#agronome

[francepittoresque]

22 août 1782 : mort d’Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, génie des sciences ➽ http://bit.ly/Duhamel-du-Monceau Inlassable travailleur, homme de génie et d’un coeur modeste mettant un point d’honneur à ne parler que de ce qu’il connaissait pour l’avoir étudié, Duhamel du Monceau consacra toute sa vie à étendre et à perfectionner les connaissances en rapport avec l’agriculture, la marine, le commerce et les arts mécaniques, écrivant avec méthode et clarté

[supplyside]

Bayer CropScience AG, Monheim

[manypersons]

using terms in my essay that i know my TA will hate when she grades it but can do nothing about because it's technically correct

[farmerstrend]

Agribusiness Talk: Understanding Seed Costs and Their Impact on Farming

Explore how seed costs impact farming profitability. Understand the breakdown of seed costs for crops like tomatoes, onions, maize, and cabbages, and learn strategies to optimize yields for better returns. Wondering if seed costs are limiting your farming success? Dive into an in-depth analysis of seed costs and discover how maximizing yields can reduce their impact on your overall profits. Learn…

[gentleman-aster]

Science is just magic with an elaborate explanation lab coats should look like wizard cloaks and be customizable. Also we should all start dressing funkier.

Like why aren't my cool outfits with cool vests and flower earrings (made with real flowers and recycled plastic) the norm at my agronomic science school

It should be logical for an agronomic engineer to wear this to a class where he is thought how to make plants grow by disposing them in strategic designs and feeding them complex concoctions

[headspace-hotel]

From Consulting the Genius of the Place by Wes Jackson:

"If nature is our standard of measure for sustainable agriculture, then we should expect a mosaic of agronomic arrangements across our land."

Mosaic...

That word keeps popping up in sources that appear unrelated. First it was William Cronon describing Native American land management techniques. Then it was a book on forest gardening. Now it's this guy writing about how to make agriculture more sustainable...

[flowerishness]

Sonchus arvensis (perennial sow-thistle)

Round-up

A perennial sow-thistle enjoys a sunny day at the beach. This plant is native to Eurasia but is often described (by farmers) as a noxious, invasive weed, and is now 'naturalized' throughout North America, South America, Russia, New Zealand and Australia. Like it's relative the dandelion, it arrived from Europe during the Age of Exploration and it's probably been growing in North America for five hundred years. I have no doubt that the first seeds arrived on someone's muddy boot.

The Minnesota Wildflowers website reports, "This species is a rapid colonizer from deep, extensive underground root systems. Once listed as a Minnesota state noxious weed, it is now widely established throughout the state but is not as problematic agronomically as was once thought. Round-up Ready crops took care of much of the problem." '

Round-up (2,4-d) is a powerful broad-spectrum herbicide used extensively in modern agriculture. Round-up Ready crops include soy, corn, canola, alfalfa, sugar beets and cotton and Round-up resistant wheat is under development. Round-up has been extensively tested and under normal concentrations it is not considered injurious to human health but this research is controversial and many lawsuits are pending. In 2023, 91% of the corn, 95% of soybeans, and 94% of cotton produced in the United States were from genetically modified, herbicide-resistant strains. For everybody's sake, I hope these safety studies are correct.

A final note: as a gardener you are advised to wear long pants, a long sleeved shirt, gloves, goggles and a mask when applying Round-up, not that anybody does. Personally, I never use the stuff. I get rid of weeds the old-fashioned way - I use my hands.

[fatehbaz]

Because tuatara are very long lived - between 100 and 200 years by most estimates […] - the founding of Aotearoa/New Zealand as a modern nation and the unfolding of settler-wrought changes to its environment have transpired over the course of the lives of perhaps just two tuatara [...].

