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With harvest nearly completed here in southeast Saskatchewan, farmers are beginning to look towards either fall spraying for weeds or pre-banding fertilizer for next year's crop. One thing that should also be top of mind is disease pressure, including clubroot in canola fields.
Clubroot is a soil-borne disease that attacks the roots of the canola plant, causing swelling and galls to form on the roots and kill the plant. It also has no economical control measures that could counteract the disease which means once it gets into your field, it's there forever.
Thankfully, clubroot is more prevalent in warm, wet, and acidic soils that are more common in the northern portions of Saskatchewan. Although, clubroot has been detected as close as Melville so it’s still a major threat to farmers.
According to the Canola Council of Canada’s encyclopedia, “The best way to prevent clubroot in canola is to prevent the introduction of contaminated soil, if at all possible. The pathogen has several stages in its lifecycle including hardy resting spores, which are released into the soil from infected plant root material, and due to their tiny size, can easily move with soil particles. Therefore, minimizing the risk of soil movement is critical to preventing the introduction of clubroot to a new area (ex. a new field or farm). Any individual who contacts agricultural soil should consider the risks of clubroot. As an added benefit, equipment sanitation will also help reduce the spread of other diseases, weeds and insects too.”
Professional agrologist and former crop extension specialist Sherri Roberts agrees that although clubroot isn’t seen as a major problem in the southeast yet, farmers need to be diligent and continue testing for these diseases.
“Please put out a call to the producers in this area to get your canola fields tested for clubroot and for blackleg. SaskCanola has that program out there again this year, they will pay for the cost of the testing. You have to send the samples in and you have to contact them if you go on to their website, there's information on there about their clubroot testing, but because they've deregulated clubroot now, you really need to know what the status of your canola fields are in case someone comes onto those fields, and you end up with clubroot, then you know the source of where it came to.”
For more information on clubroot, head to the Canola Council of Canada’s website and for everything canola-related here in Saskatchewan, visit www.saskcanola.com