Last week Thursday Manitoba Agriculture hosted their annual WADO Field Day & Bus Tour in their Melita area and came upon a not-so-welcome surprise.
Applied Research Specialist with the Westman Agricultural Diversification Organization, Scott Chalmers, says their crop discussions covered a large variety of topics including the presences of pea leaf weevils found in their crop trial.
"I've never seen a pea weevil and we had lives ones," he explains. "They were eating nodules in peas, and they make little birdhouses out of them."
Chalmers says the more nodules that we lose on a plant the lesser amount of nutrients from nitrogen the plant is able to absorb, thus less performance. He believes the pea weevils are moving in from Saskatchewan from the northwest and making their way into Manitoba.
"I think they're just following more of the popular pea-growing areas from one province to the next. We don't know much about them. We don't know if there's any thresholds that we could spray, or timings that would be best to spray," he adds.
Chalmers says at this point they are waiting for the survey with Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers Association to determine what those next steps include.
The June 14th Manitoba Crop Pest Update stated 'Notching from pea leaf weevil is noticeable on peas in the Northwest and the pea leaf weevil survey, described in last week’s update, continues, although fields are starting to get quite advanced. The known range of pea leaf weevil in Manitoba continues to expand east as more fields are surveyed; last week we found pea leaf weevil and its feeding in a pea field near St. Leon.'
Please listen to more with Scott Chalmers on pea leaf weevils below!