Rust in cereals, and especially stripe rust, is a disease that it can be easy to allow to drop off the radar. After all, the spores are carried by wind and may not reach your growing region in time to really cause an issue. What’s more, decent varietal resistance exists for many races of rust, so seeing high levels of rust may not occur every year.
The caution, however, is that new strains of rust will and are evolving; varietal resistance is not equal in all lines and new rust lines may overcome the existing resistance. It’s because of these factors that Albert Tenuta, OMAFRA field crop pathologist, warns farmers to pay close attention to risk incidence in their wheat fields this year, and not necessarily because they need to control it now. Tenuta encourages farmers to take varietal differences into consideration when choosing a wheat variety to plant this fall, as most certainly not all are created equal when it comes to rust resistance.
In this video, Tenuta explains all this and more, plus he shows us the symptoms of stripe rust and the stark difference between incidence levels on a resistance and susceptible variety.
If you cannot see the embedded video, click here.
