Known as the most destructive vertebrates on earth, mice and rats pose a serious threat as disease transmission vectors and they cause structural and electrical damage, feed loss and contamination.

“While fall is peak season for rodent infestation as mice and rats seek shelter and food for the winter, managing rodent problems is a year-round effort, especially when it comes to biosecurity,” says Al Dam, poultry specialist with the Ontario agriculture ministry. He jokes that he’s never seen a rat properly use a foot bath.

Dam reminds Ontario livestock and poultry producers to be diligent about cleaning up spilled feed inside and outside barns, keeping barns and yards free of debris to remove unintentional shelter for rodents and to continuously monitor for signs of pests.

“Mice can easily enter through a hole as small as a dime, and rats a hole the size of a quarter,” notes Dam. Common signs of rodent infestations include feces, urine deposits, chewing damage, rub marks and pathways.

Manage disease risk

Rodents can bring disease into barns and spread infection throughout livestock herds and flocks. Rats are also known for feeding on carcasses, including wild birds, which poses a serious threat to poultry flocks on alert for avian influenza.

Rats and mice can introduce diseases including avian flu, salmonellosis, erysipelas, swine dysentery and even rabies into poultry and livestock.

“Rodent control is an important element in a robust approach to biosecurity,” says Connie Osborne, OMAFRA media relations specialist. “Managing control can be challenging, and producers who encounter ongoing problems may benefit from consulting professional pest control companies.”

Osborne also notes that flies and birds such as starlings can carry disease and should be included in a pest control and biosecurity program.

Shawn McDonald, area manager and service technician with Rural Routes Pest Control, says including a professional service provider in the farm’s biosecurity plan offers the most effective pest control.

“We’re in the business of partnering with producers to keep their barns safe and disease free,” says McDonald. His employees are professionally licensed as structural exterminators who follow biosecurity protocols that can also be adapted to meet client needs.

These include staff restrictions on raising or housing poultry or hogs, imposing 48- to 72-hour restrictions between farm visits, and disinfecting equipment and trucks, among other measures.

“Agricultural pest control is different from residential or commercial, so be sure to partner with a service provider who understands your farm needs and protocols to ensure the safest environment for your barns and peace of mind for yourself,” says McDonald.

Take control

The most common pest management strategy is to address existing populations using rodenticides and trapping, and then work with producers to develop an ongoing management plan, he says.

Regular facility inspections are also important to assess and eliminate entry points in buildings and reduce access to food, water and areas rodents can live.

“Rodents can also cause serious threat to barn fires as they chew through wiring and insulation,” says McDonald, citing another common reason that producers engage his company’s expertise.

“And from an economical perspective, 100 rats can eat a tonne of feed in one year, and can contaminate 10 times the amount of feed it eats with feces, urine and fur. Rodent problems can really add up.”

When it comes to managing pest control with rodenticides or chemical products, Osborne reminds producers to make sure all products used where animals are raised for food are licensed and approved by Health Canada.

Keeping all products out of reach by livestock or poultry is also essential and Osborne advises producers to work with their veterinarian and processor if an animal is exposed to such products.

For more information on rodent control, read OMAFRA’s factsheet, Rodent control in livestock and poultry facilities, available online at ontario.ca/page/rodent-control-livestock-and-poultry-facilities.

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Also called creeping thistle and field thistle, Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) is a perennial weed that reproduces both by seed and by horizontal roots. Dense patches of new shoots can form from these new root buds, making control difficult with only single herbicide applications or other in-field actions.

Why it matters: Canada thistle can spread from seed, as well as creeping roots. This makes repeated control efforts critical.

Crop impact

As described by OMAFRA, Canada thistle grows throughout southern Canada and is most often a problem in perennial crops, as well as areas where reduced tillage is practised. According to Manitoba Agriculture, it’s also a strong competitor for light, moisture, and nutrients. This can translate to substantial crop yield losses, while green matter in harvested grain can increase drying and dockage fees.

OMAFRA also indicates Canada thistle is similar to Japanese barberry, and does not normally act as a host for rust fungus. However, hybrids of the two species can act as a disease vector.

