Speaker 1: With a positive start the wheat cross across Oklahoma is maturing nicely, but as we get moisture possible complications in the fields start to rise. Bob Hunger examines a patch of wheat near Apache, Oklahoma and helps producers consider fungicides.
Speaker 2: If you take a look at a field like this one from the surface if you’re just driving by on the road it looks nice and green and healthy, and it is on the surface, but in a field like this you have to go down to the soil to see what is occurring in this field, and of course this is a [inaudible 00:00:51] field and so on the soil surface you have the residue from last year. That residue, of course, that crop would have been infected with tan spot and then you get the residue with these black resting bodies resulting that contain the spores of the fungus that causes tan spot.

Over the fall and winter those mature and then when you get into February and early March the spores started to be released from that that infected the lower leaves and will continue to move up the canopy if there’s enough moisture and the right temperature conditions.
Speaker 1: With spring moisture the movement of tan spot and other diseases can be prevented with the use of fungicide if applied early enough.
Speaker 2: Early spray, fungicide spray either at full or reduced rate to control a disease like tan spot septoria and powdery mildew is quite justified, and as you can see from the tire tracks this producer chose to put that early application on because there is a lot of tan spot down in the lower leaves of this field.

They really should wait to see how severe it’s going to be, because it is going to take moisture, rain fall to get those diseases developing.
Speaker 1: Of course there are pros and cons to every situation. Good rainfall means good crop yield but a prime environment for disease.
Speaker 2: Excessive moisture will probably hurt the wheat more than the diseases. The diseases need moisture. There’s really none of them that operate in the absence of moisture in the drought. The drought years have been extremely quiet years because there just isn’t the disease that develops in those kinds of years.

On the other side of the coin it’s the years where we do have good moisture that are going to provide the best wheat crop and those are the years that foliar diseases can be the most severe.
Speaker 1: As wheat grows toward maturity so does the possibility for complications.

For Sun Up, I’m Dave [Dietrich 00:02:58].