Farmscape for August 26, 2005  (Episode 1895)

Manitoba Agriculture and Food and Rural Initiatives warns preliminary assessments indicate cereal farmers will face substantial losses this year from fusarium head blight.

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

The disease reduces crop quality and yield and is of particular concern to livestock producers because certain strains produce a mycotoxin that will impact performance, especially in swine.

Farm Production Extension Pathologist David Kaminski says conditions in Manitoba were ideal this year for disease development.

Clip-David Kaminski-Manitoba Agriculture and Food and Rural Initiatives 

We knew that the risk factors were high when the spring crop was flowering, those factors being heat and humidity coincidental with flowering and some rainfall in the week leading up to the period when the crop is flowering.

Those factors were in place through much of the province through an extended portion of that period in the early part of July.

I guess we can't give hard numbers at the moment but we do know that the winter wheat crop was especially hard hit and some of the first spring wheat that has been harvested, predominantly in the southwest, has been grading a number three.

That's not good news.

It indicates a significant level of fusarium infection in the crop.

In the Red River Valley, there's a lot of cropland that just did not get seeded or was flooded and later not harvested so there it's going to be difficult to assess how much loss was due to disease and how much was due to weather alone.

Kaminski says we won't have a firm handle on the situation until the harvest is complete.

He says the assessment of damage is ongoing and we have a few more weeks to go before we come to grip with what we're dealing with.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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