Identifying Canada thistle

Mature Canada thistle plants feature erect, hollow stems between 30 and 120 cm (1-4 feet) high, with branching and flowers (purple, pink, or white) occurring at the top and ends of stalks. Leaves are alternate, oblong, or lance shaped, with sharp spines protruding from irregularly cut segments. Each thistle flower produces about 700 seeds per plant. Scouting for Canada thistle means scanning field edges, shelterbelts, sloughs, and other low areas.

Canada thistle can be confused with other weeds of the species. This includes bull thistle (distinguished by the absences of spines from the surface of the leaf blades), and sow thistle (which does not excrete a milk-coloured fluid from its leaves and stems). It can also be mistaken for biennial thistles, though biennial varieties generally have a more slender physique, as well as an absence of creeping underground roots during non-flowering stages.

Control with multiple applications

OMAFRA resources say Canada thistle can be controlled with dicamba and glyphosate products. These should be applied at the early bud stage, or in early fall, though repeated applications are required in order to kill all root buds.

University of Guelph research indicates 540 grams per litre of glyphosate, applied at 1.34 litres per acre, brings between 85 and 100 per cent control. 2,4-D alone only provides top-growth control.

Additionally, OMAFRA lists repeated mowing (at 21-day intervals) as an effective way of controlling “light to medium infestations.”

A bio-control for Canada thistle and other broadleaf weeds is also currently listed as in-development by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

Phoma macrostoma is a fungus that naturally infects Canada thistle, causing plants to turn white and die from a lack of chlorophyll. The fungus has been isolated and purified from plants growing in Saskatchewan and other provinces by AAFC scientists.

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That’s why United Kingdom researchers have developed an inexpensive, convenient tool to help farmers identify resistant weeds, specifically black grass, as early as possible.

Black-grass is to the U.K. what Canada fleabane is, or waterhemp might be, to some Ontario farmers. According to Robert Edwards, professor of natural and environmental science at Newcastle University, the pest made serious incursions across the English Channel in the 1980s.

Why it matters: Quick resistance identification tests could help Canadian farmers better monitor resistance in their fields, resulting more responsive control.

Since 2009, black-grass is the top problem weed in the U.K. Just 12 plants per square metre can seriously deplete grass crop yields. It currently infects three million acres of arable land in the U.K.

Significant herbicide resistance issues

The challenge of controlling black-grass in grass crops, particularly winter cereals, continues to build as herbicide resistance problems mount.

“The problem comes from a high dependence on chemical controls,” says Edwards. He adds the U.K.’s regulatory system also constrains farmers by limiting the types of chemistries they can use. There are currently only three main herbicides that growers can employ against black-grass. The switch to lower tillage systems in the last several decades has also been a contributing factor.

Black-grass is genetically diverse. Because control options are so limited, says Edwards, it’s not uncommon for farmer control efforts to be ineffective.

A tool for more focused control

Testing for resistance is a critical solution. As described by Bayer’s U.K. Crop Science division, knowing whether black-grass is herbicide resistant can help farmers determine application timing, avoid unnecessary applications — as well as what chemistries will work — and other longer-term management strategies.

But sending samples away for testing is not always practical. To meet farmer needs, Edwards and his colleagues developed the black-grass resistance diagnostic tool, known as BReD, which is inexpensive and can be used by farmers in the field.

The tool is described as a “lateral-flow device” resembling a pregnancy test. Originally based on a more costly tool used to identify fungal spores in the field, growers use the device by applying a leaf sample on the device.

In five minutes, a series of red lines appear, the layout of which illustrate whether resistance genes are present.

By using it across the field, farmers can better map non-target-site, herbicide-resistant weed populations. Edwards adds it can help avoid the “classic control method” of flipping between different modes of action in herbicide applications, which he says actually hurts their chances of managing non-target resistance.

“What we want is to eventually make a digital agronomist,” he says.

