A cereal crop specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development is advising farmers across the province to be monitoring fields for signs of leaf and fungal diseases.
The provincial agriculture department’s latest crop report, released Monday, indicates precipitation over the past week across much of Manitoba combined with recent heat is helping advance crop development, although some crops in parts of the northwest are suffering from a lack of moisture and could use more rain.
Pam de Rocquigny, a cereal crop specialist with Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Development, is encouraging producers to be watching for signs of leaf and fungal diseases.
They’re busy with their herbicide applications, so controlling the weeds that are present in their crops and, as well, fungicide applications are also ongoing and that’s largely in our winter wheat and our spring wheat crops.
That’s of course for, at this point, management of leaf diseases and fusarium head blight as well for those crops, particularly for our winter wheat that is at that flowering stages of development.
We’ve been hearing some reports, last week and into this week, there’s been some leaf disease pressure.
There’s been leaf rust and stripe rust reported in winter wheat and in spring wheat.
The levels have been low to this date so it’s something we’re encouraging producers to scout their cereal acres for and, of course, for the crops that are in flowering which is largely our winter wheat and approaching the flowering stage, which is some of our early seeded cereals, fusarium head blight is a disease that we’re definitely monitoring in terms of risk levels.
MAFRD does provide fusarium head blight risk maps daily to provide producers with that information in terms of what their risk levels could possibly so these are two things that producers are kind of keeping an eye on for in terms of scouting and potentially fungicide applications if conditions warrant it.
De Rocquigny says timely herbicide and fungicide applications will help maintain yield potential.
