Watching for fungus

Published 5:00 am Sunday, June 19, 2005

MADRAS – Central Oregon’s garlic industry may be down, but it’s not out yet.

One year after a killer fungus known as ”white rot” hit a record number of local fields, farmers in the area haven’t seen a single outbreak of the garlic- and onion-killing blight this season.

”What a difference a year makes,” Martin Zimmerman, a state crop inspector, said on Thursday. ”I think we’ll still have some garlic industry left.”

Last year, it seemed that uncontrolled outbreaks of the fungus could end Central Oregon’s potent garlic industry for good and cost the region yet another cash crop. White rot appears to have slowed its spread for now, thanks to stricter measures to contain the fungus and new strategies for eradicating it.

White rot, or Sclerotium cepivorum, comes alive during cool, wet months to attack the root systems of garlic plants, covering them in white, fluffy strands spotted with poppy-seed-like reproductive bodies. Within a field, the strands spread from plant to plant, potentially destroying entire crops.

It spreads easily to new fields, usually hitching a ride on muddy farm equipment. Left undisturbed, the fungus can stay in a field for decades until an unsuspecting farmer plants a new crop of the pungent plant. And every new garlic planting in an infested field, spreads the fungus, making it less likely farmers will ever grow garlic there again.

Garlic is one of the few high-value crops left in Central Oregon, despite being farmed on relatively few acres. The spice yielded $3.75 million for Central Oregon farmers in 2004, according to Oregon State University statistics. It was the third-most farmed seed crop in the region, with 2,289 acres in production, according to OSU. In the past, peppermint and sugar beets filled the niche, before disappearing in the face of disease and foreign competition.

Central Oregon farmers sell their garlic cloves to commercial growers in California, who produce about two-thirds of the nation’s garlic crop. Because the fungus spreads so easily, California growers won’t accept a single clove from a field where even a few plants die of the rot. That fear of contamination costs Central Oregon farmers far more than the actual number of plants killed, said OSU researcher Fred Crowe.

In California, 12,000 acres are now out of garlic production because of white rot, said Robert Ehn, of Ag Consulting LLC, which represents the California garlic industry. Nationwide, garlic is planted on about 32,000 acres, said Ehn, who visited Madras on Friday to view Crowe’s research on containing the fungus.

Statewide, up to 2,000 acres may be contaminated with white rot, estimated Crowe, one of the world’s leading authorities on the disease. In 2004, the Oregon Department of Agriculture found 21 outbreaks of the fungus, in a survey of 2,000 acres. So far this year, in 850 acres surveyed, it hasn’t found one outbreak, Zimmerman said.

Local farmers and experts credit a policy of planting only on ”virgin lands” that haven’t been used for garlic in the past, with seed that’s certified as rot-free by the state. They tried to use that policy last year, said Crowe, but this time around farmers put more research into the history of the fields they planted.

Wes Hagman, a partner in H and T Farms in Culver, credited the certification program for keeping his fields fungus free this year, after the rot struck his 55 acres of garlic hard in 2004.

”Last year we had major portions of the crop lost,” Hagman said. He planted just 40 acres of garlic this year, down from near 100 acres in the mid-1990s.

Even farmers who haven’t been hit yet become nervous at the mere mention of the killer fungus.

”That’s a bad word you know,” said Catherine Avila, when asked if her family’s fields had been contaminated with white rot. They haven’t, but the Avilas are running out of new places to plant cloves, she said.

That’s made Crowe’s research on killing the fungus more valuable lately. After decades of simply abandoning regions that were struck by white rot, garlic producers are just about out of room to run, Ehn said. At the OSU research station in Madras, Crowe experiments with fungicides and natural methods to knock white rot down to manageable levels.

The most effective tools for controlling the blight are a fungicide known as Folicur and natural or synthetic garlic juice, which is applied to fields before planting. Folicur may soon be approved for use on garlic, after being held up for a few years over environmental concerns, Crowe said.

The garlic juice works by fooling white rot into germinating and dying off before cloves are planted, but it’s been too expensive to use widely. Now Crowe is experimenting with adding small concentrations of the juice to irrigation water to make the treatment affordable for farmers. He thinks it has promise.

”A sensitive person can taste one to 10 parts per million of garlic juice,” Crowe said. ”If a person can taste it, the fungus surely can.”

But for farmers like Hagman, who are being squeezed by Chinese garlic imports and falling prices for their crops, Crowe’s solution may arrive too late.

”It’s becoming less and less profitable,” Hagman said. ”We may just quit on garlic.”

Keith Chu can be reached at 541-383-0348 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com.