Late blight, a fungal disease that affects potato crop, has returned to haunt farmers here and the Punjab Agricultural University has issued an alert to growers after coming across fresh infections in a farm in Hoshiarpur district.
"We have found the attack of late blight disease at one potato farm at Tanda in Hoshiarpur which has damaged the entire crop sown at one acre field,"said H S Rewal, Head, Department of Plant Pathology, PAU said on Wednesday.
Stating the current weather conditions are conducive to the development and spread of disease on other fields also, he asked farmers to spray recommended fungicide on their farms to protect their crop.
"About sixty per cent of potato crop in Punjab was destroyed by late blight last year and now you can well imagine how much damage it can cause to the crop,"he said.
