The path of Heterodera glycines, a pallid roundworm known to farmers everywhere as the soybean cyst nematode, leaves a trail of financial hardship way out of proportion to its ultra-diminutive size. How much?
Try $1.286 billion in crop losses each year, estimates nematode expert J. Allen Wrather.
Wrather is a professor and plant pathologist at MU’s Delta Research Center. He recently conducted a study of diseases affecting soybean production in the United States from 2006 to 2009. When it comes to soybean loss, he found, the cyst nematode is truly in a league of its own.
Reviewed 2013-02-18