Houston Chronicle, TX
08-28-06
Soybean disease hits Texas
By TONY C. DREIBUS
Bloomberg
A potentially devastating soybean disease was found for the first time on crops
planted this year in Texas, the government said.
The disease, Asian rust, was found Sunday on crops in Liberty County, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture said Monday in a statement on its Web site. Texas is
the 25th-largest soybean growing state, producing 5.98 million bushels last year.
Click to learn more...
Researchers first discovered the disease in the U.S. in Louisiana in November
2004 and have yet to detect it in the main soybean-growing regions of the
Midwest. Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota produced 41 percent of the U.S. crop last
year.
"The disease will have considerable difficulty getting here regardless of what
happens in the southern U.S.," said Emerson Nafziger, an agronomist with the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Asian rust had previously been found in Texas on kudzu and in soybean fields
that had already been harvested.
The significance of the disease on live soybean plants is that wind-borne spores
are more likely to move to Illinois and Iowa from Texas than from southeastern
states where it was first discovered, said Iowa State University plant
pathologists in the April 3 Integrated Crop Management newsletter.