When wheat diseases appear in your fields, correctly identifying the types of disease can help you provide the most effective management. Three new resources on disease identification and management in wheat and barley have been added to the University of Nebraska CropWatch website Wheat section under "Disease Management." Each includes numerous photos to aid in identification and to differentiate between diseases. All three were developed by a multi-state university Extension and research committee on small grain diseases.
Wheat Disease Identification, a 22-page guide, is organized according to area of damage—head and grain, leaves, or stem and roots—and then by disease. It offers information on these diseases:
Heads and grain—Common bunt, Fusarium head blight, loose smut, sooty head molds and Stagonospora nodorum blotch.
Leaves—Bacterial streak, barley yellow dwarf, leaf rust, powdery mildew, Septoria tritici blotch, Stagonospora nodorum blotch, stem rust, stripe rust, tan spot, wheat soilborne mosaic, wheat spindle streak mosaic and wheat streak mosaic.
Stem and roots—Cephalosporium stripe, common root rot and Fusarium root, crown and foot rots.
Identifying Rust Diseases of Wheat and Barley, a four-page guide, includes descriptions and photos of stem, stripe and leaf rust and a discussion of emerging races of stem rust.
Identification and Management of Stem Rust on Wheat and Barley, an eight-page guide, add-resses how stem rust is identified; factors influencing the risk of stem rust and potential outbreaks; assessing the degree of damage and charts of yield loss at different growth stages; recommendations on timing and other factors of fungicide application; and the efficacy of foliar fungicides that are used to manage the disease.
- March 2012