Word: funguses
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...many, many years," gloated Delmar Grotefendt, surveying the fields of ripe golden corn on his 350-acre farm in Marine, Ill. Only last year corn blight, which destroyed 15% of the nation's corn harvest, rotted black much of Grotefendt's planting. Farmers feared that the virulent fungus might ruin up to half the crop this summer. Yet last week, a mood of quiet satisfaction was evident across the U.S. heartland as farmers began bringing in one of the most bountiful harvests in history...
Perfect Weather. A big factor in checking the blight was the unusually dry weather in July and August that deprived the fungus of life-giving moisture. The cornbelt states of Illinois, Nebraska and Iowa, which were badly plagued in 1970, escaped with only light damage this summer. "The weather was perfect," says Wyne Englehardt, who grows corn and wheat on a 4,000-acre farm near Oakley, Kans. Many farmers in Southern states where leaf disease broke out in 1970 planted blight-resistant seeds this year. Thus the spores could not accumulate and be blown North to infect fields there...
...Next time I'm planning to get exotic," he says. "Things like canned rice birds -they're sort of like squab-and white fungus and the interior of bamboo shoots." M-m-m good. Is Chung-King worried...
Finding a remedy is complicated by the fact that the truffle is a mysterious fungus related to the mushroom, growing mostly on the roots of certain scrub oaks, usually five or six inches underground. Wet summers, a decline in oak planting and the unpredictable nature of the truffle itself have all contributed to its increasing scarcity...
...best cure may be not chemical but genetic. The Brazilian government has stocked a 25-acre test plot with new varieties of coffee plants, hoping to find some that will be more resistant to the fungus than Coffea arabica, the most popular type grown in Brazil. Unfortunately, researchers have not yet perfected a variety that combines disease resistance with good taste. So far, says Wellman, "the coffee that the fungus loves best is also the one we like best...