7-11 IAN Ascochyta Blight

 A recent news report tells us that Northwest farmers are growing a lot of chickpeas because of the popularity of hummus.  That said, Idaho Pea and Lentil Commission researcher, Todd Scholz  told me that chickpeas garnished a very bad reputation in the early days of growing them.  “In the 80s, chickpeas first arrived here in the Palouse, they first started experimenting with them. in about 1983 they discovered a disease called Ascochyta  blight and it wiped out chickpeas. It literally decimated them. A farmer told me that you would have a green growing field on Friday and on Monday it would be like fire went through the whole field and it was just black, burned up and dead. It scared farmers out of chickpeas, they stopped raising them, they thought maybe by stopping planting chickpeas, they would stop the spread of the disease because we didn’t know anything about it. So in the 90’s I arrive on the scene and I went to a research tool or in the summer and saw a presentation by the breeder and he had a dead plot of chickpeas next to a live plot and he was telling us that he had discovered the resistance and incorporated resistance into the seed for this disease which was relatively exciting, so I came home and I said to my dad, should I be planting these things, the prices look pretty good? He said don’t you ever raise those things on my farm.