Manitoba Agriculture reports farmers across the province are watching fields for signs of weeds, insects and plant diseases and taking appropriate action based on staging and economic thresholds.
Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and editor of the provincial crop report, says we’re still accumulating growing degree days and are about 120 percent of normal right now, we’ve been getting good crop growth and crops are moving along rapidly.
We’ve seen some rainfall amounts throughout western and central regions with varying rainfall amounts from real heavy, even some hail in some areas and other areas just some smaller showers.
Things are really moving along in the spring wheat as well. We’re seeing fungicide application occur for fusarium head blight. Canola fungicide is the next thing that growers are already starting in some instances. They’re making decisions based on whether there is disease pressure or not. In areas where disease pressure isn’t there, growers are maybe electing to hold off on spraying there.
If you look at some of the comments from the central region, there are some insect pests that are just starting to show up in the central region and in other areas as well. There are green clover worms in some of the soybeans, grasshoppers in some regions are still being attended to by farmers, whether it be just headlands or whether it be whole fields. There’s been some of that happening as well.
There’s some alfalfa weevil feeding in alfalfa fields and also some leaf hopper nymphs are showing up in some soybean and dry bean fields. Nothing to be too concerned with right now. It’s just a matter of monitoring the fields. If your do start to see some, just keep an eye on threshold levels and just kind of go from there.
~ Dennis Lange, Manitoba Agriculture
Lange says now is a good time to look for weed escapes and try to determine whether it’s a missed spray or if there are resistance issues showing up in some fields. He says, for the most part, things are moving along quite nicely and the rain received over the past eight days will really benefit those later season crops.
