Chandigarh, January 8
The Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, survey teams have traced the attack of the yellow rust, a disease that can cause tremendous loss to wheat yield, on the wheat crop at Dabkhera Upparala village of Anandpur Sahib block in Ropar district. Another detection of this disease has been made in a wheat field at Bara Bajwara village along the Hoshiarpur-Una road.

A PAU spokesman said, “The disease manifests as yellow coloured, powdery linear stripes on the leaves. When touched with fingers, yellow coloured spore mass sticks to the fingers, which is a conspicuous criteria for disease identification”. The PAU teams had visited the disease prone sub-mountainous areas of Ropar, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar and Hoshiarpur yesterday.

A PAU spokesman says, “In the event of yellow rust symptoms, farmers should go for spot application of Tilt or Shine or Bumper or Folicur @ one ml in one litre of water or Bayleton @ one gram in one litre of water. The farmers are advised to use cone type of nozzle for spray of fungicides”.

The PAU has suggested that farmers in sub-mountainous districts of Punjab should be extra careful in monitoring their wheat fields for detection of yellow rust and take timely control measures in order to check the spread of disease to other areas.