AF staff are looking for damage from pea leaf weevil feeding in late May and early June around the province.
“If you are a producer who is planting peas in 2020 or an agronomist who has clients with pea fields, we would like the opportunity to visit your field,” says Shelley Barkley, insect technologist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry (AF).
“The timing of the survey coincides with maximum feeding damage and to find the fields in 4 to 6 node stage.”
In each Alberta municipality where pea leaf weevil is known to exist, 5 fields are surveyed. In areas outside the known range of the insect, 3 fields per municipality are surveyed.
In 2019, staff visited more than 250 pea fields in Alberta - from Warner to Manning and from Pincher Creek to Bonnyville.
The survey is done from the field edge, and surveyors don’t enter the field. They count the feeding notches on each set of nodes on a plant, and they evaluate 50 plants in each field.
“This is probably the hardest survey we do because 4 to 6 node pea fields are not as easy to see from a distance as a flowering canola field,” she adds. “A lot of time is spent hunting for the fields. We would really like to streamline our survey in 2020, so we are trying to predetermine fields before we start the survey.”
Participating producers will receive results from their field the week the survey is completed.
Source : alberta.ca