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Farmers, Gardeners can Help Root Out a New Nematode that Spreads Aggressively in Vegetable Crops

Farmers, Gardeners can Help Root Out a New Nematode that Spreads Aggressively in Vegetable Crops

How can you help stop a plant pest?

As they check their fields and gardens this summer, growers are the first line of defense in preventing the spread of a microscopic worm threatening vegetable crops in the Southeast, including sweet potatoes.

The guava root-knot nematode — Meloidogyne enterolobii or M.e., for short — spreads aggressively and causes more severe damage than other nematode species, says Paula Agudelo, a Clemson University expert on plant diseases and their management. M.e. causes abnormal root growth, creating galls on root crops such as sweet potatoes, and it can infect many other crops, including watermelon, tomato, pepper, carrot, squash, cucumber, soybean, cotton and tobacco.

“M.e. can cause big crop losses and pose a risk to exports,” Agudelo says. “It is critical for commercial growers and home gardeners to learn what M.e. looks like so that they can prevent and manage the problem.”

M.e. has been found in 13 counties in North Carolina and one in South Carolina since 2019, triggering quarantines and regulations on out-of-state shipments of sweet potato seed and slips. South Carolina, Florida and Puerto Rico have confirmed cases, and monitoring is underway in Louisiana and Georgia, though it hasn’t been found there yet.

Clemson University is part of a multistate FINDMe team, along with scientists from North Carolina State University, the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. The U.S. SweetPotato Council, South Carolina Watermelon Association, and Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association are partners.

Source : clemson.edu

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Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.