Small Grains Disease Risk Assessment Tools (A Sad Farewell for Now)

For almost two decades the Minnesota Wheat Research & Promotion Council and the Minnesota Association of Wheat Growers funded the  mawg.cropdisease.com disease risk assessment tool for Fusarium head blight and the three economically most important fungal leaf diseases of wheat. These weather-driven models estimated the risk of initial infections for each of those diseases. The unique feature of mawg.cropdisease.com was that it was the first of its kind to use forecasted weather to estimate the risk up to 48 hours in advance.

The website is going offline by the end of this month. I will not bore you with the details of the why. The goal of the Minnesota Wheat Research & Promotion Council and the Minnesota Association of Wheat Growers provide a similar service in 2022.  

For now, you will have to rely on other sources for the disease risk assessment for wheat. One option is the NDSU/NDAWN system.  The NDAWN mesoscale weather network is expanding further into Minnesota with a dozen or so new stations having been added in just the past twelve months. South Dakota State University has built up its mesonet weather network too and now includes the small grains disease risk models as well.   The NDAWN mesonet covers Northwest Minnesota and the I- 94 corridor, while the SDSU mesonet will be useful for the counties neighboring the South Dakota border. 

Finally - Penn State hosts the national Fusarium Risk Tool which is funded by the US Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative.