SCOTTS BLUFF COUNTY, Neb. – In a March article, I initiated the proposal that two major factors were responsible for the United States to consider producing and utilizing domestic sugarbeet seed rather than depending upon Europe as the seed source.
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SCOTTS BLUFF COUNTY, Neb. – In a March article, I initiated the proposal that two major factors were responsible for the United States to consider producing and utilizing domestic sugarbeet seed rather than depending upon Europe as the seed source.
I hypothesized the first factor was the First World War. Seeds were generally unavailable between 1914 and 1918 because the majority of the seeds previously used came from war-ravaged France and Germany.
For those who read the preceding article and are now precariously perched on the cliff wanting to know what that second factor was, I will reveal that it was a viral disease known as curly top. Around 1900, this disease was referred to as “blight.” It emerged as a significant threat to the establishment of the sugarbeet industry in the United States, particularly from the western growing areas. For the next three decades, it could have, and very nearly did, terminate beet production.
This one disease was responsible for the closure of numerous processing plants throughout the western United States, similar to the sugarbeet cyst nematode’s influence on European production in the second half of the 19th century.
The pathogen is identified
Curly top was among the first viral diseases recognized in the 1890s, but it was not until 1915 that a leafhopper (Circulifer tenellus) was identified as the vector for inoculation of the pathogen and spread of the disease. Furthermore, the disease was not confirmed to be caused by a virus until the mid-1970s with the improvement of viral purification methods and electron microscopy, allowing the virus particles to finally be observed.
Breeding for resistance begins
Because of the continued crop failures, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began a breeding program in the mid-1920s aimed at creating curly-top-resistant varieties for use in the intermountain West. USDA Plant Pathologist Eubanks Carsner was assigned to lead the investigations for this effort, and he began collecting seeds from individual surviving plants that expressed resistance within fields with high disease pressure. This method is referred to as mass selection, and by 1929 Congress had appropriated additional funds for continuing this line of research.