By Ed White
WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Aug 17 (Reuters) – Canada’s durum, spring wheat, canola and pulse crops have been fighting an intense and expensive battle with widespread crop diseases provoked by the first wet year this decade.
“We sprayed everything with fungicide this year,” said southeastern Saskatchewan farmer Jake Leguee, who grows about 19,000 acres (7,689 hectares) of crops, including durum, wheat, lentils, flax and spring wheat. “It becomes big dollars pretty quickly.”
The sudden influx of diseases in early summer posed a grave threat to the quantity and quality of crops in Canada, the world’s leading exporter of canola, durum wheat, dry peas, and oats, and a leading exporter of high-protein spring wheat.
The disease wave resulted from an extremely wet spring and early summer, which loaded soils with moisture, creating perfect conditions for fungal diseases when it became hot and humid.
Farmers were left with a tough choice of whether to invest more money in crops that aren’t expected to be profitable this year due to high fertilizer and other costs, or whether to double down and protect whatever crop is there.
Leguee bit the bullet and invested $6 to $20 per acre in fungicide in order to protect the plants. “You do what you have to,” he said.
That appears to be a decision many farmers have taken, according to inputs dealer Ray Redfern of Brandon, Manitoba.
“It was a must-do. They elected to continue to invest money in the crop,” said Redfern, who had thought farmers might pull back from spending on fungicide because crop profits have collapsed and finances are getting tight.
“Many farmers are getting to the end of their operating line (of credit) and they’re running out of cash flow,” he said.
Durum and spring wheat are vulnerable to fusarium head blight, canola is susceptible to sclerotinia and blackleg, and a range of fungal diseases afflict the pulse crops.
Red River Valley farmers who had the cash or credit spent it on fungicide, said crop adviser Brunel Sabourin of St. Jean Baptiste, Manitoba. There wasn’t much choice.
“Given the moisture and the frequent rains, there was no question,” said Sabourin.
For Leguee, it’ll be a few weeks before he knows if he got the right fungicides in the right places at the right time. His crops, other than lentils, look good, but nasty surprises could be lurking inside the kernels and pods on the plants.
That means the quantity and quality of Canada’s export crops are still in question on the eve of full-scale harvesting.
“We won’t know till we get the combines in the field. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” said Leguee.
(Reporting by Ed White; editing by David Gaffen)
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