by Tim Baker, Northwest Region Horticulture Specialist
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In my last column, I told the story of how we discovered a devastating bacterial disease of tomatoes in Missouri this year. This unfortunately included a number of growers that I work with. I’ll continue the story in this week’s column.
Before we continued our investigation, I felt that a lab diagnosis from one of the greenhouses that I worked with would be in order.
My second call had been from a grower who had a brand new multi-bay high tunnel. I felt that this would be a good case to submit for a lab analysis. As suspected, these tomatoes were also confirmed has having Bacterial Canker.
At this point, I knew that we had a major problem. I had visited a lot of growers whose tomatoes were showing signs of this disease. So I started asking growers what variety they were growing. These tomatoes were being grown in greenhouses, high tunnels, and in open fields. In every case, the same variety of tomato was being grown.
Statewide, this same tomato variety was found to have Bacterial Canker in several locations, including Versailles, Rich Hill and Clark. Only one other tomato variety was found with the disease, and we’re not sure how that happened. It may have spread to the second variety in the greenhouse.
At this point, Dr. Trinklein and all of us involved in the investigation strongly suspect that a single variety was involved. The bacterial organism was probably associated with a specific lot number of this variety. Our efforts at this point are directed toward identifying that lot number.
I’m not going to predict whether Bacterial Canker will be a problem next year for these growers or not. Conditions vary from year to year, and maybe this year provided the optimal environment for the spread of the disease, once introduced on a few plants.
However, given the history of Bacterial Canker infestations in other states, I would not be surprised if the disease stuck around to haunt us again next year.
In my next column, I will describe some of the concerns that growers will face, and measures they may want to consider to combat this devastating disease.