---

[T]he tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) [...] [is] the sole surviving representative of an order of reptiles that pre-dates the dinosaurs. [...] [T]he tuatara is of immense global and local significance and its story is pre-eminently one of deep timescales, of life-in-place [...]. Epithets abound for the unique and ancient biodiversity found in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Prized as “Ghosts of Gondwana” (Gibbs 2008), or as denizens of “Moa’s Ark” (Bellamy et al. 1990) or “The Southern Ark” (Andrews 1986), the country’s faunal species invoke fascination and inspire strong language [...]. In rounded terms, it [has been] [...] just 250 years since James Cook made landfall; just 200 years since the founding of the handful of [...] settlements that instigated agricultural transformation of the land [...]. European newcomers [...] were disconcerted by the biota [...]: the country was seen to “lack” terrestrial mammals; many of its birds were flightless and/or songless; its bats crawled through leaf-litter; its penguins inhabited forests; its parrots were mountain-dwellers; its frogs laid eggs that hatched miniature frogs rather than tadpoles [...].

---

Despite having met a reassuringly temperate climate [mild, oceanic, comparable to western Europe], too, the newcomers nevertheless sought to make adjustments to that climate, and it was clear to them that profits beckoned. Surveying the towering lowland forests from the deck of HMS Endeavour in 1769, and perceiving scope for expansion of the fenland drainage schemes being undertaken at that time in England and across swathes of Europe, Joseph Banks [botanist on Cook's voyage] reported on “swamps which might doubtless Easily be drained” [...]. Almost a century later, in New Zealand or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, [...] Hursthouse offered a fuller explication of this ethos: The cultivation of a new country materially improves its climate. Damp and dripping forests, exhaling pestilent vapours from rank and rotten vegetation, fall before the axe [...]. Fen and march and swamp, the bittern’s dank domain, fertile only in miasma, are drained; and the plough converts them into wholesome plains of fruit, and grain, and grass. [...]

[The British administrators] duly set about felling the ancient forests of Aotearoa/New Zealand, draining the country’s swamps [...]. They also began importing and acclimatising a vast array of exotic (predominantly northern-world) species [sheep, cattle, rodents, weasels, cats, crops, English pasture grasses, etc.] [...]. [T]hey constructed the seemingly ordinary agronomic patchwork of Aotearoa/New Zealand's productive, workaday landscapes [...]. This is effected through and/or accompanied by drastic deforestation, alteration of the water table and the flow of waterways, displacement and decline of endemic species, re-organisation of predation chains and pollination sequences and so on [...]. Aotearoa/New Zealand was founded in and through climate crisis [...]. Climate crisis is not a disastrous event waiting to happen in the future in this part of the world; rather, it has been with us for two centuries already [...].

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[T]he crest formed by the twinned themes of absence and exceptionalism [...] has shaped this creature's niche in the western imagination. As one of the very oldest species on earth, tuatara have come to be recognised [in Euro-American scientific schemas] [...] as an evolutionary and biodiversity treasure [...]. In 1867, [...] Gunther [...] pronounced that it was not a lizard at all [...] [and] placed the tuatara [...] in a new order, Rhynchocephalia, [...] igniting a frenzy of scientific interest worldwide. Specifically, the tuatara was seen to afford opportunities for "astonished witnessing" [...], for "the excitement of having the chance to see, to study, to observe a true saurian of Mesozoic times in the flesh, still living, but only on this tiny speck of the earth [...], while all its ancestors [...] died about one hundred and thirty-five million years ago" [...]. Tuatara have, however, long held special status as a taonga or treasured species in Māori epistemologies, featuring in a range of [...] stories where [...] [they] are described by different climates and archaeologies of knowledge [...] (see Waitangi Tribunal 2011, p. 134). [...]

While unconfirmed sightings in the Wellington district were reported in the nineteenth century, tuatara currently survive only in actively managed - that is, monitored and pest-controlled - areas on scattered offshore islands, as well as in mainland zoo and sanctuary populations. As this confinement suggests, tuatara are functionally “extinct” in almost all of their former wild ranges. [...] [Italicized text in the heading of this post originally situated here in Boswell's article.] [...] In the remaining areas of Aotearoa/New Zealand where this species does now live [...], tuatara may in some cases be the oldest living inhabitants. Yet [...] if the tuatara is a creature of long memory, this memory is at risk of elimination or erasure. [...] [T]uatara expose and complicate the [...] machineries of public memory [...] and attendant environmental ideologies and management paradigms [...].

---

All text above by: Anna Boswell. "Climates of Change: A Tuatara's-Eye View". Humanities, 2020, Volume 9, Issue 2, 38. Published 1 May 2020. This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. The first paragraph/heading in this post, with text in italics, are also the words of Boswell from this same article. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[francepittoresque]

27 octobre 1824 : mort du botaniste et agronome André Thouin ➽ https://cutt.ly/Andre-Thouin Fils d’un simple jardinier et jardinier lui-même, ce professeur de culture au jardin du Roi, ancêtre du jardin des Plantes, naquit à Paris au sein de ce jardin qu’il était appelé à soigner, à porter à la haute réputation dont il jouit, et à doter des plus belles productions de l’un et l’autre hémisphère

[gothhabiba]

here's one that's even more bonkers that I didn't report on. it involves writers over at Haaretz being very incompetent.

on the age of chickpea cultivation in Palestine, people variously say 10,000 BC, 8400 BC, 8000 BC, 7000 BC &c. as if at random.

foodtimeline.org (which supposedly provides sources to the researcher but has betrayed me many, many times) cites: Food in the Ancient World From A to Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge: London] 2003 (p. 84).

Dalby says:

Chickpea, one of the oldest cultivated pulses in the Near East. Chickpeas were grown in Palestine by 8000 BC.

this book is actually useless from a research perspective and belongs to what I like to call the "just some guy saying something" approach to making claims. none of the works cited at the end of the page on chickpeas (yes! none of the claims are associated with a particular work! there are no footnotes! so if you want to trace a particular claim, you've gotta look in each work mentioned! lol!) are scholarly works either, all of them also belong to the "some guy saying something" school of thought, and, most dizzyingly, none of them contain the 8000 BC claim!

okay, let's take another tack. wikipedia says:

"The earliest well-preserved archaeobotanical evidence of chickpea outside its wild progenitor's natural distribution area comes from the site of Tell el-Kerkh, in modern Syria, dating back to the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic period around (c.8400BCE). [12]"

[12] turns out to be an article titled "The Strange Origin Story of the Chickpea" on Haaretz (ugh), which is hardly a scholarly source, but perhaps it cites one! Haaretz says:

The question addressed in a new paper published in May in the journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution is historic: how the domestic chickpea arose and spread, first apparently to the Middle East – signs of chickpea domestication were identified in el-Kerkh, Syria, that may be as old as the 10th millennium B.C.E. – and onwards, the western Mediterranean and to Asia, and to eastern Africa (specifically, Ethiopia).

the particularly sharp-eyed among you may notice that "10th millennium BC" (10,000 to 9,001 BC) is a different claim from "8400 BC," but, oh well, let's click that link.

it's a paper titled "Historical Routes for Diversification of Domesticated Chickpea Inferred from Landrace Genomics." it contains no references to the finds in el-Kerkh, or to a 10th millennium BC claim, or a 9th century BC (which the year 8400 belongs to) claim; it's more about developing a model to trace spread, rather than attesting evidence for any particular date. the author of this article must have just added the information about the site in Syria from, idk, their own background knowledge? lol.

but let's keep pushing this. elsewhere in the same article, a paper titled "Draft genome sequence of Cicer reticulatum L., the wild progenitor of chickpea provides a resource for agronomic trait improvement" is linked. this paper contains in its introduction the claim:

Chickpea was domesticated with wheat, barley, peas and lentil as a member of West Asian Neolithic crops during the origin of agriculture around 10,000 years ago with the oldest archaeological evidence from 7500 B.C.4,5 

also a very different claim from both "8400" and "10th millennium BC", but okay, let's try to trace this one.

citation 4 is a paper titled "Evolution of cultivated chickpea: four bottlenecks limit diversity and constrain adaptation," and it also has to do with something completely different from archaeological evidence for chickpea cultivation. in reference to the claim it is cited to support, it contains only the sentence:

Chickpea is [...] associated with the origin of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent some 10000 years ago.

for this rather vague claim, they themselves cite two other sources: 2000, Lev-Yadun et al. "The cradle of agriculture," Science 288, 1602-1603; and 1999, Zohary D, Hoph M "Monophyletic vs. polyphyletic origin of the crops on which agriculture was founded in the Near East," Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 46, 133-142.

citation 5 is Harlan J. R. 1971, "Agricultural origins: centers and noncenters," Science, 174, 468–474. this one says, summarizing other research, that in the "Near East" (bleucgh)

barley, einkorn, emmer, peas, lentils, flax, vetch, and chickpeas appear to have been domesticated, together with sheep, goats, pigs, and possibly cattle.

the source for this sentence is G. Wright and A. Gordus, Amler. J. Archaeol. 73, 75 (1969).

okay, well, this is starting to get obviously silly; trying to trace these claims further and further back until a primary report of an actual archaeology site is found is clearly pointless, especially since at this rate the find would be from like 1954 and almost certainly new evidence has come to light since then.

let's try something else. despite the fact that Haaretz's "signs of chickpea domestication were identified in el-Kerkh, Syria, that may be as old as the 10th millennium B.C.E" claim didn't actually come from the source that they cited, surely it must have come from somewhere?

I find two papers describing the finds in el-Kerkh, written by the same team. "The origins of cultivation of Cicer arietinum L. and Vicia faba L.: early finds from Tell el-Kerkh, north-west Syria, late 10th millennium B.P." is the one that deals specifically with the chickpea findings.

aha! here, perhaps, is the source of the "10th millennium BC" claim! I suspect someone misread the title of this article, and read nothing else!!

the trouble is twofold: 1. "10th millennium BP" is given as the age of the site, not specifically of the cultivated chickpeas that were found; and 2:

"BP" is not "BC"!!!

"BP" is a metric of time used in carbon dating. it means "before present." the "present" is set to the year 1950, since this is close to when carbon dating was introduced. 10,000 years before 1950 is 8050 BC, and this is the absolute oldest date allowable based on just the title of the paper.

however, if we actually read the paper (or, I mean, skim it for a date, lol), we finally find something concerned with dating a particular site rather than making a genetic model; still better, we find this beautiful, readily comprehensible table shewing us "Archaeobotanical records for C. arietinum [...] in the early Neolithic periods", citing a specific site, the number of beans found there, the estimated date BP of those beans based on carbon dating, and a reference to the paper that details each find:

the "this paper" reference based on the Tell el-Kerkh site gives the date

9350-9165 B.P.! that's 7400-7215 BC! we have a date range at last!

other papers in this chart give estimates that are more recent (e.g. 9320 - 9175 BP), based on papers from the 80s and 90s.

so, if this paper is more recent that any other citation I found during this whole journey (2006), and it claims to have pushed the date on the earliest piece of archaeological evidence for cultivation of the chickpea back (note that archaeological is different than evidence based on literature, genetics, &c.), then where on earth are "8000 BC" and "8400 BC" coming from? I still don't know.

tl;dr: a lot of people say that wikipedia, research blogs online, popular news publications, and things of that ilk are not sources on their own, but that they can be a good starting point to help you find sources. I no longer believe that to be the case. you are better off just starting in jstor or google scholar &c. and ignoring everything else. the claims you find in the latter way may, however, still be wild goose chases even if they are published in scholarly journals. the citation webs in academic journals are dizzying and people rarely trace a claim back to its actual origin, instead content to cite a source that cites a source that cites a source that cites a source........

anyway. I share my humble stories simply for entertainment purposes only.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Appendix XII: Mutual-Aid Arrangements in the Villages of Netherlands at the Present Day

The Report of the Agricultural Commission of Netherlands contains many illustrations relative to this subject, and my friend, M. Cornelissen, was kind enough to pick out for me the corresponding passages from these bulky volumes (Uitkomsten van het Onderzoek naar den Toestand van den Landbouw in Nederland [Results of the Research into the State of Agriculture in the Netherlands], 2 vols. 1890).

The habit of having one thrashing-machine, which makes the round of many farms, hiring it in turn, is very widely spread, as it is by this time in nearly every other country. But one finds here and there a commune which keeps one thrashing-machine for the community (vol. I. xviii. p. 31).

The farmers who have not the necessary numbers of horses for the plough borrow the horses from their neighbours. The habit of keeping one communal ox, or one communal stallion, is very common.

When the village has to raise the ground (in the low districts) in order to build a communal school, or for one of the peasants in order to build a new house, a bede is usually convoked. The same is done for those farmers who have to move. The bede is altogether a widely-spread custom, and no one, rich or poor, will fail to come with his horse and cart.

The renting in common, by several agricultural labourers, of a meadow, for keeping their cows, is found in several parts of the land; it is also frequent that the farmer, who has plough and horses, ploughs the land for his hired labourers (vol. I. xxii. p. 18, etc.).

As to the farmers’ unions for buying seed, exporting vegetables to England and so on, they become universal. The same is seen in Belgium. In 1896, seven years after peasants’ guilds had been started, first in the Flemish part of the country, and four years only after they were introduced in the Walloon portion of Belgium, there were already 207 such guilds, with a membership of 10,000 (Annuaire de la Science Agronomique [Yearbook of Agronomic Science], vol. I. (2), 1896, pp. 148 and 149).

[elinaline]

Comment est structurée la recherche académique en France ?

Un post pour essayer un peu d'éclaircir le bazar que c'est après avoir parlé à @nanananerd, en allant de la plus grande structure à la plus petite.

Disclaimer, je suis dans les STIM il est possible qu'en dessous de l'étape "unité de recherche" la façon de travailler et de s'organiser en SHS soit un peu différente.

À la tête de la tête de la recherche on a le gouvernement. Ce sont les ministères qui déterminent des grands axes qui vont orienter la recherche avec des bourses allouées aux différents centres et instituts, mais aussi des bourses sur concours comme les bourses de l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche ou ANR ou encore des fonds hyper spécifiques comme pour l'ordinateur quantique français donné à des acteurs désignés. Tout le monde ne dépend pas du ministère de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche non plus ! L'INRAE par exemple est aussi un institut du ministère de l'agriculture.

Ensuite viennent les grands instituts et centres de recherche, mais aussi les établissements de l'enseignement supérieur, car dans "enseignant chercheur" il y a chercheur, et parfois même des établissements privés avec une dimension recherche importante comme Saint-Gobain. L'INRAE, le CNRS, l'INRIA, l'ONERA, le CEA... Il y en a une flopée et tous n'ont pas exactement les mêmes statuts (hé ça serait pas français si c'était simple), mais in fine ce sont eux les employeurs des chercheurs tout grade confondu c'est à dire que c'est avec eux que les contrats sont signés, et ce sont eux qui choisissent de la distribution des fonds ministériels hors concours entre les différentes unités. Je passe toutes les sous-structures que les universités s'amusent à construire en plus entre les UFR, les graduate schools, les départements, les pôles recherche et autres qui dépendent énormément des statuts et donc sont location-spécifiques.

