Days to maturity

Canola growers could use earlier-maturing hybrids on at least some fields to dodge challenging weather in spring, summer and fall. 

“Waiting for rain, then seeding a short-season hybrid, should mean faster establishment, which will help the crop grow through the flea beetle risk period a lot faster. Earlier-maturing hybrids also tend to flower earlier, which will beat the hottest summer days — most years, at least,” says Clint Jurke, agronomy director for the Canola Council of Canada. 

“And finally, they can be ready to harvest before later-maturing hybrids, which helps if fall frost and green seed are higher risks.”

Canola Performance Trials, funded by the provincial canola farmer organizations, compare leading hybrids based on several factors, including days to maturity. Find results booklets and the online comparison tool at canolaperformancetrials.ca.

Clubroot resistance

“Clubroot risk is everywhere across the Prairies,” says Autumn Barnes, agronomy specialist and clubroot lead for the CCC. “For this reason, we believe there is a case for all canola growers to choose clubroot-resistant hybrids, including those who have not yet discovered a clubroot problem.”

Planting clubroot-resistant (CR) hybrids before the disease gets established will slow the pace of spore reproduction. “This will help keep spores low and local,” Barnes says. “Growers who wait until the disease has taken hold in a field before choosing CR could be stuck with challenging levels of clubroot for a long time.”

Hand-in-hand with CR is a minimum two-year break between canola crops (one in three-year rotation). This also helps keep spores low and protects the CR trait from natural selection of more virulent clubroot pathotypes that can overcome the CR trait. Dozens of CR hybrids are on the market for 2022. Find the list and more tips on clubroot prevention and management in the diseases section at canolaencyclopedia.ca.

Pod-shatter resistance

Cutting canola at or after 60 per cent seed colour change on the main stem will usually lead to higher yields compared to cutting earlier. Hybrids with pod-shatter resistance can be cut even later — at 80 per cent seed colour change or straight combined — with lower risk and higher yield potential. 

“Thinner crops like we have in 2021 always raise questions about harvest. Should I swath to prevent losses from standing crops whipping in the wind? Or should I leave it standing because swaths are going to roll without good tall stubble to anchor them?” says Shawn Senko, agronomy specialist and harvest management lead for the CCC. “Pod-shatter resistance can be especially helpful in reducing wind losses for standing crop, which adds to the yield benefit.”

Increased yield potential makes pod-shatter resistance something to consider in 2022.

Flea beetle seed treatment

After 2021, many western Canadian canola growers might be wishing for a flea beetle resistance trait. In a recent CCC survey of 1,000 growers, flea beetles ranked as the number one pest among those surveyed, and 2021 was no exception. Flea beetle resistance is not on the ticket for 2022 — or anytime in the near future — but enhanced seed treatments are an option.

“If foliar spraying is becoming regular practice on your farm, consider booking seed with an enhanced insecticide seed treatment for 2022,” says Keith Gabert, agronomy specialist and insect management lead for the CCC.

Enhanced insecticide seed treatments are not perfect, but they should make flea beetles somewhat more manageable when used in combination with other practices. These other practices, Gabert says, include higher seeding rates and seeding into standing stubble — both of which can factor into seed orders and harvest management this fall.

The recommended canola stand is five to eight plants per square foot. “Targeting eight plants per square foot allows for some plant loss without sacrificing yield potential,” Gabert says. “It also means fewer flea beetles per plant and more seed treatment per acre.”

As for stubble, Gabert says the wind protection from standing stems should trap snow, conserve moisture and may even reduce flea beetle risk. “Without that wind protection, flea beetles can take shelter at ground level and start feeding on stems instead,” Gabert says. “This stem feeding can be much more damaging than leaf feeding.”

Every farm and field will have their own challenges to productivity and profitability of canola. Seed decisions can play a big role in risk management, with successful canola crops often starting with the right traits, treatments and rates.

The post Four canola seed considerations for 2022 appeared first on Country Guide.

The study led by Mary Ruth McDonald, a professor of plant agriculture at the University of Guelph, and Agriculture Canada scientist Bruce Gossen, has major implications for canola producers.

It means infected volunteer canola, or any other clubroot-susceptible weeds such as shepherd’s purse and pennycress, must be pulled within three weeks of germination to prevent pathogen buildup in the soil. If infected plants are mowed or sprayed, even after only four to five weeks following germination, the clubroot pathogen Plasmodiophora brassicae can finish its life cycle and produce resting spores that persist in the soil for up to two decades.

In the study, the plants were sprayed with glyphosate. In one treatment, plant stems were pulled from the field, leaving clubs in the ground. In the others, the plants were pulled, and the clubroot-infested roots harvested and frozen.

McDonald says the organism that causes clubroot is an “obligate parasite” that needs a living plant to infect, grow and reproduce. 

“With a lot of those organisms, if you kill the plant, (the pathogen) stops dead. But in this case, we showed that once the clubroot organism infects and develops to a certain stage, even if the plant cells were all dead, the organism continued to mature. The resting spores were still perfectly alive and could go back into the soil and cause disease.”

Freezing the plant actually sped up cell maturation in the trial. One hypothesis was that by freezing and then thawing host plants a few days later, the pathogen can harvest a “burst of nutrients” to use for its final stage of maturity. McDonald says another hypothesis is that plant hosts naturally “push back” at pathogens and attempt to limit their growth, but if a host is killed the pathogen has no obstacles in the way of obtaining nutrients and finishing its life cycle.

Only one other study, a 2018 European study on winter oilseed rape, has found a similar result, McDonald says. The findings help explain why so many producers continue to find clubroot in their fields even after the recommended two-year rotation away from canola.

Control options

Rotation is absolutely key to clubroot control. In Alberta, soils can have between 10 and 100 million resting spores per gram. A two-year rotation away from susceptible crops will typically reduce the pathogen load by up to about 90 per cent, which can still leave more than a million hardy spores that can persist in soils for 10 to 20 years.

