The beast is back! Ontario’s winter wheat crop has the potential to produce high yields, but some areas of the province are experiencing high infestations of the yield-robbing Fusarium fungus.
Peter “Wheat Pete” Johnson, an agronomist with Real Agriculture, said that while it’s not as bad as 1996, when Fusarium devastated the state’s winter wheat crop, producers still need to get out and check disease levels, aim combines at fields with higher infection levels and harvest those fields first.
In this episode Real Agricultural Wheat SchoolJohnson is looking at the Fusarium Head Blight Index, a new tool growers can take into the field to determine which fields are at highest risk for yield loss and deoxynivalenol (DON).
The index is an assessment of disease prevalence measured in the field during grain fill. “It gives us some insight into whether a field is going to be a problem for DON and whether we need to harvest it sooner, or we can decide that the field is not a big problem and we can leave it as is.”
In the video, Johnson gives a step-by-step guide on how to calculate the index: The first step is to scout the field for signs of infection. To do this, growers randomly grab 10 ears of rice to determine the infection rate. This process should be repeated in 10 locations in the field.
The goal is to determine the incidence (number of panicles) and severity (percentage of infected panicles) of Fusarium infection within a sample. A rating is then calculated to determine if the field needs to be harvested immediately or is a lower priority.
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