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CapitalPress.com
June 16, 2017
Idaho
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Ag dean wants to elevate University of Idaho
By CAROL RYAN DUMAS
Capital Press
TWIN FALLS, Idaho —
There’s been a lot of excite-
ment lately surrounding re-
newed efforts to establish a
world-class livestock research
center in the Magic Valley.
But that’s just one part of
the University of Idaho’s plan
to elevate the land-grant insti-
tution to the upper echelon of
agricultural colleges.
The man behind the plan is
Michael Parrella, dean of the
College of Agricultural and
Life Sciences.
“The college has great
people doing great things, but
we’re at the second tier,” he
said.
He wants to up the game,
moving the college forward to
compete with top-tier ag col-
leges such as Cornell Univer-
sity and the University of Cal-
ifornia-Davis. The question is
how to do it, he said.
It starts with the college’s
strengths — its diversity,
Carol Ryan Dumas/Capital Press
Michael Parrella, right, dean of the College of Agricultural and Life
Sciences at the University of Idaho, talks with Brent Olmstead, the
college’s assistant dean for government and external relations, in
Twin Falls on May 31.
strong research and curricu-
lums and industry and com-
munity outreach. But its sal-
aries aren’t commensurate
with universities across the
country, its research facilities
are antiquated and its educa-
tional offerings need to be
expanded, he said. Moving
the college forward will take
solutions in those areas.
While there’s no new uni-
versity money to be had, Par-
rella is convinced the mission
can be accomplished.
His plan is all about re-
newal — renewal of faculty,
facilities and programs.
About 25 percent of the
college’s faculty will retire in
the next couple of years, and
that offers the opportunity to
recruit early-career faculty
motivated for success.
“We want to hire people
with the vision of them be-
coming a functioning faculty
member,” he said.
That means creative and
diverse individuals who can
write grants, bring in fund-
ing, develop laboratories
and applicable research,
mentor undergraduate and
graduate students, develop
new courses and new pro-
grams and interact with in-
dustry and the community,
he said.
“We want to hire the indi-
viduals who are willing to do
all these things,” he said.
With limited funding for
salaries, and a situation where
early-career faculty are earn-
ing as much as mid-career
faculty — which has resulted
in a morale issue that must
be addressed — he wants to
move the college to an incen-
tive-based compensation sys-
tem, he said.
He plans to put together a
budget with metrics that pro-
vide incentives for faculty
by addressing pay discrepan-
cies and by providing partial
graduate student support in
partnership with commodity
groups and other funding or-
ganizations.
“The base of any univer-
sity is the faculty, and the
most important position is the
department head … the buck
stops there,” he said.
The college is already
searching for four new de-
partment heads, three of them
for new departments that will
launch this summer, and sev-
eral other faculty positions.
The three new depart-
ments — Plant Sciences; Soil
and Water Systems; and Ento-
mology, Plant Pathology and
Nematology — will better
serve students by offering un-
dergraduate majors and better
serve industry and the com-
munity by matching programs
to modern needs, he said.
In addition, research facil-
ities are outdated and need to
be renovated. Old facilities
make it difficult to recruit
early-career faculty. The big
issue is field facilities. Half
of the college’s 230 faculty
members are off campus, he
said.
“I look at that as a strength
and not a weakness” —
they’re in the community ful-
filling the land-grant mission,
he said.
But it also presents a chal-
lenge. Idaho is a big state, and
the college needs to improve
communication and empha-
size the value of the off-cam-
pus facilities. In addition to
shifting university funding
to update those facilities, the
college will need help from
industry and the Legislature,
he said.
“We have limited funding
in the college, and we have
to leverage every dollar we
have,” he said.
Researchers investigate scanners
for diagnosing zebra chip disease
Fall-planted wheat
faces unusual threat
By JOHN O’CONNELL
Capital Press
By JOHN O’CONNELL
Capital Press
Courtesy of Juliet Marshall
Fall wheat sampled in south-
east Idaho displays symptoms
of eyespot disease, including
lesions near the bases of plant
stalks. Eyespot is widespread
this season within the region.
irrigated crops from eyespot,
but most dryland crops should
be in the jointing stage.
Cathy Wilson, director of
research collaboration with
the Idaho Wheat Commission,
said eyespot has never been
listed as a disease of interest
on the commission’s grower
surveys because “it is not typ-
ically a problem here.”
