GrainsWest Spring 2018

33 / 52

Spring 2018 33
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research scientist
Brian Beres advocates management of the disease by
optimizing genetics and using techniques that overcome
the environment in which the crop is growing. He says
crop uniformity is critically important. In wheat, this can be
achieved by bumping seeding rates. “The big problem with
Fusarium is that the growth phase in flowering is where the
plant is most susceptible, so if you’ve got a bunch of main
stems at one stage and a bunch of tillers coming on later, that
plant is potentially at risk for a month,” he said.
Proper rotation is also crucial to minimizing damage, but
Beres believes producers are faced with a dilemma when
selecting crop sequencing. “It’s a business,” he said. “And
everything at the end of the day has to be profitable. But we
wouldn’t want to see something susceptible to Fusarium
appearing more than once every four years.”
Farmers sometimes plant host crops without knowing they’ve
done so. Beres cited a farmer who appeared to have a great
rotation plan, but didn’t. His rotation included yellow mustard,
durum, chem fallow and field peas. What appeared to be a
diverse, non-host crop rotation was not. “If you look a little
closer, the only non-host is the mustard, theoretically,” he said.
Fusarium could colonize on the dead tissue left during
the chem fallow phase, explained Beres, and, as this farmer
discovered, field peas can also be a host. “It’s not common,” he
said. “But it can happen.
“Rotation is extremely difficult to overcome and underscores
the fact that, as much as possible, we need to have non-host
phases, but it’s hard at the farm level to achieve that because, in
periods of really high FHB infestations, it’s tough to find a non-
host unless you want to get really creative,” he said.
“It really is about making sure you have the best genetics and
the best management strategies,” he said. “If you don’t adapt
the genetics or the management to the current environment,
you’re going to get killed.”
Probably the biggest contributing factor to Fusarium,
though, is the environment. The governments of Manitoba
and Saskatchewan both post daily risk maps to let growers
know when conditions are right for the disease to take hold. In
collaboration with the Alberta Wheat Commission, the Alberta
Climate Information Service has created the Fusarium Head
Blight Risk Tool, available online at as a mobile-
friendly website.
By clicking on the map button, growers can view risk
assessments across the province and select the weather station
closest to their farm for regionally specific details. The tool
takes into consideration precipitation and temperature for the
past seven days, indicating what’s to come. “We provide the
environmental risk for the infection, but the farmer needs to
understand whether his crop is in a susceptible stage and if he
has disease in the area,” said Ralph Wright, manager of AF’s
Agro-Meteorological Applications and Modelling unit. “It’s not
a decision-making tool. It’s a decision-support tool.”
In collaboration with the AlbertaWheat Commission, the Alberta Climate Information
Service has created the FusariumHead Blight Risk Tool, a mobile-friendly website.