McDonald says the 90 per cent reduction is essential, but from the standpoint of clubroot control there’s little advantage to lengthening rotations beyond two years. Importantly, though, for those two years to be effective they need to be “real rotations” without volunteer canola and other susceptible weeds.

A single infected plant can have a billion resting spores. If producers spot these weeds in the field after they’ve been growing for a month or two, killing them does nothing to stop pathogen buildup in the soil.

“Killing the plant doesn’t reduce the disease at all, and could in fact speed its development,” McDonald says.

If clubroot-infected weeds cannot be sprayed, mown or disced without worsening the problem, how can producers get rid of them?

The only answer is to pull up the infected plants, McDonald says. Then, the question is how to destroy them: left in a pile, clubs will decay but spores will continue to mature and eventually make their way back into the field. They can be buried with a backhoe, but this method is likely too labour-intensive in season.

The most practical solution is to destroy smaller batches of pulled plants in a burn barrel, although the most environment-friendly option would be to destroy them in a biodigester, McDonald says.

Scouting

The study’s results highlight the importance of scouting frequently. Luckily new research is always cropping up to make this easier.

It helps that there are clear patterns to clubroot development and its effects on a field.

Research done by University of Alberta professor Stephen Strelkov a few years ago shows, for example, that clubroot is typically first found at the field entrance and to the right, says McDonald. Clubroot travels on clumps of soil which are carried by tractors. An equipment operator will almost invariably pull to the right, stop the tractor and then open it up, dislodging clumps into the field.

“As you go further into the field there’s less clubroot because most clumps of soil have fallen off the equipment already and you end up with parts of the field with no clubroot, and year after year the clubroot might move a little bit as seeders and other equipment move through the field,” she says.

Because the organism moves through soil moisture, clubroot often shows up in low spots or areas with soil compaction. Infection often delays flowering, making infected green plants easy to spot in the sea of yellow blooms. Later, infected plants die prematurely.

Clubroot is easier to detect with a drone than other diseases due to patterns like these. This summer, McDonald and Gossen are collaborating with David Halstead, a researcher at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, on a two-year drone scouting project funded by SaskCanola through the Agriculture Development Fund and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture. The project will assess drones’ ability to spot clubroot infection from the air.

The post Swift removal of infected plants key for clubroot control appeared first on Country Guide.

While wet or waterlogged soil generally means more disease pressure, Bruce Murray is quick to point out that this is not always the case. “Many of the seedling diseases will show up under saturated soil conditions but to really take off, additional factors are required,” says Murray, the market development agronomist (eastern Manitoba) at Bayer.

He points to many stressors that put a strain on soybean plants, greatly boosting the chances of successful fungal infection. Compacted soil is one. Injury from herbicide residue from the previous year is another. Deep seeding and iron deficiency chlorosis (IDC) injury due to high-soluble salt and/or carbonate levels in the soil also cause plant stress. Plants can also be stressed from trying to grow in cold soils over extended periods. “So again, while it’s true that with wet soils we may see more disease pressure showing up in the spring, wet soils alone do not guarantee the occurrence of fungal disease,” Murray says. “The presence or non-presence of multiple stress factors matters a great deal.” Seed treatments provide additional protection if one or more of these factors cannot be avoided.

Bayer SeedGrowth specialist Brittnye Kroeker points out that some farmers incorrectly believe that if soils warm up and dry out by planting time, seed treatment is not needed. “Yes, seedling diseases like pythium, rhizoctonia, and phytophthora only really thrive under wet conditions, but other fungal pathogens like fusarium can be active in wet but also in dry and warm conditions,” she says. “Therefore, farmers should always consider seed treatment a must, no matter what conditions prevail at planting in any particular year.”

Phytophthora threat in Quebec

In Quebec, the corn harvest of 2019 was very late, finishing in January, and Bayer market development agronomist Stephane Myre notes that some of that remaining residue will shelter phytophthora, which will in turn threaten soybeans planted in the same fields this spring. If soils are cool and wet, the threat looms larger and growers should therefore choose soybean cultivars resistant to several breeds of the fungus.

“Phytophthora is the most serious disease threat to soybeans in Quebec right now, and seed treatment is really important,” Myre adds. “In corn, pythium wasn’t a big problem during the last couple of years, due to planting happening later in drier and warmer conditions, but this year, who knows how wet things will be? There was also some presence of gibberella ear rot in Ontario in 2019 and also some anthracnose here and in Ontario.”

Containing clubroot

Elizabeth Simpson, canola agronomic systems manager for Bayer, says wet soils are a particular hazard for spreading clubroot in canola, but that regardless of what crop is being grown in a field, the risk of spreading this disease will always be present. Wet conditions allow clubroot to move within a field through water flow as well as in wet soil stuck on equipment. If you have identified an infected field on your farm, Simpson advises seeding clubroot patches and entryways with a perennial grass to limit pathogen and soil movement. Also, ensure your equipment is cleaned and disinfected before leaving an infected field, and if possible, work in your potentially infected fields last.

Adam Pfeffer, national row crop agronomic systems manager for Bayer, also reminds growers of the importance of rotation. Indeed, he “definitely encourages” growers to plant an entirely different crop category in your crop rotation, for example moving legumes to acreage that grew cereals. “Obviously, also avoid sequential crops with similar disease susceptibilities,” he adds. “For example, soybeans, sunflowers and canola are all at risk of white mould pressure.”

Tracking moisture by field

To most efficiently track soil moisture levels this spring, Bayer field product specialist Andria Karstens points to the Climate FieldView app which provides growers with daily rainfall data for each field. “While a rain gauge records the precipitation for the few square inches it covers, the intensity of rain can vary greatly from one side of the field to another,” she explains. “So you will often get different readings depending on where you put your gauge.” Instead, Climate FieldView provides a “whole field” rainfall measurement. Looking at whole-field precipitation, says Karstens, will help you understand the varying workability of your fields, in addition to showing you how your fields are trending over the season — too wet, too dry or just right.

