Stripe rust shows up in some winter wheat

Farm and Ranch November 16, 2010 Some stripe rust has been found this fall in hard red winter wheat in Washington. Xianming Chen with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service at Pullman says the rust was found in several fields with large plants in the Horse Heaven Hills area. While severity and incidence was generally low there was a hotspot found with severities more than 60%. Chen says stripe was also found along Highway 26 between Othello and Washtucna. He says stripe rust has also been collected southern Idaho.

The ARS scientist says several factors are involved in finding stripe rust this fall. The prolonged rust epidemic this year provided heavy inoculum and mild late summer weather allowed more spores to survive. Then the moisture and warm weather this fall allowed wheat plants to emerge and grow quickly. Also most hard red winter wheat varieties do not have effective all-stage resistance against infection in seedlings.

Whether the rust in the fields now will cause a big epidemic next spring still depends on this winter. As Chen has told us before:

Chen: “If we get a warmer winter then next spring the rust would start very early and there would be widespread inoculum from over wintering, then we can have a big problem next year.”

But if the winter is cold the spore numbers will be reduced.

Chen also found several fields heavily infested with bird cherry oat-aphids, which can carry the barley yellow dwarf virus.

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

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