A new online tool developed by a team of scientists and researchers in Manitoba could soon make fusarium head blight (FHB) risk management in cereal crops easier for Prairie farmers.
For the past five years, staff in the department of soil science at the University of Manitoba (U of M) have been working on a new tool for FHB disease risk management. That work officially wrapped up at the end of March and the new risk assessment tool will be made available to farmers across the Prairies later this year, once provincial FHB risk management websites have been brought in line.
The premise of the tool is simple: to show the risk of FHB in small grain cereal crops in Western Canada on a specified date.
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It works by collecting real-time data from hundreds of weather stations located in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta on a daily basis. That includes information on variables such as humidity, temperature and rainfall collected over an eight or 10-day period, which are analyzed by a series of computer algorithms. From this data, the FHB risk in the area the data was collected from is rated as low, moderate, high or very high.
The tool’s algorithms are precise enough that they can provide specific risk calculations for a variety of different crop types including barley, winter wheat and spring wheat.
“I can basically go online, punch in the date when I think my crop is flowering and it will tell me what the risk is. I can then use that data to determine if I need to spray my crop to protect it against fusarium head blight,” says Paul Bullock, a senior professor with the university’s department of soil science, who helped lead the project.
Bullock points out the FHB risk assessment tool can only determine if, not when, a crop might need to be sprayed for the fungal disease, since it doesn’t currently have the ability to analyze future forecasts. However, he says that could be possible at some point when his team is able to translate the data into the type of weather parameters needed for the model.
The FHB risk assessment tool will be available on the U of M’s Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences website. Users will be able to run it on a mobile phone, tablet or desktop computer. It was designed in conjunction with Field Vision, an Ontario-based company that has worked with the Real-Time In-Situ Soil Monitoring for Agriculture network in the past.
Good coverage
Bullock says the tool can draw data from more than 500 weather stations and a number of additional stations are in the process of being added to help make its analyses even more precise.
“That’s pretty good coverage. We know conditions can vary from day to day quite markedly, so having a good density of weather coverage is very important,” he says, while acknowledging collecting data in Saskatchewan has been challenging because of the low number of weather stations available in the province.
The FHB assessment tool doesn’t currently differentiate between varieties of cereal crops. Bullock says the reason is much of the Prairies experienced extremely dry conditions during the development and testing of the tool, and although three different varieties with different levels of FHB resistance were used for each crop type, there wasn’t enough evidence of the different genetic resistance levels to make them statistically significant.
Early testing of the online tool was conducted on field plots in each of the three Prairie provinces. Beta testing was also conducted on a number of farms as part of the validation model phase of research. Once the online mapper was developed, it was then tested by a handful of farmers and industry experts to ensure it was functional and relatively easy to navigate.
Positive feedback
“The feedback was actually quite positive,” Bullock says. “We’ve kept it fairly simple and it seems to work quite well. We’re hopeful people are not going to have any issues using the tool itself.”
Preliminary testing results were encouraging in terms of the tool’s accuracy. Bullock says data from field plot tests was shown to be about 75 per cent accurate for most models and that tests in actual farm fields produced similar results.
The only problem, he says, is for now the data is biased toward drier conditions and low disease pressures since there was a severe lack of precipitation on the Prairies during those tests. The university is hoping to secure additional funding to extend the project in order to test the risk assessment tool in moister conditions. The more data they are able to feed into the system, the more accurate it will become, he adds.
Some more good news for farmers is the tool will be available free of charge.
“This is publicly funded research and that has been the intent all along — that this would be a publicly accessible tool,” he explains.
Bullock and his team are currently raising awareness about the risk management tool, however, the biggest challenge the team could face is managing expectations about it. A similar model developed in the United States has been in use for 20 years and has far more data to call upon than its western Canadian equivalent.
“This is a great start on the project. It’s here, it’s homegrown, but it’s just the start and we need to keep going,” he says. “We don’t want people to expect this to be perfect right off the hop, especially if we get into a really wet, high disease pressure year. We simply don’t have enough data for those kinds of situations (yet).”
Fusarium head blight is hardly a new problem on the Prairies. Most experts believe it has been present in the region for several decades, beginning in Manitoba’s Red River Valley before gradually spreading west. Some reports have indicated it costs grain farmers in Western Canada hundreds of millions of dollars each year in diminished yields and downgraded quality.
That’s why it’s important to develop a FHB risk tool specific to the three Prairie provinces, says Timi Ojo, an ag systems modeller for the climate resilience unit of Manitoba Agriculture. Ojo helps manage the Manitoba Agriculture Weather Program and he played a key role in the collection of weather data used to develop the FHB risk assessment tool.
Ojo says the tool could go a long way to helping reduce farmers’ losses due to downgrades in crop quality. He points to an analysis conducted in Alberta using 2016 prices that showed farmers stood to lose as much as $85 per acre if their Canada Western Red Spring (CWRS) wheat was downgraded from Grade 1 to 3 as a result of FHB.
The tool also has the potential to save farmers money because it will provide information indicating when a fungicide application does not provide any economic benefit, he says.
“If you spray when it’s not conducive for (FHB), that’s a waste of money because you are investing in something that doesn’t really give you any return,” he adds.
