A fungal disease known as head scab has spread rapidly in winter wheat fields in central Kansas, the largest US producer of the grain, a Kansas State University extension crop specialist said. "It's exploding, and I feel like that's a pretty good term to use, from what we've seen even in the last week," Kim Larson, a district agent with the university's extension service, said in an interview on Friday.
Larson is based in Concordia, in north-central Kansas. Head scab emerged earlier this month in southeastern and east-central Kansas. It has since spread as far as the northwest portion of the state, although the level of infection was light in that region, said Jeanne Falk Jones, a KSU extension specialist based in Colby, Kansas. Head scab, also known as Fusarium head blight, can infect wheat with a byproduct called vomitoxin, which sickens animals and people if consumed in large quantities.
The disease spreads when rainy conditions occur as the wheat plants are flowering, which happened in May in Kansas. "It was just the perfect storm for it. That whole month of May was wet for us. It just never dried out," Larson said. Grain elevators can test incoming grain for vomitoxin, and some Kansas facilities have begun posting discount schedules for infected wheat. Exporters typically will not accept wheat contaminated with more than 2 parts per million (ppm).
The US Food and Drug Administration limits vomitoxin in food products to 1 ppm, while certain kinds of livestock feed can contain slightly higher levels. Scab emerged in portions of the 2014 US soft wheat harvest in the southern Midwest, and it caused significant damage in the northern Plains spring wheat belt in the 1990s. Findings have been rare in the Plains hard red winter wheat belt.
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