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Microscopic worms to the cranberry rescue
USDA ARS
Nematodes with a taste for insect innards may offer cranberry growers a natural alternative to fighting hungry crop pests with chemical insecticides.
Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and University of Wisconsin (UW) are now exploring the possibility in field trials.
They ve set their sights on redheaded flea beetles, Sparganothis fruitworms and other cranberry pests that attack the cranberry plant itself or its tart-tasting fruit. Severe infestations can force growers to apply insecticides, ratcheting up their production costs. Developing alternative controls as part of an integrated pest management approach can reduce or replace the need for insecticides, noted Shawn Steffan, an entomologist with the ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit in Madison, Wisconsin.
March 16, 2021 |
Distant cousins of cultivated potato may hold the key to unlocking new sources of resistance to the tuber crop’s most devastating disease, late blight.
That’s the hope of a team of USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS), who conducted laboratory trials in which they exposed the leaves of 72 different species of wild potato to spores of the late blight pathogen
Phytophthora infestans the same culprit that triggered the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.
Late blight remains a worldwide threat today to not only potato, but also tomato crops, inflicting an estimated $6.7 billion annually in yield losses and control costs. In susceptible varieties, the fungus-like pathogen causes dark lesions and other disease symptoms that rapidly destroy the plant’s leaves, stem, fruit or tubers, noted Dennis Halterman, a plant geneticist with the ARS Vegetable
Distant cousins of cultivated potato may hold the key to unlocking new sources of resistance to the tuber crop s most devastating disease, late blight.
Wild potatoes help cultivated ones resist late blight farmprogress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from farmprogress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.