Extension Spotlight

Overuse of a crop leads to long term promotion of its pests and diseases. While disaster is frequently averted with breeding efforts and good IPM. A national scale failure of a crop is always a possibility. In the United States, the corn leaf blight epidemic of 1970 was a large-scale agricultural disaster. In Ireland a combination of potato blight, economic abuses of the British empire and overuse of a single crop led to the Great Famine. More recently much of Texas’ grain sorghum crop was destroyed by the sugarcane aphid. Alfalfa is easily the most frequently used legume for hay. Some varieti...