Farmscape for August 26, 2005  (Episode 1896)

Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food reports levels of fusarium head blight infection across the province appear to be extremely low this year.

Fusarium head blight is a fungal infection that primarily affects cereal crops.

Fusarium graminearum is of particular concern because, in addition to reducing grain quality and yield, it produces a mycotoxin which reduces the performance of livestock, especially swine.

Provincial Plant Disease Specialist Penny Pearse says early in the season there was a lot of heat and humidity, which tends to favor disease development, but by the time the crops reached the critical flowering stage the weather was much drier.

Clip-Penny Pearse-Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food 

In terms of the disease that's been showing up, I think, in 2004 and 2005 overall we've had low severity levels and we're looking at generally less than one percent severity.

When I say that what I mean is, if we were to take all the grain on average in the province and looked at it, less than one percent of those kernels would actually be having any kind of fusarium species present.

That's really good news for Saskatchewan.

We saw higher levels in 2001.

It was a wetter season and then we were looking at levels of three to four percent primarily in the southeastern regions.

I would say that on the eastern side of our  province, bordering on to Manitoba, especially our southeast, is where we have had most of the fusarium head blight showing up however we have seen scattered amounts across the province but overall very low severities.

We tend to see levels of fusarium drop as they approach the western regions of the province.

Pearse says the incidence of the mycotoxin producing fusarium graminearum has been particularly low.

She says, while the figures for 2005 aren't yet available, 2004 numbers indicate graminearum accounted for 17 percent of the fusarium infection in wheat and three percent in barley with the rest of the infection resulting from non toxin producing strains.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council