Wheat Crop Falling Prey To Disease

May 04, 2016

By Rhonda Garrison

As if this year’s wheat crop hasn’t been through enough, disease has struck, and Rod Gurganus, Director of Beaufort County Extension says it’s been located in several areas,

“It seems like this wheat crop is starting to melt down before our eyes. We started to see some of these symptoms back maybe three or four weeks ago, even. As it started getting into March it started warming up, and plants really started growing, and we saw some things going on on a small scale, but it seems like here in the last week or so that this wheat crop is going backwards, at least in our area. I’m starting to hear reports of the same kind of problems in other parts of the state as well.”

And the situation has yet to be defined says Gurganus:

“We’ve taken a lot of samples trying to figure out what it is. We think that there’s some pathogen at work here, they’ve not narrowed it down completely, Christina Cowger, and Angela Post are working on that. But, whatever it is, we feel like it’s related to this wet weather we’ve had, this growing season for wheat. And even some of these symptoms we saw in this wheat crop, as well, and that was a wet year. So, before this, really attributed this damage to something else, and what we’re learning now is that it could be some kind of disease, that is affecting the wheat that is a factor or a derivative of this wet weather we’ve had.”

Extensive testing on several fronts has identified two possible culprits says Gurganus:

“The symptoms we saw early on, I was in the field with Ron Heiniger, and we were describing what was going on, and the cultural practices that were in place, and he thought it was probably soil-borne wheat mosaic virus, and we took some samples and ruled that out, but it was showing symptoms that certainly made you think that. And that’s when we started digging in a little bit more, and that’s when we took some tissue samples and some soil samples, to see if it was related to fertility. And those came back as not being the case, the fertility was adequate in the tissue and the soil. So, we ruled that out. So, Christina Cowger started thinking it was downy mildew, and that turned out to not be the case, so, we have through some sampling, Christina has identified some pythium and some rhizoctonia.”

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