ABSTRACT
The rotted seeds become soft and mushy, turn brown, shrink, and finally disintegrate, often showing the presence of the fungal growth. This gives a patchy stand of the crop. Under conducive conditions like drought stress, losses due to brown root diseases in peanuts could reach 95% in some fields in Argentina. Patchy stands of peanuts due to these diseases are the single most important factor for low production of the crop in almost all peanut-growing states of India. Soil temperature influences the involvement of the kind of pathogens in seedling disease complex and the severity of incidence of seedling diseases. For example, at higher soil temperature, Rhizoctonia solani isolate from peanuts is more virulent than the isolate from wheat. In Egypt, seedling diseases of peanuts caused by Fusarium solani and R. solani could be managed by amending the soil with gypsum and by balanced application of nitrogen and potassium fertilizers as well as by soil moisture.