Growers should also understand the way the platform works, integrating live weather data feeds from various sources including weather stations, rain gauge networks and radar. This means that its readings are updated as needed each hour as more quality-controlled data is received. “So the measurements sometimes change over time, but you can be assured that if they do, their accuracy has increased due to integration of the latest possible data,” Karstens explains. “Simply click on the ‘Weather’ icon to see the amount of precipitation in each field, since yesterday, since midnight, season-to-date and also the amount compared to the 10-year average.”

Kroeker notes that an increasing number of growers are doing small field trials to better manage their crops for fungal disease control and more, and that the FieldView app is very helpful in obtaining meaningful conclusions from these trials. “If you are going to invest in doing your own trials, you want to make sure you are getting the most useful data out of them that you can, this year and in years to come,” she explains. “Data is not useful unless it’s managed in a way that results in much better decisions.”

This article was originally published in the 2020 Disease & Yield Management Guide, a Country Guide Special supplement sponsored by Bayer Crop Science.

The post Disease considerations for a late and wet spring appeared first on Country Guide.

Agronomists have been beating the drum of crop diversity for years and farmers understand that tight rotations of any crop lead to increased disease, weed and insect pressure, and eventually to reduced yield and quality.

But it certainly is difficult to lengthen canola rotations when the crop is bringing in the bucks and you’ve got bills to pay. It’s one reason why, even as the incidence and severity of diseases rise, many farmers still plant canola on the same field every second year. They know it may bite them in future, but the income is needed now.

That dilemma between short-term gain and long-term pain is something Danny Le Roy hopes to ease in the future. An associate professor in the department of economics at the University of Lethbridge, Le Roy is working with U of L bio-economist Elwin Smith and colleagues from the Universities of Alberta and Manitoba on a five-year, WGRF-funded research project aimed at determining the economic value of diversified cropping systems. He wants to put a dollar figure on the tradeoffs between short- and longer-rotation plans. “The reality is that with the spread of root rots, clubroot, blackleg and more, farmers are struggling with crop decisions,” Le Roy says. “That’s part of the rationale for this research. Instead of just relying on a gut feeling, is it possible to put some numbers to it?”

Smoothing the peaks and valleys

Maybe one place to start is to think about the sources of profit. You sell a crop, you get a return, and whether it’s a high or low return depends on markets and the quality of what you have to sell — that’s pretty straightforward. But productivity also influences profit: the more productive the land, the higher the yield and grade, the higher (presumably) the return. You can’t affect markets, but you can affect productivity.

“Up to this point, land has been intensively used,” Le Roy says, referring to the short-rotation patterns typical of Prairie agriculture. “With canola, for example, the tradeoff for it being the money-maker is that canola pests reduce the productivity of that land. If you have a longer rotation, you might have a lower return, but the variability of that return may be lower.”

In other words, what you lose in a spectacular return every few years, you gain in making smaller, but steadier, more reliable returns over time. It’s kind of like the stock market — there are dips and valleys month-to-month and year-to-year, but the overall trend is upward.

Three soil regions

To find out the profit potential of long rotations and fully diversified cropping systems, Le Roy and his colleagues are gathering data from three distinct agronomic regions in Western Canada: the black soil zone of southern Manitoba, where corn and soy crop systems are dominant; black and grey soil zone areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where canola and cereals are ubiquitous; and the brown and dark brown soil zones of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where pulses reign supreme.

Both short, less diversified rotations and longer, more diversified rotations are included in the study, and data points will be collected by researchers and agronomists from field projects they are already working on. “All the information we need has been collected for years, but it needs to be reorganized,” says Le Roy.

The main goal is to develop a solid framework that farmers can use to help make cropping decisions more easily, perhaps more aware of the risks associated with various choices.

“Margins are very thin,” Le Roy says. “It’s a very competitive industry. A small difference here or there may make the difference between making a mortgage payment and getting foreclosed, and growers need to protect that margin. So if canola doesn’t make the margin you’re used to, a tool like this will help you make some decisions — ‘given what I’m putting in, what’s the best course of action?’”

Specifically, the framework will be a way to quantify the economic tradeoffs between the profit potential of short-rotation crop plans and the long-term benefits of diversification. “I don’t know at this point if the work we’re doing will lead to a commercializable spreadsheet — that would be the dream,” says Le Roy. “The point is to help real people in the real world.”

“The problem motivating this study is timeless,” Le Roy says, adding that the alarm bells ringing now — increased pest severity, resistance and pressure on Western Canada’s major crops — create a sense of urgency. “I don’t know all the answers, but I can help frame the question,” he says.

“The importance of this research is to quantify some things that are becoming increasingly important — this is truly agronomically driven work,” he says. “I would like farmers to know there are means being developed that will help them evaluate the choices they make in the spring.”

This project is funded by WGRF plus these funding partners:

• Alberta Pulse Growers Commission (APG)
• Alberta Wheat Commission (AWC)
• Brewing and Malting Barley Research Institute (BMBRI)
• Manitoba Pulse & Soybean Growers (MPSG)
• Prairie Oat Growers Association (POGA)
• Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission (SWDC)

The post Putting a value on crop diversity appeared first on Country Guide.

DeKalb’s DKTF 92 SC and DKTF 94 CR will not be available for 2020, Bayer said. Canola growers who have already booked those seeds for this spring are now asked to talk to their local sales reps or retailers about suitable replacements.

“Last season proved to be a challenging environment for Canadian growers across the board,” Bayer said in a release Wednesday. “Some expressed concerns about the performance of these two hybrids in particular, while others saw these hybrids perform as expected.

“Ultimately this inconsistent performance did not meet Bayer’s expectations.”

The company said it ran side-by-side trials with other DeKalb TruFlex canolas and confirmed “the inconsistent yield results were limited to these two hybrids,” while “all other TruFlex canola, straight cut and clubroot hybrids performed to expectation.”

