Persistent Fungus Puts Blight on Grain Farmers

Any beer drinker who knew what’s been in David Vilmo’s barley crop the last few years would take pause.

It’s known as vomitoxin. Although it won’t have the effect the name suggests, no brewer will buy his barley.

“It’s a public relations nightmare,” said Vilmo, who farms near Ada, Minn.

Vomitoxin and the grain fungus that produces it have devastated wheat and barley growers in the Upper Midwest, costing them $200 million to $400 million a year and pushing thousands to the edge of bankruptcy, economists say. Minnesota and the Dakotas, where U.S. brewers once obtained three-quarters of their malting barley, have lost most of the market.

Alarmed, the government is ready to fund a crash research program designed to control the vomitoxin fungus, known as fusarium head blight or scab, and develop resistant strains of grain.

An agricultural research bill that President Clinton signed into law in June authorized $26 million for scab research at Agriculture Department and university laboratories over the next five years.

The first $3-million installment is included in 1999 USDA spending bills now moving through Congress. That’s six times what the government is spending on scab research this year, but scientists warn that it still could be at least four to five years before new scab-free strains of wheat and barley are commercially available.

Rick Ward, a Michigan State University professor helping lead the research, calls scab “one of the most intractable diseases” that agricultural scientists have ever encountered.

The research will involve at least 100 scientists looking into various possibilities for controlling the disease, including genetic engineering, new cultivation practices and better fungicides, Ward said.

Although it has been around at least a century, the fungus was no threat in the wheat belt until the 1990s. Agronomists attribute its appearance to a combination of excessive moisture and new soil conservation methods in which farmers leave crop stubble in the field instead of plowing it under after harvest.

The fungus spends the winter in the stubble, then splashes onto next year’s crop if there is a lot of rain. At certain times of day, farmers say, the salmon-colored spores can give a wheat field a pink glow.

Scab epidemics are most severe in western Minnesota and the Dakotas, but they have been reported for six years in at least a dozen states as far east as Ohio. The cost to the farm economy is an estimated $3 billion.

Some farmers desperate to stop the infection have gone back to plowing under their crop stubble, an idea that’s anathema to conservationists, who fear the exposed soil will erode and carry farm chemicals into nearby streams. Agronomists say plowing does no good anyway: The spores will just blow back from a neighbor’s farm.

In wheat, the fungus can reduce yields by more than half. After five consecutive years of infected crops, many farmers say they can’t get crop insurance or credit they need to stay in business. USDA estimates North Dakota has lost 1,400 farms since January and may lose another 1,440 next year.

The vomitoxin does no harm to humans but in excessive amounts can make livestock sick. Brewers won’t buy barley that has even minute traces, because they suspect it causes beer to spew out of the bottle or can and also taints the taste.

Brewers have had to buy more expensive barley from Canada or the West to supply their malting plants, nearly all of which are in Minnesota and North Dakota. Anheuser-Busch Inc., which owns a malting plant near Moorhead, Minn., says brewers are absorbing the extra expense.

Meanwhile, farmers in the Upper Midwest say they are losing up to a dollar a bushel on infected barley that is now good only for livestock feed. In northwest Minnesota, barley is going for $1.30 a bushel, reducing farmers’ incomes to what they were making in the early 1970s, Vilmo said.

“It would be the same as someone who lives in town trying to pay for the house payment, car payment and make all their living expenses and making what they made 25 years ago,” he said.