Canola Growers Encouraged To Test For Clubroot

May 19, 2015

Earlier this year, the Pest Surveillance Initiative (PSI) was established in Winnipeg with the goal of testing canola soil for clubroot disease.

The lab is currently accepting samples from producers in an effort to help track the disease.

Holly Derksen, field crop pathologist with Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development says the lab is able to detect clubroot at very low levels.

"We've only had two cases where we have seen symptoms in field," she said. "But through this testing and as well as testing we've done through the canola disease survey we have found it at extremely low levels in the soils. Not at levels able to cause disease symptoms in the fields...it's valuable information for our growers to know that it is there at some level."

Source : PortageOnline

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.