Separately on Twitter, the company said it would recommend DKTF 96 or 75-65 RR to replace DKTF 92 SC, while a TruFlex canola clubroot hybrid is “an alternative” for DKTF 94 CR.

DKTF 92 SC was announced in 2018 for use in the 2019 growing season, and was billed as having “improved pod strength for straight cutting” plus “very good combining ease and multigenic, R-rated blackleg resistance.”

DKTF 94 CR was also first made available to growers for the 2019 season and was billed as having resistance to five clubroot pathotypes (3, 2, 5, 6 and 8) plus an R rating for blackleg.

DeKalb promoted both TruFlex varieties as offering growers “a wider (herbicide) application window, with up to as many as 14 more days, without sacrificing yield potential.”

The two varieties’ herbicide tolerance packages were also marketed as allowing growers to control 51 weed species, “24 more than the Genuity Roundup Ready canola system.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post DeKalb pulls two ‘inconsistent’ canolas off market appeared first on Country Guide.

Back then, researchers identified a handful of clubroot pathotypes, mostly minor, and one major one that was responsible for most infections and yield loss in Western Canada. Plant breeders focused on that and introduced the first clubroot-resistant (CR) canola varieties in 2009.

They worked for a while, but then something changed. “In 2014, we started seeing new pathotypes coming out of Alberta,” says Gary Peng, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in Saskatoon. “Just in a few fields, but we had a strong sense of resistance breaking down.

“We do have an arsenal of R (resistance) genes, but they are still limited in diversity, especially in terms of resistance mechanisms,” Peng says. “And now we have a total of 17 pathotypes identified in Canada. So the question is, do we have all the R genes against those patho­types, and what’s the best strategy to deploy our R genes for optimum durability and efficacy?”

With funding from WGRF and SaskCanola, Peng and his team set out to answer those questions. And what they found offers new hope for canola producers across the Prairies.

A happy surprise

Used on their own, none of the CR genes currently in the arsenal can be effective against all 17 pathotypes, so Peng was interested in learning how a multi-gene approach would work. Would having more than one CR gene in a cultivar provide more robust disease resistance? Would that resistance last longer?

To find out, canola lines with various combinations of multiple CR genes were tested under simulated, intensive growing conditions against pathotype 5X — one of the newly reported pathotypes that is virulent on all old resistant canola cultivars. The possibilities presented by one particular double-gene combo looked promising.

Nutrien Ag Solutions, a collaborator on this project, bred hybrid canola lines carrying one R gene from chromosome A3 and one from A8. “We wanted to use a commercial breeding process so that anyone could use the approach in their program,” Peng says.

He found that canola lines with these two particular CR genes showed highly effective resistance to the handful of old clubroot pathotypes and partial resistance to pathotype 5X. Peng then wanted to find out if this resistance would also be durable.

“We repeated the plant’s exposure to the patho­type,” he says, explaining that this is done by collecting the clubroot galls from canola roots, drying them, grinding them up, then reintroducing that inoculum to the growth medium before growing the canola in it.

“If you do that with single-gene resistance, it breaks down very fast,” Peng says.

“Our hypothesis was that, even with the two CR genes, the resistance wouldn’t last. But to our surprise, it lasted pretty well at over five generations of exposure,” he says. “And we also saw a reduced level of inoculum in the soil over time.”

Investigating that aspect a bit further, Peng found that these stacked-gene canola lines developed slightly fewer galls over each generation of exposure, and that the galls themselves got smaller over time as well.

Ultimately, Peng says, that meant a smaller amount of pathogen inoculum was returned to the growth medium in each canola generation. That, in turn, resulted in consistent resistance performance from the plant.

Lessons and cautions

“From what I know, this is the first time anyone has looked at the multi-genetic route for clubroot resistance,” Peng says, adding that it is still a relatively new disease of canola and that there is still a lot to learn about the clubroot pathogen itself, as well as resistance mechanisms.

“We may have only two or three R genes to choose from at this time, and pathotypes can have different modes of action. The new ones avoid mechanisms of resistance by the R genes.”

Peng is also quick to point out that, even with two CR genes present in a canola variety, the efficacy and durability of resistance depends a lot on inoculum levels in the soil. “If levels are high, resistance is more vulnerable; if low, it’s more durable, especially for varieties with stacked CR genes.”

Peng says that with a two-year break between canola crops, 90 per cent of clubroot inoculum can die off in soils. It sounds like a lot, but it’s all relative.

“Ten million spores per gram of soil reduced by 90 per cent is still one million spores,” Peng laughs. “But there is still benefit to bringing inoculum levels down in all cases — even in severely infested fields. By bringing that inoculum level down, you allow even the resistant variety to perform better.”

Peng has two conclusions from this study to offer growers:

“One, the double gene will work effectively on older pathotypes and give you moderate, durable resistance against the new pathotype 5X. Two, reducing the amount of inoculum in the soil is good for resistance performance and durability.”

So what now? “I hope to move on to the next stage and look at the new pathotype 3A, 3B and 3D to ensure the resistance performance of a double-gene hybrid.”

The post Hope ahead for more durable clubroot resistance appeared first on Country Guide.

A study by Saskatchewan Research Council’s Susan MacWilliam, along with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research scientist Reynald Lemke and others, compared the impact of changing management and production practices on environmental stability and canola performance between 1990 and 2010. They found that environmental effects of producing one tonne of canola were reduced over that period.

“Over the past two decades, on-farm fuel use and fertilizer applied per tonne of canola decreased, which led to reduced greenhouse gas emissions and improved ecosystem quality,” they wrote.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the production of a tonne of canola in the grey and black soil zones were reduced by 24 and 27 per cent, respectively, between 1990 and 2010 (results were mixed for the brown soil zone).

The researchers found more inputs were used over the two decades, but there were improvements in environmental performance per tonne of canola, in part due to increased yields.

There were also lower potential GHG emissions associated with the production and use of fertilizers.

Lemke says that for him, the most important metric for sustainability is carbon sequestration.

