight, and it was logical to try to prevent its introduction through restrictions on selling seed with traces of the disease.
Fusarium had occasionally been detected in Manitoba in the middle of the last century, but it did not become a serious disease there until the 1990s. Soon it was also spreading through Saskatchewan.
The drier climate of the western Prairies had provided a level of protection against the disease, which thrives in moist conditions.
However, the wetter growing conditions of recent years encouraged fusarium to take up residence in Alberta. Its further spread now has more to do with the weather than the seed’s inoculum load.
However, pedigreed seed growers are still required to sell only fusarium-free seed.
Growers with infected crops must either try to sell it in Saskatchewan or Manitoba, where there are no restrictions, or sell it as commercial grain at a much lower price.
Meanwhile, the fusarium regulation isn’t enforced on sellers of common seed. Their seed is untested, and so buyers have no idea of the inoculum load in those sales. For that matter, there is little enforcement and testing on pedigreed growers either.
The fusarium seed restriction discourages seed companies from multiplying new cereal varieties in Alberta. They don’t want the expense of producing a crop under pedigreed conditions, only to be forced to sell it as commercial seed if it is infected with fusarium.
This makes new varieties more difficult to find in Alberta than in other provinces.
Alberta must recognize when laws and regulations outlive their usefulness.
One step toward fairness would be to lighten up on the zero tolerance policy.
A private member’s bill introduced in the legislature this summer endorsed a .5 percent tolerance level, but the province’s standing committee on resource stewardship set it aside. The committee suggested a regional approach, which allows parts of the province to deviate from the zero tolerance policy.
Certainly, flexibility is needed. Regions where fusarium is still rare could keep tight seed standards, but tolerances much wider than .5 percent could be acceptable where the disease is established.
The province now needs to promote a robust fusarium management strategy, which in-cludes stubble management, crop rotation, foliar spraying when appropriate and growing resistant varieties.
Wheat varieties had no resistance to the disease 20 years ago. Now there are moderately resistant types, and one new variety, AC Emerson, actually has an “R” rating, implying full resistance.
However, more extended crop rotations are even more important, not only to reduce the fusarium load in the soil but also other soil pathogens, with the added benefit of herbicide rotation to fight the development of resistant weeds.
