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Agriculture This Week: Niche crop interest could return

It is interesting how certain random occurrences create thoughts of a much larger scale. 

For example, I was recently reading Gardener’s Notebook by Debbie Hayward, and she made reference to borage. 

While Hayward was referring to borage in terms of a garden, my mind jumped back several years to when there was talk in the farm sector in Saskatchewan that it could become an important niche crop since the plant is also commercially cultivated for borage seed oil extracted from its seeds.

Borage seed oil has one of the highest amounts of γ-linolenic acid (GLA) of seed oil, and in herbal medicine has a long list of applications.

The crop never quite achieved the level of production one might have expected from the ‘hype’ at the time, although to be fair there were a long list of crops that were thought to become important crops as the sector looked to diversify.

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LALEXPERT: Sclerotinia cycle and prophylactic methods

Video: LALEXPERT: Sclerotinia cycle and prophylactic methods

White rot, also known as sclerotinia, is a common agricultural fungal disease caused by various virulent species of Sclerotinia. It initially affects the root system (mycelium) before spreading to the aerial parts through the dissemination of spores.

Sclerotinia is undoubtedly a disease of major economic importance, and very damaging in the event of a heavy attack.

All these attacks come from the primary inoculum stored in the soil: sclerotia. These forms of resistance can survive in the soil for over 10 years, maintaining constant contamination of susceptible host crops, causing symptoms on the crop and replenishing the soil inoculum with new sclerotia.