Focusing on problem weeds in Canada

The BReD diagnostic tool was developed after Edwards and his colleagues spent years analyzing black-grass genes — as well as proteins within those genes and other metabolic changes — in order to find the origin of its resistance. Eventually, they determined one specific gene as the source of most herbicide resistance. This is what the BReD tool identifies.

Now his team are collaborating with researchers in other parts of the world to expand the tool’s scope. Edwards says this includes working with Canadian agronomy companies to apply the technology to wild oats, a major weed of the Prairies.

Eventually, he says they also hope to improve the technology by giving it the capability to make agronomic recommendations based on plant analysis.

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Obeid is part of a team that has developed a process for leaf sample analysis of weeds which potentially have resistance to herbicides commonly used in vegetable crops. She spoke at the Ontario Processing Vegetable Industry conference held recently in London.

“As soon as you have a miss on your field, we can take a quarter-size piece of the leaf, and we can get a DNA analysis,” she reported. “We’re getting results back in one or two days” a huge improvement over the previously-available turn-around of two weeks or more.

A benefit, Obeid says, is growers might have the opportunity to try a different control measure than they used in the previous year, rather than simply finding out after they’ve already applied herbicide that there is resistance.

And, despite concluding her talk by stating, “sometimes, I do have good news” — that a high percentage of the tests undertaken through the initiative in 2019 showed no resistance — Obeid cautioned that her team is watching a few potentially troublesome weeds very closely.

For vegetable growers, the most significant among the 21 weeds so far identified as possessing resistance in Canada, are in the amaranth/pigweed group. In 2019, herbicide-resistant waterhemp was confirmed in two vegetable fields in Ontario: one in Norfolk County and one in Elgin County. Resistance was detected to Group 2 and Group 9, as well as Group 14 in the Norfolk instance. Group 14 is concerning, Obeid suggested, because this is one of the newer active ingredients that veggie growers have available.

With waterhemp, however, don’t just assume it’s resistant. Get it tested. She even had an instance of a plant she believed was waterhemp actually turning out to be a somewhat mutated version of pigweed. “It can be confusing.”

Others to watch include large crabgrass in peas, onions (Obeid shared a photo of a crop that had been sprayed 10 times by the grower, and the onions were still difficult to discern) and other vegetable crops, redroot pigweed in celery, and fleabane in carrots. She has also tested for resistance in velvetleaf in red beets and tumble pigweed in carrots, but so far there’s no DNA confirmation.

A big threat with resistance, she explained, is that a seed bank has been established. So next time you grow that crop in that field, it will resurface. “If we do have (resistance), what are we going to do next year? We’re going to rotate to a different crop that will hopefully get that under control.” But rotate wisely. “When we rotate crops, we don’t necessarily rotate the groups of herbicides in use.”

Either way, once you get herbicide-resistant weeds, Obeid said, “you’re always going to be managing them so you don’t have an outbreak.”

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That said, Tracey Baute, field crop entomologist and WBC expert with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, says several factors have combined to make accurate impact predictions difficult.

Why it matters: Planting delays experienced in the first half of 2019 mean crops are developing when WBC is at its most aggressive. Negative impacts could be seen despite current low pest numbers.

Crop development ill-timed

Ineffective pheromone lures in some of the traps used in the WBC trap monitoring were a problem early in the growing season. Some traps worked fine, says Baute, while others did not effectively attract migrating moths, making it difficult to draw accurate population estimates.

“That added an additional issue with us comparing previous years [ …] It got sorted out before we reached peak flight,” she says.

Slow growth early in the planting season also meant the WBC trap network, as described by Baute in an article for Field Crop News, did not reveal its first moth until the second week of July — a time normally considered close to WBC’s peak flight period.

However, Baute says the main danger in 2019 stems from late planting. Corn and dry bean crop development now line up with WBC development, posing a greater risk of damage from both the pest itself and the diseases following in its wake — notably DON and other fungal pathogens.

“They may not have as long a time to feed on the ears as in some years. They didn’t really get in the fields until August,” says Baute, but some ear feeding may have gone unnoticed thus far.

“There’s always going to be feeding even if they spray. There will be some that survive,” Baute says. “Damage really doesn’t show up until defoliation of the plant.”

