Historical Data Points to Bad Year for Pulse Root Rots

Feb 21, 2024

Once again, farmers should be on the lookout for root rots in pulse crops. If farmers are practicing proper field crop rotations and haven’t grown pulses in fields since 2020, then root rots could be a problem.

“You want to look back and think ‘Okay, well, what were the weather conditions like in 2020, when you had that pea and lentil crop in the field?’ And unfortunately, 2020 was a fairly wet year. When we look at the past few years of precipitation history, 2020 does stand out as a wetter year. So that means that risk will be higher in those fields that had pea or lentil in 2020 going into 2024,” Syama Chatterton, pulse pathologist at AAFC Lethbridge, says in a phone interview.

Chatterton recommends farmers look back at their yield maps or field notes from the last time pulse crops were grown in a field to check if there were any yellowing spots in the field or if there are any low-lying spots where water can accumulate. Soil tests should be taken from these areas to test for root rots. Possible root rot complexes that can impact pulse crops include Aphanomyces, Fusarium, Rhizoctonia and Pythium.

Bacterial blight incidence should be low for the 2024 growing season as 2023 was a drier year, Chatterton says.

Farmers growing chickpeas should be aware that there has been an unknown chickpea health issue that’s popped up in Saskatchewan, cautions Chatterton. There isn’t much information yet about what’s causing it yet, but farmers should watch out for wilting and yellowing of chickpea plants starting at the growing tips. If it is found farmers should report it.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids