After many years of fighting, the pepper war between farmers and nematodes continues to rage on.
Farmers keep striking with the chemical fumigant methyl bromide, but the nematodes keep coming back.
Now farmers face a ban on methyl bromide by the year 2001. Fortunately for pepper farmers, they have an unswerving ally in Richard L. Fery. This geneticist with USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Charleston, South Carolina, has developed bell peppers that have genetic resistance to the southern root-knot nematode, Meloidogyne incognita. Fery and his research colleagues, who began the bell pepper project at the agency's U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in 1981, have released two resistant varieties, Charleston Belle and Carolina Wonder. In 3 years of field and greenhouse tests, Fery showed that both the Charleston Belle and Carolina Wonder are highly resistant to the nematodes.