Diseases You Can’t Afford to Ignore: What we Learned from the 2025 Canola Diagnostic Program

Growing canola doesn’t come without challenges, diseases are top of the list for many Manitoba farmers. Many diseases of canola have similar symptoms and co-infect plants across fields, making it more challenging than ever to understand what is causing yield loss in your fields. 

Manitoba Canola Growers (MCG) Canola Diagnostics Program helps untangle and support growers and agronomists with lab based diagnostic identification of blackleg, verticillium stripe, and clubroot levels. The results not only help individual farms make better management decisions, but they also provide an important snapshot of disease pressures across the province. 

The 2025 diagnostic season saw strong participation with samples submitted from 116 different Manitoba farms, the majority, for a combined verticillium strip and blackleg test. 

Verticillium Stripe is Widespread 

The 2025 results showed verticillium stripe remains a significant disease across Manitoba. Of the submitted field samples 93% were positive for verticillium stripe. With 42% falling into the moderate infection category (50,000 to 200,000 spores/g soil) and 34% classified as having high infection levels (200,000 to 1,000,000 spores/g soil). 

These findings demonstrate that verticillium stripe is firmly established in many Manitoba canola-growing regions and warrants close attention from growers and agronomists.