Up until the 1940s chemical disease control relied upon inorganic chemical preparations, frequently prepared by the user. Key areas of use were horticulture and vegetable production with key targets being diseases that caused easily recognized damage. After this era and as the damaging effects of more crop diseases became obvious by the use of chemical control, the crop protection industry expanded rapidly and research to discover new active materials began in earnest. As new areas of chemistry were introduced, each one aiming to offer advantages over the previous ones, chemical families were born with research-based companies frequently adopting patent-busting strategies in order to capitalize on the developing fungicides market. Systemic fungicides offered new opportunities in disease control. The rise in Research and Development (R & D) and the increase in the number and quantity of chemicals being applied led to the introduction of regulation in the 1950s, initially on a voluntary basis, but now strictly controlled by legal obligations. In the 1960s, the market switched from horticulture and vegetables to one in which the main agricultural crops dominated. The cereal market, initially based on barley, moved to the current dominant market of wheat. The costs of R & D have risen dramatically in recent years and have become dominated not by the discovery process per se but by the provision of all the extra data needed to obtain registration. These rising costs happened at a time when markets showed little growth and are currently showing some decline. This has resulted in an industry that is continually striving to cut costs, normally by mergers and take-overs. As a consequence, many plant disease problems are not now being targeted by the industry and special measures have been introduced to ensure adequate disease control is available for these minor markets. Plant disease control will remain a necessity and fungicides will remain as a key factor in such control, although it is predicted that integrated control using chemicals, biological controls and biotechnology approaches will begin to dominate.

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Plots of spring wheat cv. Baldus were inoculated at GS 13 with four Mycosphaerella graminicola isolates, two relatively susceptible and two relatively resistant to DMI fungicides. Changes in the ratio of relatively susceptible to resistant types following fungicide or water sprays were measured. Three fungicides were compared: flutriafol, which is very mobile within leaves, fluquinconazole, which is less so, and prochloraz, which is almost immobile. All are inhibitors of sterol demethylation. In 1996, fungicide-treated plots were sprayed once with half the recommended dose at GS 39±47. In 1997, three doses were used: one-quarter and one-eighth of the recommended dose and a dual application of two one-eighth recommended doses, a week apart. Isolates were classified using a discriminating dose assay and the ratio of relatively susceptible to relatively resistant isolates in each field plot before and after fungicide application calculated. In both years, the numbers of relatively susceptible and relatively resistant isolates were equal just before fungicide application. All fungicides caused significant selection towards resistance, but the strength of selection varied with fungicide, dose and position in the crop canopy. Fluquinconazole selected most strongly and gave the best control of disease. Interactions between fungicide and dose were not significant. Selection was equally strong all along leaves sprayed with prochloraz, but increased smoothly from base to tip of leaves sprayed with fluquinconazole or flutriafol. Averaged over fungicides, reducing the dose of a single fungicide application from onequarter to one-eighth slightly reduced selection towards resistance on both leaf layers. The dual one-eighth dose caused twice the change of the single one-eighth dose on the flag leaf, but was similar to a single spray on leaf 2.

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