The beast is back! Ontario’s winter wheat crop has high yield potential but there are also high levels of yield robbing fusarium in fields in some regions of the province.
Real Agriculture agronomist Peter ‘Wheat Pete’ Johnson says it’s not as bad as 1996 when fusarium decimated the provincial winter wheat crop, but growers will have to get out and scout to determine disease levels and point the combine to fields with higher levels of infection and harvest these fields first.
On this episode of RealAgriculture Wheat School, Johnson looks at the Fusarium Head Blight Index, a new tool that growers can take to the field to determine which fields are at the highest risk for yield loss and deoxynivalenol (DON).
The index is a rating of the prevalence of disease measured in the field during the grain fill stage. “It gets us to a point where we can actually somewhat predict whether a field will be a problem for DON and if it needs to be harvested quickly. Or it can tell us that the field is not a big issue and we can leave it.”
In the video, Johnson explains step-by-step how the index is calculated. The first step is to scout fields for signs of infection. On these walks, growers should blindly grab a handful of 10 heads to determine the percentage of infection. This process should be repeated in 10 areas across the field.
The goal is to determine incidents (how many heads) and severity (percentage of infection on the head) of fusarium infection in the sample. A rating can then be calculated to determine whether the field needs to be harvested quickly or is a lesser priority.
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