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Fusarium Head Blight a Challenge for Farmers

Fusarium was a key challenge for farmers in many areas last year and is being found in some seed tests.
 
Last year was a bad year for the disease, which infects the crop head while the kernels are forming affecting the yield as well as the grade.
 
"What really distinguishes it is when you get kind of a salmon coloured appearance of spores on the blooms of the wheat," said Saskatchewan’s Integrated Pest Management Specialist Brent Flaten. "Once you start combining it's the fusarium damaged kernels that you can see. They're shriveled up kernels, sometimes we call them tombstone kernels."
 
Flaten adds there are economic threshold levels for Fusarium infected seeds to be aware of depending on the type of infection.
 
"For seed borne fusarium, what we are looking at are thresholds of about no more than five per cent fusarium graminearum species, but you can have a total of around 10 to 15 per cent total other fusarium species."
 
He says using a fungicides with fusarium head blight suppression can prove beneficial depending on the timing – it needs to be used at early flowering, adding that producers that are using seed with some Fusarium present should make sure to pencil in a fungicide treatment for Fusarium Head Blight suppression.
 

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