Little things mean a lot: Working with Central American farmers to address the mystery of plant disease

Cornell University and Zamorano (The Panamerican School of Agriculture) facilitated workshops that provided Honduran and Nicaraguan farmers new experience with plant diseases and helped farmers assimilate information and identify disease management alternatives. After learning about the biology of plant diseases, farmers were able to identify disease problems in their field, enabling them to use pesticides more selectively. Furthermore, participants of seven courses conceived 273 pathogen-specific management alternatives, and they identified on average 66 percent of the common recommendations by plant pathologists for the control of general disease types. Many ideas were novel and may represent new opportunities for improving the practice of disease management. © 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.