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,
Crop scouting crop and field observations, comments and a field map. Crop scouting Crop scouting is the process of precisely assessing pest pressure (typically insects) and crop performance to evaluate economic risk from pest infestations and disease, as well as to determine the potential effectiveness of pest and disease control interventions. Scouting is usually sold as a commercial service to farmers as part of Integrated pest management. New tools are available to increase the effectiveness of crop scouting, including specialized field instruments and handheld computers with GPS, enabling geotagging of crop problems. There exists a new generation of crop scouting systems that