She also reiterates no clear hot-spots have been identified yet, but the aligning of WBC and crop development means moths can pick and choose their locations more easily. Rising yearly temperatures also allow the pest to overwinter closer to Ontario, giving it yet more flexibility within the province.

“[This] also highlights not to rely on trap counts. You still have to scout because the dynamics of what’s going on in the field could be different then what the trap is telling you,” she says.

Unknown factors might be suppressing WBC

WBC numbers have been shifting downwards over the last two years. Indeed, Baute says both the number of egg masses and the remnants of egg masses have dropped. This indicates something is affecting the ability of WBC to lay eggs.

“We are not sure […] We’re just not seeing the egg masses as prevalent as we usually do. It’s an effort to find enough compared to previous years,” she says. “If you scout frequently enough you should still see the presence of egg masses. In some cases, they weren’t there.”

For her part, Baute believes the missing factor is likely greater pressure from bio controls – namely predatory insects such as ladybugs, lacewings, and others. However, more investigation is required.

Earworm numbers rising

While western bean cutworm numbers appear to be dropping, the last few years have brought an increase in corn earworm populations. This pest comes from the United States and lays its eggs directly on ear silk, which Baute says makes them very difficult to see.

As with WBC, the late 2019 planting season also provides greater opportunity for the pest to develop.

“That’s another pest that’s likely going to start playing a role in ear damage in the fall. I think we’re going to see it more often,” she says. “It’s not just a sweet corn issue anymore […] If we have years where we delay grain corn planting, we are going to see more risk.”

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Research in the late 1980s established the significant yield impacts caused by weeds if they are not properly controlled early in the growing season, says Clarence Swanton, weed scientist in the department of plant agriculture at the University of Guelph. More recent work is investigating what mechanisms cause this drop, which can amount to several bushels per day.

Why it matters: New research showing how plants communicate and respond to early-season weeds illustrates that good weed control is even more imperative to yield than previously thought.

Swanton says we now know crops like corn and soybeans are able to detect and communicate the presence of weeds even before seedlings emerge from the soil. That detection cues stress-induced adaptive responses, which have a “rapid and irreversible” negative effect on yield, further reinforcing the importance of early season weed control.

“This is actually the science behind why we suggest what we do. It’s going to (have an) impact on weed control, on yield potential, cover crop use, all these things you can think about,” he says.

“The number one driver of yield potential is the time of weed emergence relative to the crop.”

How it works:

• Corn and soybeans register light reflected from the far-red end of the spectrum by weeds. This initiates stress responses in the crop.
• Crop seedlings can even perform this detection and responsive action before emerging from the ground, permanently altering their own morphology in ways not conducive to higher yield.
• The younger the plant, the more susceptible it is.

According to Swanton, crops can detect the presence of external stressors through several mechanisms, including the release of volatile compounds used as a warning to others of the species in the event of an insect attack, for example, as well as communication through root systems and changes in light quality.

But when it comes to registering weedy threats, light communication is very important.

“Plants don’t compete initially for light, water and nutrients. That’s the most significant thing. It changes everything and how we view competition,” says Swanton.

“You have to be pretty close to the surface to be able to detect above the surface, and at the same time you have to fire the genes and change your morphology,” says Swanton. “It did all that in the last few centimetres of the soil. It’s remarkable that it can do that.”

Once altered at an early stage, further development can only occur within the now-altered growth parameters. In other words, what has been done cannot be undone.

The stress processes that actually hurt yield, says Swanton, have to do with the overproduction of natural compounds.

As corn and soybean plants are stressed, they produce higher levels of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and singlet oxygen (1O2), which in normal amounts have no ill effect. Like alcohol in a person, however, too much can cause damage. Energy then needs to be spent to fix that damage, with antioxidants or carotenoids, pigments within the leaves, acting as sponges to try and absorb excess and prevent cell damage.

Just like people eating antioxidant-rich foods like blueberries, Swanton says plants go through the same stress responses.

“If your child is not growing at a standard growth rate, how serious is it? It’s the same principle.”

