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The next pandemic could strike

crops, not people
Genetic uniformity is central to modern farming.
It leaves us vulnerable to plant disease breakouts. Grist / Getty Images

Saima Sidik
Contributing writer

Published Aug 22, 2023

Topic Climate + Agriculture

Nobody really knows how the fungus Bipolaris maydis got into
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the corn elds of the United States. But by summer of 1970, it was
there with a vengeance, in icting a disease called southern corn To support our nonpro t
leaf blight, which causes stalks to wither and die. The South got environmental
hit rst, then the disease spread through Tennessee and Kentucky journalism, please
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The destruction was unprecedented. All told, the corn harvest of
1970 was reduced by about 15 percent. Collectively, farmers lost
almost 700 million bushels of corn that could have fed livestock
and humans, at an economic cost of a billion dollars. More
calories were lost than during Ireland’s Great Famine in the 1840s,
when disease decimated potato elds.
Really, the problem with southern corn leaf blight started years
before the 1970 outbreak, when scientists in the 1930s developed a
strain of corn with a genetic quirk that made it a breeze for seed
companies to crank out. Farmers liked the strain’s high yields. By
the 1970s, that particular variety formed the genetic basis for up to
90 percent of the corn grown around the country, compared to the
thousands of varieties farmers had grown previously.
That particular strain of corn — known as cms-T — proved highly
susceptible to southern corn leaf blight. So, when an unusually
warm, wet spring favored the fungus, it had an overabundance of
corn plants to burn through.

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At the time, scientists hoped a lesson had been learned.

“Never again should a major cultivated species be molded into
such uniformity that it is so universally vulnerable to attack by a
pathogen,” wrote plant pathologist Arnold John Ullstrup in a
review of the matter published in 1972.
And yet, today, genetic uniformity is one of the main features of
most large-scale agricultural systems, leading some scientists to
warn that conditions are ripe for more major outbreaks of plant
disease.

There are several strains of corn blight, which can a ect crops. Southern corn blight was blamed for
the corn shortfall of 1970. Northern corn blight, seen here, produces di erent markings on the
diseased leaves. Getty Images

“I think we have all the conditions for a pandemic in agricultural

systems to occur,” said agricologist Miguel Altieri, a professor
emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley. Hunger and
economic hardship would likely ensue.

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Climate change adds to the danger — shifting weather patterns are

on track to shake up the distributions of pathogens and bring
them into contact with new plant species, potentially making
crop disease much worse, said Brajesh Singh, an expert in soil
science at Western Sydney University in Australia.

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Incorporating biodiversity into large-scale farming could move

agriculture away from this crisis. Here and there, some farmers are
taking steps in this direction. But will their e orts become
widespread — and what will happen if they don’t?
Farms cover close to 40 percent of the planet’s land, according to a
2019 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform
on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Almost 50 percent of
those systems are made up of just four crops: wheat, corn, rice,
and soybeans. Disease is commonplace — globally, $30 billion
worth of food is lost to pathogens every year.

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Things were not always this way. As the 1900s dawned in the
United States, for instance, food was produced by humans, not
machines — more than 40 percent of the American workforce was
employed on a multitude of small farms growing a wide range of
crop varieties. The British Empire sparked the shift toward today’s
industrialized food system, said historian Lizzie Collingham, who
wrote the book Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food.
By the early 1900s, the British Empire had learned that it could
“basically treat the whole planet as a resource for its population,”
Collingham said. It acquired cocoa from West Africa, meat from
Argentina, and sugar from the Caribbean, for example. Suddenly,
food was not something to be bought from the farmer down the
street, but a global commodity, subject to economies of scale.
America grabbed hold of this idea and ran with it, according to
Collingham. First came the New Deal — President Roosevelt’s
plan for pulling the country out of the Great Depression included
raising the standard of living for farmers, partly by bringing
electricity to rural life. In 1933, farm country was characterized by
outhouses, iceboxes, and a complete lack of street lights. By 1945,
all that had changed.

An 1805 botanical illustration from London that depicts corn blight. Sepia Times / Universal Images
Group via Getty Images

Once they were on the power grid, farmers could buy equipment
such as electric milk coolers and feed grinders that let them scale
up their operations, but such things are expensive — only by
expanding could farmers a ord them. “It all makes sense if you
rationalize it for economies of scale and make your farm into a
factory,” Collingham said.
Then World War II hit, and much of agriculture’s workforce had
to go o to ght. At the same time, the government had an army
to feed and the general public to keep happy, so it really needed to
keep the food supply coming. Machines were the answer — the
war era solidi ed the shift from humans to tractors. And machines
do best when they only perform one job, like harvesting a single
crop, acre after acre.
Monocultures can be very e cient when they’re not contracting
diseases, and that e ciency is part of what got the United States
through the war. In fact, the system worked so well that “soldiers
doing their training in America got fatter,” Collingham said. “A
lot of them had never eaten so well in their lives.”

