Roger Ashley

I'm Roger Ashley, area extension agronomist for the Dickinson Research Extension Center. Soil-borne pathogens can certainly be a problem in winter wheat production, especially where we seed winter wheat into wheat stubble. This particular practice, seeding winter wheat into wheat stubble is a common practice here in southwestern North Dakota. Basically we do this because we want to limit or prevent winter kill. However, we do expose the plant to a number of soil-borne pathogens, and without controlling these soil-borne pathogens we can end up with thin stands, less competitive stands, and less profitable stands. Therefore we would suggest that producers consider using seed treatments which control pythium and some of the other soil-borne pathogens.

In this particular plot, we have total control of the soil-borne pathogens. This really shows that the plant is really advanced or more mature than in untreated plots that we have in this particular trial. The untreated is right here, and you can see it is not as far advanced as the previous plot, but it is also a thinner stand even though it was seeded at the same seeding rate as the rest of the plot. It has fewer plants that have emerged and even though we applied our weed control, to control wild oats and other crop weeds, the winter wheat crop is not as competitive because it (the crop canopy) is more open, so we have more wild oats. Now in this particular plot we have actually used a commercially available seed treatment registered for the control of pythium. You can actually see a marked improvement, more wheat plants that were established, and certainly it's a much more competitive stand so we see fewer wild oats in this particular plot . It's more advanced than the untreated, but nearly as advanced as the one where we have total control of the soil-borne diseases.