The chemical is used to create crop-protection products such as insecticides and fungicides.
This is the crop of the Indian subcontinent and of Argentina.The extraordinary results in the centre of the field are achieved by using the best plants, fertilisers, fungicides and husbandry.
More recent innovations produced higher-yielding crops, chemical herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilisers that were put to good use in the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, doubling wheat yields in India and boosting Chinese rice harvests by two-thirds between 1970 and 1995.
Fungicides afford some protection but huge quantities of chemicals are an expensive and limited answer.
Chart 1 tracks its yields from the start, showing how the three different kinds of wheat farming African, Green Revolution and modern have diverged, sometimes quite suddenly: in the 1960s with the introduction of new herbicides for Green Revolution wheat, and in the 1980s with new fungicides and semi-dwarf varieties.
Organic coffee is grown without pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, while "shade-grown" means grown under a canopy of trees, thereby protecting wildlife habitats.Mr Young hopes to win voters on the strength of his environmental argument.
The diseases make a vast difference.One problem is that viruses cannot be killed by fungicides and other agrochemicals.
Although the rust can be managed with three fungicides, it has to be spotted early.
The result, they claim, is that bee-delivered Trichoderma offers as much protection as the chemical fungicides preferred by most strawberry farmers.
Most fungicides, for example, are not bactericidal.
Preventive fungicides are often sprayed postharvest to avoid crop losses from these diseases, and cold storage during transport can prevent or slow their spread.