A botanical illustration that shows wheat rust on the left and corn blight on the right. DeAgostini /
Getty Images

Soon, small-scale farms growing diverse crops had largely

retreated into the past in the Midwestern U.S. It’s not that anyone
intended for the practice to be lost. It was simply “in many
people’s minds, rendered obsolete,” said agronomist Matt
Liebman, who recently retired from Iowa State University.
One might think the realization that biodiversity protects plant
health is a new one, given that it wasn’t that long ago that
biodiverse farming became a rare practice. But in fact, scientists
and farmers have recognized this connection for at least
centuries, and probably longer, said evolutionary biologist
Amanda Gibson from the University of Virginia.
The basic concept is simple enough: A typical pathogen can only
infect certain plant species. When that pathogen ends up on a
species it can’t infect, that plant acts like a sinkhole. The pathogen
can’t reproduce, so it’s neutralized, and nearby plants are spared.
Disease-resistant plants can also alter air ow in ways that keep
plants dry and healthy and create physical barriers that block
pathogen movement. Especially if they’re tall, resistant plants can
act like fences that diseases have to hop over. “Somebody did a
nice experiment taking dead corn stalks and just plopping them in
the bean eld,” said plant pathologist Gregory Gilbert from the
University of California, Santa Cruz. “And that works, too,
because it’s just keeping things from moving around.”
In nature, this dynamic between plants and pathogens can be part
of healthy ecosystems. Pathogens spread easily between stands of
the same species, killing o plants that are too close to their
relatives and making sure landscapes have a healthy degree of
biodiversity. As “social distancing” is restored between susceptible
hosts, the disease dies down.

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In monocultures, there are no sinkholes or natural fences to stem

the spread of pathogens. Instead, when a disease takes hold in a
crop eld, it’s poised to burn through the entire thing. “We create
ampli cation rather than dilution,” said Altieri.
New technology has driven home these old lessons: Over the last
decade, it’s become possible for scientists to isolate a broad swath
of the microbes found within a particular niche — like an ear of
corn or a stalk of wheat — and use DNA sequencing to create a
censuslike list of everything that lives there.
The results have been unsettling, but not always unexpected.
Plants in cultivated lands carry a signi cantly larger variety of
viruses than those in adjacent biodiversity hotspots, plant and
microbial ecologist Carolyn Malmstrom from Michigan State
University and her colleagues found in one study.
Conversely, they later found that some elds of barley and wheat
were largely devoid of viruses, but that could also be a sign of
problems to come. Pesticides may be keeping virus levels low: “So
we might think, OK, yay, we’re protecting our crops,” Malmstrom
said. But not all microbes are bad.

Wheat grows in a eld along Mertz Road in Maxatawny Township, Pennsylvania. Ben Hasty /
MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images

“By pulling our crop systems out into a virus-free situation, we

may also be removing them from some of the richness of the
biodiversity of microbes that’s bene cial,” she added.
The bigger the farm, the more serious the disease problems, at
least in the case of a pathogen called Potato virus Y, which leads
to low potato yields. When researchers looked at the amount of
simpli ed cropland surrounding a potato plant, they found that
the prevalence of the pathogen went up steadily as the percentage
of surrounding area covered in cropland increased. Unmanaged
elds and forests, on the other hand — carrying wild mixes of
plants — seemed to have a protective e ect.
In natural landscapes, increasing biodiversity lowers the number
of virus species present. But increasing biodiversity along the
edges of crop elds doesn’t seem to have the same e ect, plant
ecologist Hanna Susi from the University of Helsinki found.
Fertilizers and other chemicals leached from the crops might
a ect the susceptibility of nearby plants to infection, she and her
coauthor postulated. Bene cial microbes found on wild plants
may be keeping many of these viruses from causing disease, but if
the same viruses get into crops that lack that protection, “We
don’t know what may happen,” she said. Farmers could nd
themselves dealing with new kinds of crop diseases.
On Altieri’s farm in the Colombian state of Antioquia, he mixes
many plants — corn with squash, pineapples with legumes — and
said, “We don’t have the diseases that neighbors have, that have
monocultures.”
The results of recent DNA-sequencing experiments are familiar to
him because traditional Latin American farmers have long used
biodiversity to protect their crops. “These papers are good
ecological research,” he said. “But actually, they’re basically
reinventing the wheel.”
This old wheel does have to get over a new hill, however. Climate
change is redistributing pathogens, bringing them into contact
with new crops, and changing weather patterns in ways that
foster disease.

