Many young farmers within the grains industry only have a dim understanding of cereal cyst nematode (CCN) and what damage it can do to cereal crops.
However this was not the case in the 1980s when CCN, a small soilborne parasite that attacks cereal crop roots, was public enemy number one for grain growers.
"It did such significant damage it was basically like all our modern day diseases rolled into one and once you had it there was no way of getting rid of it," said South Australian farmer and researcher Andy Barr.
"In my state it was particularly problematic on the poorer soils such as the Mallee, it was present everywhere but in the areas with less fertile soils that really showed up, it was nothing to see yield losses of 40-50pc in bad paddocks," Dr Barr said.
What happened from there was a triumph of the Australian agricultural research and development (R&D) sector.
Dr Barr said groundbreaking discoveries made by researchers at the University of Adelaide's Waite Campus enabled breeders to come up with varieties with resistance.
"The researchers identified resistant genes in ancient land race relatives to our modern cereal crops, and eventually were able to breed varieties with resistance.
"Within a full crop rotation farmers had managed to vastly lower the number of nematodes in the soil, and now CCN levels often come in below damage levels when doing soil testing such as PredictaB, it has been a fantastic success story for our industry."
"Making these genetics gains is fantastic as it lowers the reliance on controls such as nematicides, allowing cleaner and more economical crops to be grown."
Researchers at the Waite, this year celebrating 100 years of agricultural research, set to work in earnest to find a solution to CCN.
The damage from the pest was first identified by Waite researchers in the 1930s before pioneering work from the likes of Harry Wallace identified the pest as the cause of the damage in the 1960s.
From there Dr Barr said once the resistant genes had been identified there was a gradual roll out of resistant varieties.
"It started with Galleon barley, then we saw oats such as Marloo, along with triticale which was then a popular crop in places like north-eastern Victoria and later on we got some really good CCN resistant wheat lines like Frame and Yitpi."
"Malt barley was actually the hardest to breed but in time that came and now we tend to take CCN resistance for granted as part of the agronomic package of a new variety, but back then when we first got access to the varieties it is not exaggeration to say it revolutionised cropping in many areas."
This is backed up from data from the Waite which found in today's grains industry annual yield losses to CCN are just 3 per cent.
This works out to a $700 million annual saving for the industry.
As the years went on Dr Barr said advances in plant breeding such as molecular marking and 3D imaging helped make it easier to identify resistance, but he said much was owed to the pain staking work of the plant breeders of the past.
"If anyone asks about where the value is in agricultural R&D this is a textbook case of where growers have seen a transformational change as the result of research."