Foot rot of cereals

Abstract

An attempt has been made to find out the causes of 'Foot Rot' and 'Root Rot' of cereals and in this connection several fungi have been studied. Given proper conditions, almost all the fungi described in the text can cause 'Foot Rot' and in certain cases the disease may be very severe. The two genera Helminthosporium and Fusarium embrace the chief causal organisms, and the other fungi are also of importance, if they be present in large amounts. Only a few fungi have been discussed here and owing to the limited scope of the present work a lot of these organisms could not be studied in detail. Species of Septoria and Alternaria have been isolated regularly from diseased plants, and in infection experiments Septoria sp. caused a serious seedling blight. For the control of the diseases described in this account several experiments have been carried out, but owing to the limited scope of the experiments the results obtained cannot be recommended for use on a large scale.All the information given in this work is the outcome of original investigations, except in the case of Fusarium where a little help has been taken from the literature in making certain general statements. The description of all the fungi is original, and all the infection experiments described here have been carried out during the course of this this work, and the interpretation of their results is strictly. original.Observations in the fields and experiments in the laboratory lead me to the conclusion that the chief cause of 'Foot Rot' is infection of the cereals by species of Fusarium. The rest of the fungi though capable of producing a similar disease are not very. common. Species of Helminthosporium come next in the scale of the cereal pathogens causing 'Foot Rot'.