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Already, Liebman has seen the e ects of climate change rsthand

in Iowa, where tar spot disease — an infection that kills the leaves
on corn plants — is on the rise. “We have warmer nights and more
humid days,” he said. The tar spot pathogen loves the new
weather.
Predicting exactly how much climate change will increase crop
disease is di cult, said Singh. But there are some general
conclusions he can draw.
Rising temperatures will likely favor certain pathogens that cause
disease in major crops. A wheat-infecting fungus called Fusarium
culmorum, for example, is likely to be replaced by its more
aggressive and heat-tolerant relative, Fusarium graminearum.
That could spell bad news for Nordic countries, where wheat
crops could su er.
Hotter temperatures will likely knock back other pathogens. A
fungus that infects the herb meadowsweet, for example, has
already begun dying out on islands o the coast of Sweden. In
general, however, Singh thinks regions that are currently cold or
temperate will likely see increases in crop disease as they warm.
For regions that are already warm, rising humidity could cause
trouble. For example, parts of Africa and South America are
among the regions that will probably see increases in funguslike
pathogens called Phytophthora. Food insecurity is already
prevalent in some of these areas, and if nothing’s done to stop
disease spread, that’s likely to get worse. “We need a lot more
information,” Singh said. “But I agree that that is one of the
scenarios that is a possibility.”
Jason Mauck farms “every which way,” in his words. The head of
Constant Canopy Farm likes experimenting, seeing what works
and what doesn’t. And on about 100 out of the 3,000 acres he
tends to in Gaston, Indiana, one of his experiments involves a
strategy called intercropping.

Intercropping with rows of corn planted alongside co ee at a farm in Brazil. Lena Trindade / Brazil
Photos / LightRocket via Getty Images

Intercropping means growing two or more crops in the same eld,

by alternating rows or mixing the crops within the same rows —
it’s a modern reimagining of age-old techniques like those Altieri
uses, and one way of introducing biodiversity into large-scale
agriculture. In Mauck’s case, he’s planting wheat with soybeans.
The wheat seeds go into the ground in October, and by February,
the plants are poking up through the soil. Then in April, he adds
soybeans between the rows. The two crops grow together until the
harvest, right around July 1.
Unlike the wheat Mauck grows in a monoculture, he doesn’t spray
the intercropped wheat with fungicides at all — they simply don’t
need the help to stay healthy. The combination of crops likely
encourages air ow that dries moisture and prevents fungus from
growing, Mauck said. With climate change bringing more extreme
storms to the region, he welcomes the help.
Mauck’s experiences are far from unique. When biologist Mark
Boudreau from Penn State Brandywine reviewed 206 studies on
intercropping across a wide variety of plants and pathogens, he
found that disease was reduced in 73 percent of the studies.
In China, farmers have been experimenting with intercropping for
decades, and it’s catching on in Europe and the Middle East,
Boudreau said. But in the American Midwest, Mauck said
intercropping makes him “kind of a weirdo.” He speaks at about
20 conventions every year to spread the word about this and other
sustainable farming practices, plus he has a lively social media
following. He’s convinced some of his fellow farmers to try
intercropping, but progress is slow.
Lack of equipment is a big part of the problem, said extension
agronomist Clair Keene from North Dakota State University. Farm
equipment companies haven’t invented the machine that will let
farmers harvest mixed crops separately, and farmers usually don’t
have the time to do multiple harvests. That would be an easy
enough problem for farm equipment companies to solve,
Boudreau thinks, if farmers put a bit of pressure on them.

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In North Dakota, the humble chickpea might just provide the

motivation farmers and farm equipment companies need. In
recent years, the pro t margin on chickpeas has been two to three
times that of spring wheat — a common crop for the region. But
there’s a problem: Chickpeas are very susceptible to a disease
called Ascochyta leaf blight. “It can just wipe out the eld. Like,
there will be no chickpeas left to harvest,” Keene said. To avoid
this fate, farmers spray their chickpeas with fungicides between
two and ve times a year, and the cost of the fungicides really cuts
into the pro t margin.
Intercropping could be an a ordable alternative. Keene and others
have found that Ascochyta leaf blight drops by at least 50 percent
when chickpeas are grown along with ax. Like in Mauck’s elds,
Keene thinks ax promotes air ow around the chickpeas,
reducing moisture and preventing the blight-causing fungus from
growing.
When Keene looks across the expansive crop elds that
characterize her home state of North Dakota, she sees two sides to
modern agriculture. On the one hand, monocultures have given
many people a vital source of calories. “We as Americans — we’re
using our landscape to provide a quality of life that, at least writ
large, wasn’t ever dreamed of by generations before us,” she said.
“And who’s making that happen? Farmers. We owe them a lot.”
But the same agricultural system has impacted the landscape
dramatically, from the native plants that used to thrive in
Midwestern prairies to the microbes that populate the soil.
Changes are brewing in Earth’s climate, and a system we’ve come
to rely on may start to falter. Modern agriculture has o ered
humans comfort: “But,” Keene asked, “at what ecological cost?”
*Correction: This story has been updated to report the correct
amount of corn lost in the 1970 harvest, 700 million bushels.

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