“Clearly there was an improvement — we were producing canola in 2010 with much less environmental impact. And the amount of land needed to grow every tonne of canola went down.”

In Western Canada, the crop mix has shifted from wheat-based to canola-based systems. In 1986, Canadian producers harvested 6.5 million acres of canola. By 2012, that figure broke the 20 million mark, and in 2019, it reached 21.3 million.

Lemke notes that producers started getting into canola around 1985-90 at the same time that a lot of other management shifts were underway.

“We were moving strongly into one-pass seeding, zero tillage and reduction of summerfallow. All of these things were concurrent, so it’s hard to tease out how much of that was a result of canola being introduced to the system. But certainly the advent of the hybrids and herbicide tolerance really pushed cropping intensity.”

Logistics trump agronomy

Any definition of sustainability must include economic stability, and canola offers a win-win for producers in terms of market returns and relative production simplicity, says Bill May, crop management agronomist and the lead on one of Canada’s longest-running studies for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at Indian Head, Sask.

May says some recent trends — the shift to canola, increased farm sizes and shortening rotations — are intertwined. Due to their larger operations, many producers are moving to simplify their management practices to cover off all their acres during the growing season, and this sometimes means logistics trump agronomy.

“Canola has been a valued addition to people’s rotations because it has herbicide-tolerance characteristics. That has slowed the development of herbicide-resistant weeds,” May says.

“It’s represented an economic advantage for producers because the crop can hit a home run when you get high yields and good prices. The disadvantage is that rotations are shortening. The big problem we’re seeing on the horizon is with farm sizes increasing; logistics can overrule agronomy.”

Clubroot is moving across Western Canada, and even though a two-year gap is required between crops to manage the soil-borne disease and maintain yield, many producers are still growing canola every other year. Shortened rotations mean disease resistance could start to break down in fields with heavy spore loads.

“What I’m hearing is that guys are depending on that clubroot resistance in cultivars and not extending the rotation. Some farmers are very good at extending the rotation, but other guys are not able to find an extended rotation that they think is economically sustainable,” May says.

“The drive toward simplicity leads people into shorter rotations that are going to have some negative impacts over time. Logistics have to be handled, and farmers want an economic return that supports their continued existence. All the benefits of a longer rotation suffer if the short-term objectives aren’t being met.”

Tech to the rescue?

What’s the solution? May says self-directed or auto-guided implements might help take the pressure off logistics and allow producers to improve management over a larger acreage. He adds that more research is also needed to explore the problems of tightening rotations.

Last year May added new rotations including wheat-canola, wheat-canola-soybeans and wheat-canola-oat-soybeans to the long-term plots at Indian Head to “bring the study into relevance.”

As part of this study, researchers will look at long-term carbon cycling, crop development, yield, biomass production and soil health.

Research scientist Mervin St. Luce is now the lead on the long-term study plots in Swift Current. One diversified study began in 2003 looking at a wheat-canola-field peas rotation.

St. Luce says data from the long-term plots is used for crop models that look at the effect of climate change on production systems, and how soil management affects long-term carbon sequestration.

This April, St. Luce began working on a data-management platform that will make all the protected data from the long-term plots available to the public.

The post Taking a long-term look at agronomy for canola appeared first on Country Guide.

Manitoba’s agriculture department reported Friday that clubroot pathotype 3A — a strain that can “overcome some first-generation sources of genetic resistance” in commercial canola — has been positively identified in the south-central rural municipality of Pembina.

Canola varieties that have been traditionally rated as “R” or “resistant” won’t be effective in preventing clubroot infection against 3A, the department said.

Those canolas are tested against pathotypes 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 but aren’t labelled as effective against 3A and 5X, both of which are “breaking-resistance” pathotypes.

Genetic resistance to pathotype 3A can be found in just a “small number “of commercially-available canolas, and those are specifically labelled for resistance to 3A, the department said.

“Outside of Alberta, very few fields have been found to contain novel pathotypes like this, and this is the first finding in Manitoba,” the Canola Council of Canada said in a separate release Tuesday.

“This is yet another cue for the industry to continue to take this disease seriously and implement clubroot management plans,” council agronomy specialist Dan Orchard said in Tuesday’s release.

“We still have an opportunity to get ahead of this disease and limit the impact it has on canola producers and the industry.”

Selection pressure

Caused by soil-borne Plasmodiophora brassicae, clubroot first became established in Canada mainly in vegetable-growing regions of Quebec, Ontario, Atlantic Canada and British Columbia.

Swollen galls appear on roots of a clubroot-infected canola plant, choking off its supply of water and nutrients and forcing it to prematurely ripen, either reducing its yield or killing it. Typical yield losses run around 50 per cent but can run up to nearly 100 per cent in fields under severe clubroot pressure.

The disease’s first appearance in Canadian canola was in Quebec in 1997, but it took until 2003 for clubroot to turn up on the Prairies, in spots near Edmonton.

Clubroot has since landed in thousands of Alberta fields, mainly in central regions but also in the province’s south and its northwestern Peace region, and in canola fields in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and North Dakota.

The first R-rated canola variety was released in 2009, but by 2013, significant clubroot infections began appearing in some Alberta fields seeded to R-rated canolas.

Pathotypes that are virulent against R-rated canolas were found to have been widespread in clubroot-infected areas of Alberta before R-rated varieties were introduced — but those pathotypes had usually been seen only at low levels in the galls on infected, non-resistant canola plants.

Experts say those findings confirm that the virulent strains of clubroot were able to thrive due to selection pressure from the use of R-rated canola.

Of the clubroot pathotypes affecting otherwise-R-rated canola, 5X was confirmed in central Alberta in 2014 — and 3A was found in a study last year to be the “predominant” virulent subtype in fields in that province.

Scouting time

A soil-borne disease, clubroot can be transferred from field to field on soil particles, travelling via footwear, vehicle tires, farm machinery and/or wind or water movement across a landscape.

