Crop diversity fruit trees and banana plants) are cloned. A single pest or disease could threaten a whole crop due to this uniformity ("genetic erosion"). A well-known historic case was the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1847, where a vital crop with low diversity was destroyed by a single fungus. Another example is when a disease caused by a fungus affected the monocultured 1970 US corn crop, causing a loss of over one billion dollars in production. A danger to agriculture is wheat rust, a pathogenic fungus causing reddish patches, coloured by its spores. A virulent form of the wheat disease, stem rust,
Cover crop season, they found that songbird densities were 7–20 times higher in the cotton fields with integrated clover cover crop than in the conventional cotton fields. Arthropod abundance and biomass was also higher in the clover cover cropped fields throughout much of the songbird breeding season, which was attributed to an increased supply of flower nectar from the clover. The clover cover crop enhanced songbird habitat by providing cover and nesting sites, and an increased food source from higher arthropod populations (Cederbaum et al. 2004). Cover crop A cover crop is a crop planted primarily to manage soil erosion, soil fertility,