Sprinkler system helps researchers fight wheat
blight
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Herb Ohm used 11,000 feet of plastic tubing to irrigate
his wheat test plot at the Purdue Agronomy Farm so that a fungus
would thrive. (photo by Tom Campbell)
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By TOM CAMPBELL
To passing motorists, a small portion of the Purdue University Agronomy
Research Center looks more like an artistŐs expression than a scientistŐs
research tool.
A thousand white plastic pipes, each four feet tall, emerge from the
prairie at eight-foot intervals. A nozzle on each showers a thousand
times as many wheat plants with a cool, fine mist of water.
But this isn't art. It is the work of Purdue agronomist Herb Ohm, graduate
assistant Jim Uphaus and technician Dan McFatridge.
The trio assembled the one-of-a-kind fungus irrigation system for the
first time last year. This year, Ohm doubled the coverage size, using
11,000 feet of pipe to cover a 1.5-acre wheat nursery.
The objective of the misting system is not to nourish the plant, but
to promote growth of a fungus that could kill the very wheat the system
wets.
"Fusarium head blight is the number one concern of wheat farmers,"
says Ohm, "particularly in the Midwest."
The plants infected with the fungus on the agronomy farm pose no threat
of spreading the disease to surrounding farms, according to Uphaus.
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