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Penny Pearse
- Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food |
| Farmscape for January 16, 2002 (Episode 867)
Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food is encouraging the province's grain growers to maintain vigilance to prevent the spread of a fungal disease which has become entrenched in Manitoba.
Fusarium head blight is a fungal disease which can infect a range of crops but those most at risk are wheat, barley and corn.
The mycotoxins present in infected grain are of particular concern to swine producers because they tend to reduce feed intake and can impact reproductive performance.
Provincial Plant Disease Specialist Penny Pearse says, in 2001, the dry conditions kept the incidence of fusarium contained to the southeast corner of Saskatchewan but it remains a concern.
Clip-Penny Pearse -Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food
What we're trying to do in Saskatchewan is really an education process for our growers so they understand that fusarium head blight is a threat and once it is in an area it is there to stay.
It's very difficult to get rid of it because it is soil borne and also can be borne on the straw or residue from year to year as well so once it's in an area it's hard to get rid of.
Prevention is key so we focus on things like the use of clean seed or seed treatments, not shipping seed to other parts of the province where fusarium isn't a problem, the use of varieties with a little bit more tolerance...there's no such thing as a resistant variety but there's some that vary in their tolerance to the disease...things like crop rotation, allowing a break between cereal crops so that residue in the soil can break down and in cases such as the southeast where the disease tends to be more prevalent is to scout for disease at early flowering and
potentially apply a fungicide if registered.
Pearse says the species responsible for causing fusarium in Saskatchewan tend to be species other than fusarium graminearum, which is the species prevalent in Manitoba.
She says not all fusarium species will form mycotoxins and fortunately in Saskatchewan many of the species present are not the mycotoxin producers.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council |
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© Wonderworks Canada
2002 |
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