Kurt Schroeder, a UI crop-
ping systems agronomist,
confirmed eyespot on fall
wheat at the university re-
search farm in Moscow. He
said infection was widespread
in a field planted in October,
but a field planted the follow-
ing month was clean.
“It’s one of these diseases
where unless you’re looking
for it, it’s not the easiest to
see,” Schroeder said.
Tim Murray, a small grains
pathologist with Washington
State University Extension,
said eyespot is fairly common
in Eastern Washington and
parts of Oregon.
He said laboratory testing
has confirmed some severe
infections in Washington,
though most growers are
focusing their attention on
stripe rust. He expects grow-
ers to become aware of eye-
spot soon, when grain begins
to lodge. Murray anticipates
a bad year for eyespot due to
the wet fall, though he not-
ed many growers in his area
plant resistant varieties.
ROP-40-42-4/#17
IDAHO FALLS — Wide-
spread infections of an un-
common fungal disease have
been reported in southeast
Idaho fall wheat.
University of Idaho Exten-
sion cereals pathologist Juliet
Marshall said an unusually
wet fall followed by a cool,
wet spring has contributed to
flare-ups of eyespot — a form
of root rot that weakens the
bases of stems and often caus-
es wheat stalks to tip over, or
lodge, complicating harvest.
Marshall confirmed eye-
spot in irrigated and dryland
fields spanning from Arbon
Valley to the Blackfoot area.
“We are seeing some
symptoms that would reduce
yield pretty significantly, and
pretty widespread through the
fields,” Marshall said, adding
the worst cases have occurred
in early planted fall wheat.
“I would expect yields to be
reduced 20 to 40 percent, de-
pending on the severity.”
Marshall said eyespot last
caused widespread problems
in the region during a few wet
years in the mid-2000s. The
fungus can survive on crop
residue. Though it thrives in
excessive moisture, Marshall
said dryland farms can be at
risk, where limited rotational
options lead growers to plant
wheat in consecutive seasons.
Symptoms may include
reduced production of shoots,
called tillers, dwarfed plants,
white grain heads and eye-
shaped lesions at plant bases.
“It’s not something the
growers are usually planning
for or trying to correct for be-
cause we only see it in years
of a lot of moisture,” she said.
She’s also confirmed some
cases of pythium root rot,
which doesn’t usually con-
tribute to lodging and seldom
causes white heads.
Marshall said growers who
notice eyespot should apply a
mixture of propiconazole and
Topsin M when stems begin to
elongate, called jointing. She
said it may already be too late
to apply fungicide to protect
ABERDEEN, Idaho —
Researchers are studying
the reflections of various
light wavelengths off zebra
chip-infected potatoes, seek-
ing to devise a quicker and
more precise method of quan-
tifying the disease’s preva-
lence.
Zebra chip — caused by
the Liberibacter bacterium
and spread by tiny, winged
insects called potato psyllids
— creates bands in tuber flesh
that darken during frying. The
disease first surfaced in the
Northwest in 2011.
University of Idaho Ex-
tension entomologist Arash
Rashed explained processors
have been slicing random
samples from truckloads of
potatoes to check for zebra
chip. Spuds are subjectively
scored from zero, represent-
ing no signs of infection, to 3
based on zebra chip severity.
Rashed said the approach
is far from foolproof and can
sometimes result in the rejec-
tion of spuds that would meet
quality specifications, or the
acceptance of tubers with la-
tent infections that exhibit
poor quality in processing.
For the past two months,
Rashed and his collaborators
have been using a spectrom-
eter — a device that records
signatures of reflected light
wavelengths — to evaluate
infected tubers from other UI
zebra chip experiments for
comparison with healthy tu-
bers. Xi Liang, a UI cropping
systems agronomist, is assist-
ing with spectrometer analy-
John O’Connell/Capital Press
Zhiguo Zhao, a visiting scientist from China at the University of Idaho Aberdeen Research and Exten-
sion Center, prepares to take an infrared scan of potatoes infected with zebra chip disease. Zhao is
developing a computer model to simplify and improve the diagnosis of the extent of infections.
sis, and Zhiguo Zhao, a vis-
iting scientist from China, is
developing a computer mod-
el, based on the data, to pre-
dict the progression of zebra
chip infection without frying.