The long-term sustainability of Prairie canola production will depend on suppression of clubroot infection through effective crop rotation — and rotation of sources of genetic resistance — together with good farm biosecurity, the Manitoba government said Friday.

Even when using resistant varieties, growers need to scout their crops to make sure the resistance they’re using is effective against the pathotypes in their fields and to see if new sources of resistance are needed.

Under high resting spore loads, symptoms can occur after using the same resistance source two or three times, or even sooner, the canola council said.

Producers are “strongly encouraged” to familiarize themselves with clubroot symptoms and start scouting this fall, the council said. Clubroot symptoms are most noticeable late in the season and can still be seen during and after harvest on canola roots.

“It is critically important to limit the pressure we put on resistance by using resistant varieties before spore concentrations are high, extending the break between canola crops and changing up resistance sources if necessary,” Orchard said Tuesday.

“The development of clubroot and discovery of a pathotype that is virulent to the original source of clubroot resistance is concerning to Manitoba canola farmers,” Ron Krahn, a director with the Manitoba Canola Growers Association, said Tuesday.

“We know how important canola is for a profitable crop rotation, which is why we feel the research dollars that MCGA spends every year on current production challenges is money well spent.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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On its website, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) defines biosecurity as “a series of management practices designed to prevent, minimize, and control the introduction, spread, and release of plant pests, which include insects, nematodes, weeds, molluscs, bacteria, fungi, and viruses.”

With diseases like fusarium and clubroot spreading on the Prairies, and a growing list of herbicide-resistant weeds appearing in farm fields, biosecurity will likely soon be a daily part of the production routine for many Canadian grain farmers.

“Biosecurity is becoming increasingly important because we’re seeing the emergence of diseases that are spread (in soil, water or crop residues),” says Lee Anne Murphy, CEO of Pest Surveillance Initiative (PSI), which was established in 2013 to provide DNA-based testing for crops after clubroot was first found in Manitoba.

Although producers can choose varieties resistant to many diseases, when those diseases evolve quickly there is a risk of losing genetic resistance as a tool, which can be costly.

“The worst thing must be questioning, ‘if only five years ago I had stopped traffic from going down that lane or down into that field, could I have saved myself money?’” Murphy says. “Making biosecurity an economic issue rather than just an issue of stewardship makes it much easier for people to be proactive about implementing it.”

Ontario agrologist Bill Ungar was practising biosecurity on his own farm before the concern became as prevalent as today, and he now teaches courses on biosecurity to Ontario producers. His advice is to treat biosecurity as part of the business plan.

“Just as we review the business plan every quarter or every month, we should be reviewing the biosecurity plan,” he says. “Biosecurity can affect crop quality and quantity, operational values and return on investment.”

Ungar describes biosecurity as “maintaining plant health… Biosecurity starts in your mind with questions like ‘what can I do to protect the health of my crops? What can I do to protect or mitigate the potential of a disease coming in and affecting my profitability, stability and security?’”

The trend toward higher-value crops on the Prairies is also driving the need to improve biosecurity. “With the advent of corn and soybeans coming to Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, to get decent yields producers may have to do more babying in some scenarios, which means more times in the field and more potential for pest issues,” Ungar says. “It all boils back down to profitability. The more producers can do to protect plant health and crop health, the better off they’re going to be because they are maintaining yield potential.”

Putting it into practice

The first step for producers is to be aware of the voluntary national biosecurity standards that provide recommendations for developing on-farm biosecurity protocols. Grain farmers can find the National Voluntary Farm-Level Biosecurity Standard for the Grains and Oilseeds Industry on CFIA’s website.

In Alberta and Saskatchewan, these standards are part of the provincial disease act and are compulsory for producers to follow, but they are voluntary in Manitoba.

“Regulations and acts are great, but there also needs to be common sense behind them, so if producers have a pest they’ve never seen before, or there’s a new disease or weed in their area, they should be taking measures on their own farm to make sure that if they see it, they get rid of it or develop ways to manage it,” says Anastasia Kubinec, manager of crop industry development with Manitoba Agriculture.

Limit access

Ungar says controlling access to the farm is the number one consideration in a biosecurity plan. “The first question I ask producers is ‘how many approaches do you have to your farm and fields? Are they controlled, for example, with a locked gate or a sign?’”

The problem with large acreages in Western Canada is that there are often no fences or gates, but Ungar says that doesn’t mean those fields need to be open to everyone.

“If you own a section, each quarter could potentially have a couple of approaches, so you might have eight access points. If you can close down one of those approaches and only have one approach to get in and out of the section, that’s your first step in controlling access and mitigating the risk.”

Putting up a sign that says the field or property is now under a biosecurity protocol and visitors must contact the owner or farm manager is another simple way to prevent or limit unauthorized access, because it’s vital that producers know exactly who is tramping around their property and what potential risks they may bring.

“Even on the home quarter, where your house, shop, barns, bins or whatever are, access should be down to a single entry point where you have to come in and go out again with a biosecurity sign saying who to contact,” Ungar says.

There should also be a designated parking spot for anyone coming onto the property, whether it’s the home quarter or a field with no buildings, and farmers should expect visitors to respect protocols and take measures to adhere to them.

“When the neighbour comes over for a visit, they still should use the designated parking — they shouldn’t be running out to the bin yard or the back 40 because you’re working there — you don’t know where that person has been prior,” Ungar says.

Prevent contamination

Ungar carries items such as disposable coveralls and booties, spray disinfectant and a dedicated pair of rubber boots (in a disinfectant tray) in his pickup truck. He recommends farmers do too.

“If you’ve got someone that’s going to walk around your bin area, or storage facilities or whatever, offer them plastic booties,” he says, adding a farmer should never be slow to insist that everyone take the same precautions that he or she does.

On his own farm, Ungar used to have a pair of rubber boots that he left at the farm and changed into when he got there and out of to go home. He says it’s a simple measure that prevents a lot of risk, adding this simple protocol should extend to everyone, even family. “Everybody needs to understand this,” he says. “Dad may think it’s a pain in the butt to take his boots off to run to town but it’s protecting your bottom line.”

