Late last June, I got a call from Ron, a producer who farms 1,500 acres of canola, beans, oats, wheat and winter wheat northwest of Portage la Prairie.
Ron was extremely concerned about his field of canola. “I’m not sure what’s going on here,” he told me. “I’ve got a spotty field — it could be cutworms, some kind of seeding problem, or maybe blackleg.”
Up close, there was no pattern to the stands of spindly, bolting stage, canola plants. In some spots the stand was thick and in others only five to six plants per square metre could be found. When I walked through the field, I noticed the canola plants were breaking off or falling over at the base.
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The odd thing was, Ron had planted the same canola variety in the field across the road and it looked great, with thick stands of healthy plants.
At the sight of this healthy field — planted under the same conditions as the unhealthy one I was standing in — I immediately eliminated several possible sources of the problem, such as wind, hail and germination issues.
Just to be sure, I pulled the lot number on the seed Ron purchased but no other growers had reported any germination concerns.
Ron originally thought the problem could be blackleg, but there were no physical symptoms, such as spots on the leaves or black girdling around the stem. Also, the seed variety Ron used was R-rated and, again, the field across the road showed no signs of blackleg.
Ron’s other theory was that the damage could have been done by cutworms, so we planted two cutworm baits that night. The following morning, when we inspected the traps, there were no cutworms.
This was not going to be a simple solution. I needed more information. I asked Ron for details about the rotation history of his field. Ron planted canola that year after his wheat crop was washed out. Perhaps the excessive moisture had caused stress to the canola field, or a pooling of nutrients, I thought.
But looking at the healthy field across the road, it just didn’t seem to fit. Why would the washout affect one field so differently from another separated by only a few metres of road?
The year before the washout, Ron had planted canola and before that wheat, beans, and winter wheat. After hearing the rotation history on the field I had an idea.
Send your diagnosis to Country Guide, Box 9800, Winnipeg, Man., R3C 3K7; email kbelanger@directpubli cations.ca;or fax 1-866-835-8467 c/o Kari Belanger. Best suggestions will be pooled and one winner will be drawn for a chance to win a Country Guide cap and a one-year subscription to the magazine. The best answer, along with the reasoning which solved the mystery, will appear in the next Crop Adviser’s Solution File.