“In research, I can see giv-
ing a more meaningful mea-
sure of disease,” Rashed said.
“For industry, the short-term
benefit is to predict quality
loss after storage and process-
ing based on tubers that are
just harvested.”
Rashed said Zhao’s soft-
ware should also enable
the industry to estimate the
growth stage in which infec-
tions occurred and predict the
further development of zebra
chip symptoms in storage.
Rashed said the research
has been funded mostly from
his general laboratory budget,
and he hopes to have initial
results in October to justify
a larger grant. He anticipates
working with UI Extension
storage specialist Nora Olsen
on storage trials using Zhao’s
model. Sean Prager, with the
University of Saskatchewan,
Rodney Cooper, a research
entomologist with USDA Ag-
ricultural Research Service in
Wapato, Wash., and Rashed’s
Ph.D. student, Karin Cruzado,
have also been involved .
Cooper trained Rashed’s
team to use infrared imaging
equipment. The researchers
hope thermal infrared signatures
will also enable them to detect
zebra chip in uncut tubers.
“It looks like it’s going
to be really promising tech-
nology to be able to identify
diseased tubers in a batch,”
Cooper said. “It could be ex-
tremely useful to both grow-
ers and researchers.”
Deputy state AG: Wheat
commission rule change
proposal on solid ground
Psyllid tests positive for
zebra chip in Kimberly
By SEAN ELLIS
KIMBERLY, Idaho — A
potato psyllid captured at the
University of Idaho’s Kim-
berly Research and Exten-
sion Center has tested pos-
itive for the bacterium that
causes zebra chip disease in
potatoes, entomologist Erik
Wenninger confirmed on
June 1.
Zebra chip — caused
by the Liberibacter bacte-
rium and spread by tiny,
winged insects called psyl-
lids — first surfaced in
Idaho and the Northwest in
2011. It reduces yields but
poses the greatest nuisance
by creating bands in tuber
flesh that darken during
frying.
Since the arrival of zebra
chip, UI has overseen an ex-
tensive potato field monitor-
ing network, making weekly
collections of sticky traps
set up along field borders to
detect the arrival of psyllids,
which are tested for infec-
tion.
Wenninger said a hand-
Capital Press
BOISE — The Idaho
Wheat Commission is on sol-
id footing in trying to obtain
the names and contact infor-
mation of all wheat growers
in Idaho, a state deputy attor-
ney general told commission-
ers.
That message came as the
commission prepares to hold
a second round of negotiat-
ed rule-making meetings on
a change that would require
first purchasers of Idaho
wheat, such as elevators, to
submit the names and con-
tact information of all wheat
growers to the commission.
The commission is re-
quired by its enabling legis-
lation to educate growers and
hold periodic referendums to
gauge whether wheat farm-
ers approve of the way the
commission is spending their
checkoff dollars.
But because only 12 of the
state’s 20 largest elevators
submit that information, “We
Sean Ellis/Capital Press File
A wheat field in southern Idaho
is shown in this 2016 photo.
State Deputy Attorney General
Kay Christensen told Idaho
Wheat Commission members
that their plan to ensure the
IWC has the names and contact
information of all Idaho wheat
growers in on solid legal ground.
are not able to fulfill the duties
we have under our enabling
legislation,” IWC Executive
Director Blaine Jacobson said
during the commission’s reg-
ular quarterly meeting June 6.
State statute gives the
commission authority to have
the names and contact infor-
mation of wheat growers but
the commission currently
lacks the mechanism to col-
lect them.
By JOHN O’CONNELL
Capital Press
ful of additional psyl-
lids were also captured in
late May from a field in
Twin Falls County and a
pair of fields in Minidoka
County.
Wenninger said the first
infected psyllid of 2016 was
also confirmed during early
June, from a sample collect-
ed in late May.
“We had more psyllids
last year than in all of the
previous years combined,
but the amount of Liberib-
acter was quite low,” Wen-
ninger, said.
He said UI hopes to com-
pile data from its monitoring
program to develop a predic-
tive tool for psyllid and ze-
bra chip pressure.
“Every year seems to be
a little different, and it’s
hard to say based on the
first viewed samples what’s
going to happen this year,”
Wenninger said.
Wenninger
said
the
scouting program will in-
volve routine collections
of trap cards from 80 fields
throughout Idaho’s potato
production areas.