Keep it clean

When the agronomist comes to the farm, if possible either use the farmer’s truck or equipment to go into the field, or if they must use their own vehicle, make sure they clean it off first, says Ungar. “In situations where I have to take my truck into the field I will ask the farmer for a power washer to wash my truck,” he says. “Then I take my disinfectant and spray my inside wheel wells, and because it takes 10 minutes to be effective I will chat with the farmer for that time and then we can go.”

There will always be situations where someone else’s equipment such as a custom sprayer, seeder or combine needs to come onto a producer’s land. In that case it is vital to make sure it’s cleaned before it enters the farm and after it leaves, and also from field to field. “You have the right to insist because it’s your crop,” Ungar says. “Ask custom applicators to come in with clean equipment. If they are switching over from wheat and coming to your place to do canola, ask them to blow everything off the combine, and run the combine for three or four extra minutes to make sure that everything is cleaned out of it.”

Kubinec says producers should not expect a custom applicator to clean to a higher level than they would themselves. “It’s important for a producer to establish what they themselves are going to do and then what they expect from that custom work that’s going to be done.”

Take 10 minutes

There are many things that farmers can do themselves to prevent the spread of disease, weeds and pests by equipment, starting with taking an extra 10 minutes just to knock off mud before heading to the next field. Cleaning mud off equipment is particularly important to reduce the risk of soil-borne pests such as soybean cyst nematode, which is endemic in Eastern Canada where soybeans have been part of the rotation for much longer than on the Prairies.

A portable water tank and gas-powered pressure washer mounted on the farm truck or a converted bale wagon is another relatively inexpensive biosecurity measure. Ungar also knows some producers who have purchased backpack blowers to blow grain dust off the combine or grain truck between fields. “It may take an extra 15 minutes but it gives those producers peace of mind to know they aren’t spreading stuff from field to field.”

With custom spray applicators, and also for time-stressed farm operators or employees rushing to get a job done, there is also the risk of crop injury from chemical product carryover if time isn’t taken to clean out the tanks as thoroughly as possible.

“Backing up to a fence line, throwing a flush button and letting it flush for a minute and then taking off to the next field is not good enough sometimes, depending on what the chemical is,” says Ungar. “Say you’re going from a wheat field to a soybean field. If you don’t do a tank wash and flush the booms properly, you could have a minute trace of some other pesticide that might not kill the soybeans but still could physically damage them, and now that’s a vector for disease to come in.”

Effective on-farm biosecurity tools

Vigilance is one of the most effective tools in the biosecurity arsenal. Kubinec says it’s important for producers and their agronomists to inspect fields regularly and look out for diseases or other issues while they are still manageable.

“One thing we really encourage producers to do is if they see a part of their field that’s dying or is really weedy and the crop just really hasn’t established, they need to go and figure out why, and not just assume that it was a wet spot or an overlap of herbicide or a saline spot,” she says.

“Go and figure out why that crop looks different, why the rest of the crop is green and that’s yellow, or there’s nothing there and there’s weeds. Walking the fields is the first step and identifying something that just doesn’t seem right.”

Certified seed offers producers some guarantee of quality and peace of mind.

“Certified seed is clean and it’s been tested for diseases, so when producers buy it they have that confidence,” Kubinec says. “If producers are buying bin-run seed, they should probably talk to the producer who produced it about whether they have done a disease screen and what is the germination. There’s not as much confidence there about the quality of the seed and also the pests that it could be bringing in.”

Crop rotation

Crop rotation is an important tool for reducing risk by maintaining resistance in crop varieties, especially for diseases that are long-lived in soil, such as clubroot.

“After three to four years of no host crop — canola or any of the mustard species — the population of clubroot in the soil goes down very quickly,” says Kubinec. “It can live up to 20 years in the soil, but in Manitoba we’ve done some tests with some of the first producer fields where we found galls, and when we went back and tested three years after, and the producer did not have canola in those three years, it had dropped by 90 per cent in the soil.”

Sending pictures of suspicious weeds to agronomists or provincial weed experts is often a quick way to get a positive identification, but if there is a weed issue, whether it’s as a result of herbicide resistance or something new, a plant tissue sample will be needed for analysis at some point.

In the meantime, mowing is one of the best ways to control small patches of weeds. “Before they flower is a great short-term measure to give you a bit of time to figure out what to do,” Kubinec says.

Although weed seeds are destroyed by composting manure, producers should be aware that it doesn’t kill pathogens, so they need to avoid spreading manure that could be contaminated with disease. Pastures can also be infected with clubroot.

“Producers do need to be cognizant that there can be clubroot in pastures,” Kubinec says. “If you have a field that’s full of clubroot, taking alfalfa off it may not be the best plan (because the disease can get caught up in dirt or pods that pass though the digestive tract of cattle and end up infecting other pastures or fields). Maybe you could be taking hay off of it that you’re not going to get some of that dirt in it or take really careful measures not to have any transfer.”

Where to find help

PSI has an excellent online calculator based on the CFIA national biosecurity standards and helps recommend practices suitable for a particular operation based on a series of questions.

“It produces a report and says, based on your answers, these are the areas where we can see you may have risk, and you maybe should be looking at some of the activities that you are doing, or some of the activities that you are willing to do or others are doing for you to see if you can reduce your risk,” Kubinec says. “It’s a great tool and quick. In 10 minutes you’re done.”

All provinces publish disease, insect and weed maps that are designed to let producers know what is in their area. Kubinec also suggests producers speak with local input suppliers, agronomists and neighbours as a way to learn what they may need to watch out for.

“Twitter is great for that, but for producers who aren’t into Twitter, talking to people in the area and saying ‘hey, what have you heard, what should I be worried about?’ is a good way to stay informed,” she says.

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Fields most likely to benefit from lime have pH below 6. For pulses, pH below 6 will reduce rhizobium nodulation, and the Canola Encyclopedia says “on strongly acid soils with a pH of less than 5.5, canola yields are often reduced substantially.”

