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Abstract: State University by C.A. Thomas in 1925; in fact the first mushroom research conducted, at the Pennsylvania State College at that time, was an attempt to rear mushroom flies in quart milk bottles filled with manure spawn The late C.A. Thomas pursued a practical grower co-operative line of research until his retiremnt in June of 1960. As a part of my work on mushroom pests since coming to The Pennsylvania State University in 1960, I have kept records of the animal pest problems and related pesticide problems that have come to my attention either through direct observations or from materials that have been sent to me for diagnosis Table 1 is a tabulation of this accounting The major problems are pyemotid mites, sciarid flies, phorid flies, cecid flies, nematodes, and pesticide injury. The attitude of many American mushroom growers seems to be that since mushroom flies are an easy problem to recognize, they are the major industry problem Low yields are blamed on mushroom flies and not on less evident phenomena like poorly prepared composts and lack of environmental controls Pesticides are used when fly populations are observed rather than as a means of prevention on the premises Thus pesticides tend to be used heavily during cropping Since there is a great deal of variation in yields of most crops, mushroom growers tend to disregard pesticide injury as a problem While it is difficult to precisely establish losses due to pesticides, there is reason to suspect that the losses are nearly as important as pest damage, at least in the USA
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