| he ancient Romans had a legend about a malicious boy who tormented a fox by tying wheat straw to its tail and then setting the straw on fire. The Roman god of crop protection, Robigus, was so irritated that he penalized humanity with wheat rust, the fungal disease that leaves a farmer’s field looking as though it has been burned. For hundreds of years afterward, the Romans sought to pacify Robigus by sacrificing dogs or cows with the misfortune of being born with rust-colored fur.
Modern farmers make sacrifices over crop diseases, too. Often profits are sacrificed to prevent damage from a host of fungal rascals with names such as black rot, club root, sclerotina blight, wire stem, sudden death syndrome, brown spot, charcoal rot and head blight. Not | |
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|  | | | all fungal players are destructive, though— opportunities also exist to harness beneficial fungi as remedies for these costly agricultural rascals. The many well-documented benefits of mycorrhizal fungi include improving crop nutrients, water uptake, disease resistance, carbon content and soil structure. These fungi can also improve crop yields and decrease costs for fertilizer and water.
THE FUNGUS RASCAL
Robigus, the god that brought us fungus, can be a rascal with a real appetite. While urban dwellers fear common maladies such as itchy toes and moldy bread, farmers face far more serious fungal diseases that can inflict widespread damage on a farm. For example, scientists estimated soybean disease losses for the 1994 crop from 10 countries with the greatest | |
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| | | | soybean production. The total loss of yield due to disease was 14.99 million metric tons, valued at a whopping $3.31 billion.
Certain Fusarium fungal species are among the most dangerous cereal crop diseases in the world, with a dramatic increase of infection witnessed in the early 1990s. The ability of this disease to form toxins poisonous to both humans and animals makes it a serious problem.
Another disease, damping-off, caused by Pythium and Rhizoctonia fungi, affects agricultural seedlings growing in flats or in the farmers field. Damping-off disease attacks young seedlings just prior to emergence or topples them a few days afterwards. When older seedlings are attacked by Rhizoctonia, the lower stem becomes | |
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