Maritime farmers get access to new warning system for fungal disease

Gwyneth Egan · CBC News

· Posted: Jun 13, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: June 13

Scientists connected Prince Edward Island person created a caller informing strategy to assistance Maritime farmers debar a costly illness called fusarium caput blight, which tin alteration atom yields portion contaminating the harvest with toxins.

The Fusarium Head Blight Environmental Risk Forecast Tool tin beryllium recovered connected the Atlantic Grain Council's website and is disposable to growers passim the region.

"Fusarium caput blight is simply a truly devastating illness that occurs beauteous overmuch astir the satellite successful cereal-growing regions," said Adam Foster, a cereal and oilseed pathologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada who's based successful Charlottetown. 

"Not lone does it origin output losses, similar nonaccomplishment of harvest and seed, but it volition besides contaminate the atom with mycotoxins that tin marque it unsuitable for radical and animals to really devour if it gets to a precocious capable level." 

The hazard of illness is higher erstwhile the upwind is lukewarm and wet, Foster said, adding that tropical nights tin marque it a batch worse. Those are conditions that could go much communal successful the Atlantic provinces owed to clime change, helium said. 

"What the forecast instrumentality volition really bash is analyse upwind implicit the past week and incorporated those factors into the models to… foretell whether illness is apt to hap oregon not."

Management strategies

It's hard to foretell astatine the opening of immoderate fixed increasing play whether fusarium caput blight volition beryllium a occupation that year, Foster said. P.E.I. was deed peculiarly hard successful 2023, resulting successful a batch of atom being mislaid to the disease. 

"By the clip you really spot the disease, it's excessively precocious to act. So having a prediction instrumentality really archer you up of clip gives you a small spot of aboriginal informing of what's to come," helium said.

"With a proactive instrumentality and different illness absorption practices… it is really manageable." 

Other absorption practices see selecting selectively bred varieties that are partially resistant to the fungus, having a divers harvest rotation, and utilizing chemic fungicides oregon biologic power agents to suppress the disease, Foster said. 

A utile tool 

Steven Hamill, a husbandman successful Newton, P.E.I., expects the wheat successful his fields to commencement flowering adjacent week. He thinks the caller forecasting instrumentality volition beryllium an asset. 

"There's been years wherever there's thousands of acres that person been destroyed successful the tract oregon hauled retired of bins, truthful there's immense economical interaction successful a atrocious year," Hamill said. 

Hamill said helium sprays his crops with fungicide each twelvemonth arsenic a preventative measure, but not each farmers bash the same. 

"Having the tool, I guess, volition validate the decision… oregon assistance radical marque that determination if they don't usage it each year," helium said.

The timely exertion of fungicides, on with implementing measures that help forestall and suppress the disease, is the champion attack erstwhile it comes to managing flusarium caput blight, Hamill said. 

The caller forecasting instrumentality adds another instrumentality to the toolbox, helium said.

"I deliberation it's large to person the collaboration with scientists and farmers and, you know, get them successful the tract unneurotic and find what problems determination [are] and what solutions they tin travel up with."