The disease triangle demonstrates the relationship between the environment, host, and pathogen for the establishment of a disease. Simply put, if any of the three factors are missing the disease is unable to establish in the host. Disease negatively impacts yield potential and understanding a hybrids tolerance to common diseases in your region can help us strategically make recommendations and hybrid decisions. 

The purpose of the project was to provide customers with a scope of the R&D work done behind the scenes to better understand genetic tolerance and resistance to varying level of disease incidence and severity. This has helped generate base line product ratings for product placement and management recommendations for products in the PRIDE Seeds line-up.

Project Design

Disease ratings were taken over multiple seasons (2014-2020) and various Research locations throughout the US Midwest and Ontario. Planting date varied over each growing season, but all were within reason of regional planting date averages. Populations aligned with standard hybrid screening and ranged from 32-34,000 seeds/ac. Goss’s Wilt research sites were inoculated following individual state guidelines.

Results - 2014-2020 Disease Ratings

Conclusion 

Understanding the incidence and severity of disease pressure is important to differentiate tolerance of hybrids. Diverse genetics can be placed and managed to reduce risk of yield loss associated with disease pressure. A look at inbred line tolerance to various diseases can provide value in hybrid breeding of future products. Many of the current PRIDE Seeds hybrids have outstanding tolerance to common diseases of Canadian Corn growing regions, diseases of which have proven to be economically damaging and when unmanaged in continuous corn rotations can cause significant yield losses. Important to remember that tolerance of one foliar disease does not necessarily correlate to resistance of others.

Click here for the PDF of this project and the rest of the PRIDE Seeds 2020 Agronomy Projects.