When did our knowledge of Fusarium begin? There is a tendency to regard it as all very new, in fact I recently read a thesis in which it was claimed that our knowledge of Fusarium diseases of cereals began with a paper published by Bennett in 1928. Ican assure you that it began much earlier; precisely when depends upon what you mean by the Fusarium problem. One of the first written descriptions of ear rot of maize caused by F. moniliforme was described from native Aztec descriptions in the sixteenthcentury by a Franciscan friar in Mexico. When the plant pathologists first went overseas to look at peasant agriculture they found the farmers had local names for the diseases that occurred in their crops, and these names obviously went back for generations, usually being translated as red mould, white mould etc.
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