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With farmers getting close to harvest they're taking an extra look at any diseases that could pop up this year, including verticillium stripe.
While more common in eastern portions of Manitoba, samples have been seen in fields all the west to Alberta.
The disease is a relative newcomer, with agronomy specialist with the Canola Council of Canada Breanna Miller explaining its impact.
"Verticillium Stripe is a soil-borne disease that's causing yield loss in canola. European studies have shown about a 10 to 50 per cent yield loss in infected plants where more losses are occurring from an earlier infection. It actually infects the routes and travels up the water transporting xylem the stem, eventually plugging the xylem and cutting off the flow of nutrients and water uptake to the rest of the plant."
While there's no current outlook for verticillium stripe in 2024, studies and research are currently being done.
"There will be some disease surveys occurring at the end of September to help us understand how many acres were affected and showing symptoms over the land. We have been getting some calls right across the prairies here with some early symptoms showing up, but I don't believe there have been many labs confirmed tests at this point in time, so we will know more a little later this fall when those disease surveys are completed."
How can farmers identify and deal with that verticillium strip?
"For identification purposes, it's very important to scout at this point in the season. If you are suspecting that you have some issues, the best thing to do is take a walk out into your crop. It's not really something we can identify driving by in the truck. We need to go and pull those plants and closely look to be able to differentiate between other diseases that exist, such as sclerotinia or black leg."\
"At this time of year, it's a little trickier as the crop is fairly ripe and green, the verticillium will show some striping and colour change. It will show up as more of an orangey brown colour and then as this crop matures striping will become more obvious as the plant is dying and stripping will be more of a dark grey."
"Another way we identify it is cutting it, taking a cross-section of the plant, so cutting close to the bottom of the plant when we look and see a grey star-like burst in the centre of the stalk we know we have verticillium present."
As far as dealing with our verticillium, if you suspect you have an infection present, we like to see growers, scout and follow up post-harvest when the diseases are easier to observe and they would like to see and encourage farmers to submit those samples to provincial labs to confirm the verticillium is present."
Research and studies are ongoing on verticillium stripe to learn more about how farmers can handle the disease.
There's all kinds of interesting research being done today on both current varieties that exist in the marketplace and how they handle verticillium in their own ways, as well as working on creating genetic resistance to verticillium. Ultimately, we're still fairly new to this disease. We're still developing and understanding the pathogen and soil-borne diseases are incredibly complex, so we're ultimately working from the ground up."
Miller recommends people learn all they can about how to deal with verticillium from a variety of sources.
"Just being aware, being present, scouting your lands, and asking questions, reach out for support from your governments, local agronomists as well as the canolacouncil.org. We have some great resources in the encyclopedia that go through our scouting techniques, symptoms we might see, the disease cycle, some information there, as well as some information from past disease surveys across the prairies here. We're always happy to help at the Council."