In the wake of heightened wheat concern in the Nebraska Panhandle in 2023, this year brings positive news: The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is releasing a new wheat variety, NE Prism CLP, that stands out for its resistance to fungal disease, including fusarium head blight.

Last spring, Husker faculty members Katherine Frels and Stephen Wegulo began receiving concerned phone calls from Nebraska wheat growers. Something strange, the callers said, was going on in wheat fields in parts of the Panhandle.

The farmers were seeing field conditions they hadn’t encountered before: Their winter wheat had reached maturity, but the kernels had none of their familiar golden color and robust appearance. Instead, they were bleached and sickly.

Tombstones, such kernels are called — blighted irreparably by fungal assault.

The culprit was fusarium head blight, a notoriously destructive plant disease rarely seen in western Nebraska. The disease, also known as scab, undercuts yield and contaminates the grain with mycotoxins harmful to humans and animals.

“Producers were caught off-guard,” said Frels, Nebraska’s small grains breeder and an assistant professor of agronomy and horticulture.

The Panhandle region, which produces more than half of the state’s wheat, is normally free of the disease because that part of the state rarely receives enough rain to trigger the release of harmful fungal spores during wheat flowering.

But 2023 was not a normal year.

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