Welcome to another season of weekly small grains disease and pest updates. This first issue should have gone out last Friday after the scouts completed their first week roaming the Minnesota countryside looking for diseases and pests. Unfortunately, a technical glitch prevented me from seeing the tally of their work. So....here it goes.
Diseases
Overall, the disease situation is relatively quiet. All indications are that stripe and leaf rust pressure in Kansas and Nebraska is relatively low. That means that the number of spores traveling north will also be low. This, in combination with the unfavorable weather conditions (as indicated by the NDSU disease risk models), suggests that things will continue to be quiet for those two diseases.