Tillage: Methods to take a look at for take-all utilizing a plastic cup

Take-all is a illness that’s turning into a significant problem on Irish cereal farms. Black patches in stubble may be an indicator of the issue’s existence.

Nonetheless, Seedtech’s Tim O’Donovan outlined a way more definitive take a look at for the illness on the firm’s latest trials occasion in Co. Waterford.

All that’s required is pattern of contemporary soil, taken from a area that has simply been mixed, a single cereal seed and a plastic tea or espresso cup.

Testing for take-all

Directions comply with – fill the cup with soil, place the seed within the soil, convey the cup indoors and go away on a heat window ledge.

Examine the cup 10 days later, by which era the seed could have germinated. It’s then a case of gently peeling the plastic away from the soil mass. This can expose the complete root mat that has developed inside the cup.  

If the roots are white, then take-all will not be a difficulty. Nonetheless, if the foundation mat is colored black, one is then left to mull over the implications of the well-hackneyed phrase, ‘Houston, we now have an issue’.

Take-all is a vital illness of winter wheat, particularly as management with fungicides or varietal resistance is extraordinarily restricted. The illness can be reasonably vital in winter barley. Spring sown cereals will not be as badly affected.

The fungus is now widespread all through the UK and Eire. It acts to scale back yield and grain high quality.

Estimates recommend the illness impacts half of UK wheat crops, with common yield losses of 5–20% ensuing. Nonetheless, greater than half of the crop may be misplaced when illness is extreme. 

Take-all causes most injury on mild soils the place the fungus spreads extra simply and the lack of lively roots has a big impact on water and nutrient uptake.

Poor drainage and nutrient standing additionally encourage the illness. The climate additionally has a big affect on the affect of take-all. Dry situations throughout grain filling exacerbate the damaging results of the illness on root perform.

Northern Eire

Expertise in Northern Eire would point out that take-all is appearing in an nearly sub-clinical method on many cereal farms.

Leigh McClean is a crops improvement advisor with the Faculty of Agriculture, Meals and Rural Enterprise

He commented: “Some winter barley yields had been disappointing final yr, regardless of crops trying nicely within the fields.

“Growers had been attributing this fall-off in remaining yields to Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus. Climate situations for aphids, the vector of the virus, had been very appropriate the earlier autumn.

“Sub medical take-all may be a difficulty in winter barley. These are crops which are primarily grown as a second cereal inside an arable rotation. Carry over points referring to take-all may be a difficulty on this context,” McClean added.