Wheat Planting Considerations for Insects & Diseases

Dec 03, 2025

Decisions made before planting wheat are critical for effective season-long pest control.
Variety selection should balance the factors required to meet overall cropping system objectives.
The Hessian Fly-free planting date and other cultural factors remain very important.
Seed treatments provide additional protection in high pressure environments.

Decisions made before planting wheat can have a large impact on the success of the season-long pest management program. Perhaps the most important pre-season decision with any crop is variety selection. Wheat varieties vary significantly in yield potential, agronomics, and defensive traits. Varieties must be selected with consideration for the overall objectives of the cropping system – e.g. top end yield may be compromised for an earlier maturing variety that facilitates double-crop soybeans and offers a better disease package. By contrast, full-season top yielding varieties may compromise disease tolerance traits, requiring additional crop protection inputs.

Variety selection

Obviously the first trait that you are looking for is yield. The second trait you should look for is resistance to Fusarium Head Blight (FHB). This is the most destructive disease encountered across wheat production systems in North America, and results in reduced yields in addition to mycotoxin (deoxynivalenol-DON) contamination of grains, requiring additional cleaning and potentially blending by elevators. Resistant wheat cultivars reduce the colonization rate and degree of spread in wheat heads and reduce DON contamination. This is important as healthy-looking kernels can contain elevated DON and these kernels cannot be removed from high quality grain. Our modern wheat cultivars have much greater resistance to FHB than those released 5-10 years ago. In addition, most of these cultivars do not come with a yield penalty as they did in the past.

Other diseases that may not be as devastating but more commonly occurring in wheat production should be next on your list of variety traits to look for. These diseases include Septoria Leaf Blotch, Stagonospora Leaf and Glume Blotch, Powdery Mildew (especially in high nitrogen management systems and manured fields) and Stripe Rust. Stripe Rust is typically a concern if it blows into wheat production regions and conditions remain very cool and wet. Keep in mind what traits your varieties have so you can determine what diseases to look out for during the season.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.