Looking for wheat variety tolerance to wireworms

Looking for wheat variety tolerance to wireworms

Farm and Ranch September 27, 2010 Seed treatment is one way to address the problem of wireworms in cereal grains, genetics another. Washington State University winter wheat breeder Arron Carter is looking for some level of tolerance in wheat varieties.

Carter: “I was able to put out some trials and screen about 200 lines for tolerance to wireworm in some pretty heavily infested fields. There were about 40 of those that looked like they had some survivability. They were at least flowering, heading and not dying like the other lines I found in the field. So I am taking those and again putting those out in heavily infested fields for the second year to make sure that I didn‘t get anything that escaped the wireworms. You never know exactly where they are in a field. So we are putting that out at multiple locations again to see if we can get something that is at least more tolerant.”

Carter gathered the genetic material from several sources but he says some that did well against the wireworm are from PNW adaptive material.

The results of Carter’s genetic work can then be combined with research also being conducted seed treatments for wireworm.

Carter: “All of this is very preliminary this year. This next year coming up will really tell us a lot of information I think about which ones would be our best choices and start making some recommendations to growers. I am not saying it is going to be fully resistant to the wireworms but at least give them a shot to maybe get a crop out of that.”

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.

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