With clubroot disease showing up in fields east of Alberta over the last few years, there’s work underway in Manitoba to survey the entire canola-growing region of the province for the presence of clubroot spores.
So far, spores or symptoms have been found in 13 fields in 10 rural municipalities in Manitoba. Spore concentrations in these cases have generally been much lower than in central Alberta, where clubroot was found over a decade ago, explains Holly Derksen, field crop pathologist with Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, in this episode of the Canola School.
“The general feeling is that you need 100 thousand spores per gram of soil to see symptoms consistently in the field (galls on canola roots.) We had one field that showed symptoms in the field and it was at 89 thousand,” she says. “But most of them are much lower than that and a number are actually below the range where we can quantify, which is about 1000 spores per gram of soil.”
With support from the Manitoba Canola Growers Association, as well as the federal and provincial governments, a lab capable of testing soil for clubroot has been set up in Winnipeg, meaning samples will no longer have to be sent to the University of Alberta. The Pest Surveillance Initiative funding is also being used to test every township-range across the canola-growing part of Manitoba for clubroot, explains Derksen.
Source : Alberta Canola