Some Wheat Production Problems

Last week I attended the wheat diagnostic school at the experiment station. Let's see what we can find in my own fields:

Here is some dryland wheat south of my house:
This thin stand is a result of two things. First, dry conditions at planting. This is the only field I planted in September of last year, and conditions were quite dry when it got planted. As a result, only about 30% of the wheat I initially planted came up. This wheat ran out of moisture fast and so shut down fall tillering early. The rest of the field did not sprout at all until the rain we had in the second week of October. That wheat had plenty of moisture last fall and tillered normally. It sounds backwards, but the wheat that came up early did not have as good of a root system going into winter as the wheat that sprouted after the rain. With our (perfectly normal) abnormally dry winter, we lost about the top six(6) inches of soil moisture by the time February rolled along. Then we had (perfectly normal) abnormally warm February. This pushed the wheat to come out of dormancy early and (especially in the case of the wheat without roots past the first 6 inches) to joint early (any time a wheat plant is stressed it will speed up it's growth processes). While jointing does not completely stop tillering, it certainly puts it on the back burner. So we are left with patches in the field that essentially did not tiller, resulting in a very thin stand. It is good thing for me to remember that these are the places in the field where I actually succeeded in my goal of planting into moisture.

Next we have these patches of shorter, yellowish wheat:

With this "flame out" pattern on the leaf tips:
This is the result of a barley yellow dwarf infection. This is a wheat disease that is spread by aphids, most notoriously this fellow:
This is a bird cherry-oat aphid. BYD can also be spread by greenbugs, and we definately had greenbug activity earlier as you can see on this leaf:


This striping of the leaves is classic Russian wheat aphid damage:
Russian Wheat Aphids like to hang out towards the base of the leaf, so if you un-roll the rolled up leaf (another sign of RWAs) you can find them:
Here is some hail damaged wheat:

Here is an example of loose smut, which is a seed borne disease.:
This head is NOT from a seed production field! All of our seed production is planted with treated seed, which greatly reduces the occurrence of this disease.

Here is a little bit of (I think) freeze damage. Before I opened the spikelet in question, you would have seen that it was white. The arrow is pointing to the flower, which is dead. As you can see, the rest of the head is perfectly healthy. The flowers in each head don't all mature at the same rate, so it is normal to see a freeze to affect only parts of the head. This could also possibly be hail damage.

And here is an example of spray rig operator error. I guess Phil hadn't quite got the hang of his fancy new sprayer when he sprayed his fallow this spring.
And here is some damage from spray drift:
Corn herbicides and wheat fields don't mix very well.