Swanton provides an example:

If 100 per cent of corn plants are growing at an average rate of 4.5 grams per day, the yield would be 12,300 kilograms per hectare. If 20 per cent of that overall amount grows at 3.5 grams per day, the entire weight drops to 10,000 kg per hectare. That means a reduction in growth rate of one gram, among a mere 20 per cent of all corn plants, results in yield losses of 2,300 kg per hectare — equivalent to 37 bushels per acre.

“This would help explain why the yield monitor in your combine bounces all over the place, even with top-performing corn hybrids,” Swanton says. “It’s illustrating how yield really hinges on such a delicate balance.”

Impacts for planting green, corn spacing

The key to triggering these yield-depressing mechanisms really is the presence of green matter.

For this reason, Swanton says corn residue, while it would be considered a weed by soybeans, does not appear to affect growth in the same way. Green cover crops, however, definitely would, and he reiterates the importance of appropriately timed burn-down regimens for those planting green.

Corn itself can also have adverse reactions to other corn plants if spacing between each plant is not adequate. The exact proximity threshold is not yet known.

“A soybean knows whether a soybean is growing next to it, or if it’s a weed. Corn doesn’t seem to be able to do that,” says Swanton.

These growth responses to stress, says Swanton, are not limited to corn and soybeans. Indeed, it’s a principle applying to all natural and cultivated environments.

With these crop-specific findings being seen in the lab as well as the field, Swanton said he hopes they will help in the development of more competitive crops.

In the meantime, farmers should still be knocking weeds down as early as possible.

“This is proof of why we stress weed control. It’s very important in terms of weed management. Get to it on your first opportunity,” he says.

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Now farming in Saskatchewan, the producer brought a Seed Terminator from Down Under to test its pulverizing abilities on prairie weed seeds this harvest.

Why it matters: Alternative weed control methods will gain added importance as the prevalence of herbicide-resistant weeds grows and consumers press for less herbicide use.

“Nick Berry, who is also my first cousin, invented it,” said Josh Lade.

“We were both pretty apprehensive on how it was going to go, like the tough conditions are a lot different to the Australian harvest we’re used to, but it worked flawlessly. We couldn’t believe how well it handled the conditions and this harvest wasn’t exactly easy.”

A Seed Terminator is a hammer mill that’s installed in the rear of a combine to destroy weed seeds in the chaff discharge.

Lade farms in a partnership with three other producers near Osler, Sask., after a work-experience trip in 2010 led him to start “living my dream,” he said.

However, some of the growing strategies used by Canadian producers, including overreliance on a handful of herbicides, concerned him because he has witnessed first-hand how herbicide-resistant weeds can devastate the industry.

“I can see the writing on the wall, with the spraying of glyphosate,” Lade said.

“I can see that this isn’t going to last. It hasn’t worked in my homeland, so I wanted to use a version of the mill and put it to work before my back is against the wall like many Australian grain growers are.”

It took Lade 24 hours to install the latest version of the Seed Terminator in his John Deere S680 combine.

“It’s situated right between the end of the chafing deck, like the grain sieves, and the straw chopper. So the straw chopper just gets moved back a bit and this unit gets placed in between there,” Lade said.

The Seed Terminator is belt driven, and in the JD S680 combine there are two belt settings for the chopper. Lade said he uses only the fast speed so he was able to use the pulley for the slow setting to power the mill.

The straw continues to go over the walkers and discharge beaters and through the spreader, while chaff is directed through the newly installed mill.

“If the combine is set right, all of the weed seed or volunteers should be either in the tank of the combine or mixed up in that chaff that then gets put through the mill,” Lade said.

He said the chaff gets directed through the chute into the multi-stage hammer mill, which has achieved a 96 percent weed seed kill rate on Australian fields.

“As long as you can get your weed seeds or your volunteers into that chaff screen, they basically have no chance coming through,” Lade said.

He said his first goal was to see if the Seed Terminator would work in Canadian conditions.

“In Australia, we get shut down because it’s too hot, with fire danger ratings and things like that. Here we get shut down because of snow when it’s too cold. The material is a lot tougher to put through, higher moisture content of grain. Plus the weeds can be green too,” Lade said.