The Canola Encyclopedia lists the factors that can limit canola plant growth on acid soils: toxicity of hydrogen ions, aluminum, iron, or manganese; deficiency of calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, boron, nitrogen or molybdenum; reduced organic matter breakdown and nutrient cycling by microflora; and reduced uptake by plant roots and inhibition of root growth. These same factors also inhibit yield potential for other crops.

Applications of lime — calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or hydrated lime (Ca(OH)2) — increase soil pH to help fix many of these problems. Lime is also proving to reduce clubroot gall formation in canola, a benefit that has elevated liming — “finally” — in the minds of farmers in the low-pH and clubroot hot zone in central Alberta.

“For everywhere else in the world with soil acidity, liming is a part of agriculture,” Penney says. He worked at the soil testing lab in Alberta for many years and when longtime Canadian farmers would get a test result with pH around 5.5 or 6, they wouldn’t think anything of it. “But when European farmers moved to Western Canada and looked at soil test results for low-pH fields, they’d be stunned. ‘Where the hell’s the lime?’ they’d ask.”

Why did those fields not show major productivity problems before clubroot?

“Aluminum toxicity is probably having a modest effect on yield in low pH soils,” Penney says. “But higher nitrogen rates, more inputs and better agronomy overall have offset that effect.”

However, he says, lime — though expensive due to large required volumes and trucking — could reduce the required rates for these other inputs. And, he adds, because nitrogen has an acidifying effect on soil, countering low pH with higher rates of nitrogen will make the situation steadily worse. “Soil pH in Alberta has dropped another half a unit over the past 20 years,” he says.

Experienced limers

Nathan Kosbau is an agronomist with CHS in central and southern Minnesota. Through his territory, soil pH ranges from 4.2 to 8.3, with quite a bit of variability even within fields. Liming has been a “thing” in Minnesota for the past 20 years, he says.

In Kosbau’s territory, 60 to 70 per cent of farms are corn-soy only. Most of the others have those two plus alfalfa, oats or sugar beets. For fields with low pH, the first target crop for liming would be alfalfa, he says. Next is corn to improve phosphorus availability.

Cost-effective liming has to start with grid soil sampling to identify low pH areas, Kosbau says. The typical grid practice is one composite sample for every 2.5 acres. “Lime is pretty expensive when you look at it on a per-acre basis,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense to put lime in an area with higher pH.”

The common product used in Minnesota is AgLime, which flows well through broadcast applicators. Rates on those acres that need it most can be four to six tons per acre, but Minnesota farmers are motivated.

“They will spend more money to unlock the reasons why they’re not seeing more yield gain in corn and soybeans,” Kosbau says. Lime is one of those unlocking inputs, and applications will be repeated as needed: “pH is not static,” he says. “It is a moving target, not a destination.”

Tyler Waterhouse farms with his father and brother at Carberry, Man. They typically follow a three-year rotation of potato-cereal-oilseed. Their cereals are fall rye and wheat and their oilseeds are canola and soybeans.

Sandy areas around Carberry can have pH down around 4.5, which is very low for Manitoba — a province with mostly alkaline soils. The Waterhouses limed some of their low-pH areas for the first time around 2001, and liming continues to be part of their farm practice. They apply variable rates based on one-acre grid maps. Their lime source is the Brandon Water Treatment Plant, which uses lime to soften the water. The treatment plant provides the lime byproduct to farmers who will pay to truck it away.

Potatoes, a crop with high costs and high potential returns per acre, were the primary motivation for their lime investment and it provided “great results,” Waterhouse says. Wheat shows the biggest yield benefit and canola on limed land seems to hang on better in dry conditions, he adds.

In the time since they started liming, the Waterhouses have seen a big jump in average yields for their crops. But they’ve also improved a bunch of other crop management factors and weather conditions have also changed. Liming has likely been a positive factor, but how big a factor has it been? “We’re still learning about the long-term results of lime,” he says.

They don’t have clubroot, so that isn’t a motivator for them, yet. But they have clubroot in mind because the soil-borne disease is in Manitoba, seed potatoes can bring outside soil onto their farm, and potato production, with its mounding and harvesting, moves a lot of soil.

pH and clubroot

Clubroot is driving the liming conversation in Alberta these days. Recent greenhouse trials show that clubroot galls will grow prolifically in solutions with pH of 6.5 but not at all in solutions with pH of 7.3. An Alberta study on two clubroot-infested fields with low pH shows that applying lime to increase pH to a neutral level will reduce clubroot and increase yield.

Dan Orchard, agronomy specialist for the Canola Council of Canada, says “the future of liming being part of clubroot control looks quite promising, either for patch management or larger areas.”

Targeting a pH of 7.3 could require tonnes of lime per acre. Orchard shares a quote from University of Alberta clubroot researcher Stephen Strelkov: “You can’t just sprinkle a little lime on the field and feel good about it.” This is more motivation for farmers to identify clubroot patches for intense management before the patches become too large.

“Understanding the right rate, right time, right product and right placement — the 4 Rs — of lime application seems to be instrumental in the success of liming,” Orchard says. While best practices to lime for clubroot remain a work in progress, Orchard reiterates Penney’s point that the benefits of liming in low pH Alberta soils go well beyond clubroot:

“Liming can improve yields through improved nutrient availability as well as nitrogen and phosphorus use efficiency. Wheat and barley will benefit if pH is 6 or higher. Peas will significantly benefit from bringing pH above 6 and closer to 7 is preferred. Alfalfa will be the big winner with raising the pH,” Orchard says. “There are no detrimental effects from raising the pH to 7, only benefits.”

Even if the best way to lime for clubroot management isn’t firmly nailed down, an investment in lime for low pH soils should help and — as a big bonus — provide the crop nutrition benefits that all other limers around the world are after. Finally.

Jay Whetter is communications manager with the Canola Council of Canada.

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