Maritime cereal grain farmers get access to new warning system for fungal disease

Scientists on Prince Edward Island have created a new warning system to help Maritime farmers avoid a costly disease called fusarium head blight, which can decrease grain yields while contaminating the crop with toxins.

The Fusarium Head Blight Environmental Risk Forecast Tool can be found on the Atlantic Grain Council's website and is available to growers throughout the region.

"Fusarium head blight is a really devastating disease that occurs pretty much around the world in cereal-growing regions," said Adam Foster, a cereal and oilseed pathologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada who's based in Charlottetown. 

"Not only does it cause yield losses, like loss of harvest and seed, but it will also contaminate the grain with mycotoxins that can make it unsuitable for people and animals to actually eat if it gets to a high enough level." 

The risk of disease is higher when the weather is warm and wet, Foster said, adding that tropical nights can make it a lot worse. Those are conditions that could become more common in the Atlantic provinces due to climate change, he said. 

"What the forecast tool will actually do is examine weather over the last week and incorporate those factors into the models to… predict whether disease is likely to occur or not."

It's hard to predict at the beginning of any given growing season whether fusarium head blight will be a problem that year, Foster said. P.E.I. was hit particularly hard in 2023, resulting in a lot of grain being lost to the disease. 

"By the time you actually see the disease, it's too late to act. So having a prediction tool actually tell you ahead of time gives you a little bit of early warning of what's to come," he said.

"With a proactive tool and other disease management practices… it is actually manageable." 

Other management practices include selecting selectively bred varieties that are partially resistant to the fungus, having a diverse crop rotation, and using chemical fungicides or biological control agents to suppress the disease, Foster said. 

Steven Hamill, a farmer in Newton, P.E.I., expects the wheat in his fields to start flowering next week. He thinks the new forecasting tool will be an asset. 

"There's been years where there's thousands of acres that have been destroyed in the field or hauled out of bins, so there's huge economic impact in a bad year," Hamill said. 

Hamill said he sprays his crops with fungicide every year as a preventative measure, but not all farmers do the same. 

"Having the tool, I guess, will validate the decision… or help people make that decision if they don't use it every year," he said.