Making Every Manitoba Farmer Member More Productive And Sustainable.
Do you know where your wheat yield comes from? Understanding wheat yield components and how management choices influence each component can help guide decisions to maximize yield.
Rapid visco analysis (RVA) is the assessment used to determine the degree of pre-germination in barley grain. This measurement is used to assess nonvisual pre-germination.
This document is designed as a guide for use in proactively scouting wheat fields to detect pests at or before they cause damage.
Manitoba growers know the devastating impacts of hail on wheat due to unstable spring and summer weather. Assessing hail damage can be very difficult, but there are steps you can take after hail events to evaluate crop damage.
Armyworms (Mythimna unipuncta), sometimes called true armyworm, are a pest species that impact winter wheat, spring wheat, fall rye, barley, forage and pasture crops. Armyworm moths do not overwinter in Manitoba – they migrate from the southern U.S. to the Canadian Prairies. Moths travel to Manitoba between May and June through purposeful migration, but southern winds assist in moth transportation.
Manitoba farmers are well aware of the destructive abilities of wireworms. They feed below ground on many different crop types, causing early season plant stress. Feeding also results in thinning plant populations and reduced yield.
Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a serious fungal disease that mainly affects wheat (including durum), barley, oats, and corn. FHB causes economic losses in three ways: 1) yield losses; 2) downgrading of grains; and 3) mycotoxin contaminations reducing grain marketing options. FHB has become increasingly prevalent in the Prairie Provinces, calling for awareness and judicious management. One key FHB management practice as part of an integrated management approach is timely fungicide application when the risks are high. Risk maps are an important tool to assess FHB risks and make fungicide decisions. Starting in 2024, a unified prairie-wide FHB risk map for spring wheat, durum wheat, winter wheat and barley was introduced.
Cereal rusts are a threat to Prairie wheat and barley production annually. Cereal rusts include leaf rust (Puccinia triticina), stem rust (Puccinia graminis) and stripe rust (Puccinia striiformis). All three rust pathogens can cause widespread devastation and crop loss, especially in wheat. Therefore, all pathogens are considered priority-one wheat diseases in Canada, while stem rust is the only rust pathogen considered a priority one-disease in barley (Aboukhaddour et al. 2020).
Early season weed control can be key to optimizing yield and giving your crop a good head start. Even small weeds compete with your crop for moisture and nutrients while also acting as a host for insects and diseases. Controlling weeds while they are small prevents competition with the crop and in many cases improves herbicide efficacy. This is especially true for some of our more troublesome weeds.
In Manitoba, field corn is grown for grain or silage production. The majority of grain corn produced in Manitoba supplies the ethanol and feed industries, but a small portion is sold to the distillery in Gimli. Silage corn is used as dairy and beef feed. Silage corn production makes up approximately 22% of total corn production in Manitoba.