“My first question to Nick was, ‘how long will it take to take it off.’ ”

It takes about half an hour to remove the chutes, pull the chopper back to its normal position and take the belt off.

However, the weed pulverizer worked well and Lade didn’t have to bypass it.

“We did about 214 hours this harvest and we didn’t touch it,” he said.

“We did a small amount of peas, barley, a lot of canola, and a lot of wheat this year. In all of those crops it worked really well.”

He said the only issue occurred when very green material went through the combine because it sometimes fell off the discharge beater at the back of the combine into the mill instead of going through the spreader.

“But even then, that wasn’t much of a problem. The mill has sensors all over it, so if some green material had fallen in, it will beep at you. Often it will clear, sometimes it won’t. Just wait for the machine to cool a little bit, take it out and keep driving,” Lade said.

He is considering adding another discharge beater to his combine to avoid this problem and he said this wouldn’t be an issue with some New Holland combines because they have a different system to feed the straw into the chopper.

Lade is using the latest model of the Seed Terminator, which has updates that have significantly improved the performance.

For instance, it has more sensors and a stronger gearbox that is less likely to overheat compared to earlier models.

Lade said his next step is to examine how effective the terminator is at destroying different types of weed seeds on Canadian fields.

“Now we want to get the thing tested with the species of weeds we have here. Let’s see what it’s doing on kochia, let’s see what it’s doing on wild oats, what it’s doing on cleavers, mustards, you can name them all. There is plenty of them around,” he said.

Lade is already working with Saskatchewan Agriculture on a research plot but he is hoping to expand the research.

“It would be good if it were industry-funded, where you know I’m a grain grower where I have 3,000 acres for myself on this farm. We have check-off dollars right, so it would be nice if some of these partners would come in and help with the initial cost of it. Just to set up some plots in the area. I have one already, but it’s not enough,” Lade said.

He said the Seed Terminator is going mainstream in Australia, with many of the initial bugs worked out and more than 50 units now installed in combines around the country.

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“The reality in field crop scouting for pests today is that looking for disease, weeds and insects is done often with textbooks and apps that make use of manual menus and you compare pictures,” said Warren Bills, business development manager in Canada for xarvio, an agriculture technology company backed by Bayer CropScience. “There must be a better way and a more efficient way to identify pests, quickly and more accurate.”

The app launched recently in Canada and is free to download to smartphones.

The company has been working for two-and-a-half years on the algorithm, and had to give the system time to make sure it would recognize enough crop pests to be useful.

As thousands of images of crops and weeds are sent to the database, it learns and will have greater accuracy over time.

The app was launched in other markets in late 2017 and now has close to 60,000 users around the world.

The global reach means that year-round, weeds are being uploaded to the database, now housing more than 100,000 images.

At this point the app is more capable of the most common weeds, but as time goes on the accuracy will improve. At this point it will give a percentage accuracy for the evaluation.

“We believe it will really scale globally. Any picture taken in the U.S. or Canada or China will help the algorithm improve,” said Bills. Once there are 500 to 1,000 images of a particular weed in the database, the accuracy is strong.

In order to build the database, xarvio has connected with some Canadian universities, including the University of Alberta, with samples of problem weeds. They have added images of weeds to the database.

Users find they have an “aha” moment, said Bills, when they are able to identify a problem in a crop and that’s when trust is built in the system.

Users are able to create scouting trips where pictures and notes created can be stored together.

The app doesn’t yet tie the information into larger crop-management systems. Bills said the goal was to keep the app response and simple, although he said that integration, or the ability to export the data, could happen in the future if it makes sense.

The app also shows regional trends in crop diseases and insect pressure, not specific to individual farms, but regionally, so a user can tell what pressures are growing or present in their area.

Bills said the longer-term goal is to be able to instantaneously identify weeds, with the potential to put the system on a sprayer so that it would only spray for certain pests as needed.

“This is not about replacing the great knowledge base out there, it is about extending it,” he said.

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