Viennent maintenant ce qu'on appelle communément les laboratoires : les unités de recherche ! Elles peuvent être mixtes, c'est-à-dire avec du personnel de plusieurs instituts ou établissements d'enseignement différents, c'est assez commun d'avoir une UMR CNRS-université par exemple, ou elles peuvent ne dépendre que d'un seul organisme. Là on est toujours dans le cadre légal mais le bordel s'annonce doucement : le labo au sens unité ce n'est pas toujours le labo au sens équipe/bâtiment, les unités peuvent avoir des tailles vastement différentes. L'institut de physique de Rennes par exemple est absolument monstrueux, étendu sur cinq bâtiments avec 120 personnels permanents, alors que le SIMM à Paris s'étend entre deux escaliers d'une grande école et compte une trentaine de chercheurs permanents.

On arrive à la séparation "à la sauce du labo". Généralement les très grandes unités définissent un peu des axes de recherche qui vont permettre aux gens de se reconnaître entre eux, et dans ces axes on trouve les équipes. Les équipes ont encore très souvent une existence administrative, dans le sens où une fois que l'unité a reçu les fonds ministériels, ils sont répartis en dotations annuelles pour chaque équipe, en fonction de leur taille et de leurs besoins (les gens qui travaillent sur les atomes froids consomment souvent un poil plus d'argent que les agronomes par exemple). Une équipe en France c'est un directeur d'équipe + quelques autres chercheurs permanents, qui ont des disciplines ou des centres d'intérêts en commun et qui donc vont pouvoir présenter un projet de recherche au sens large dans les évaluations annuelles, genre "la restauration d'art avec des mousses" ou "la physio chimie des coproduits alimentaires".

À partir de là on passe dans le pas d'existence administrative, tout est plus ou moins officieux et c'est : le bordel. La sous-organisation des équipes va dépendre du nombre de chercheurs permanents, de la présence ou non d'ingénieurs et techniciens de la recherche propres à l'équipe, de la curiosité commune des chercheurs de l'équipe, de la capacité à recruter des non permanents, du matériel présent, de la volonté à partager les bourses sur concours ou pas, ... Mais généralement dans les équipes de recherche on trouve des groupes plus ou moins officieux, qui peuvent être un ou plusieurs chercheurs et leurs subordonnés non permanents qui travaillent sur une thématique spécifique liée au cadre de l'équipe. C'est la partie un peu "à l'américaine" de la recherche française (au sens où les américains ne s'emmerdent pas avec nos quatre étages, y a l'université, et dans l'université y a un chercheur avec SA thune qui constitue SON équipe). Par exemple dans l'équipe Matière Molle de l'IPR il y a un groupe "film de savon".

Dans ces groupes il y a aussi bien sûr des gens avec des projets différents et du coup si on veut on peut encore redécouper mais eh sayer la c'est bon

MAIS ALORS DU COUP EN VRAI COMMENT ÇA SE PASSE CONCRÈTEMENT PUTAIN. Bah du coup un chercheur (ou plusieurs chercheurs en groupe) a une idée, va en parler avec son équipe pour vraiment inclure cette proposition dans les sujets de recherche, puis ça va en parler à l'administration de l'unité pour écrire une fiche de poste ou un sujet de recherche, qui va être envoyé à l'institut pour voir si on peut débloquer des fonds et effectivement ouvrir une possibilité d'emploi, à laquelle les gens vont candidater. La candidature se fait pour être employé de l'institut mais collègue ou subordonné du gars du début qui a écrit la fiche de poste, dans son groupe dans son équipe dans son unité dans son institut au sein du ministère correspondant. Simple, non ?

[st-just]

🔥

Sustainable food production

Don't really know about agronomics to have any considered hot takes here tbh. I mean, like, 'mass famines bad, therefore industrial agriculture and globalized food markets good' but that's hardly a hot take.

Oh also the fetish for 'locally grown' is, in a world of ever-increasing urbanization, only ever going to an unevenly accessible luxury. Unless we make some big advances in the field of, like, thermodynamics, there's no possible way urban agriculture feeds multimillion-resident megalopolises.

[boombox-fuckboy]

Reteaching myself statistical bioinformatics the professional way (invented a little guy who's proficient in botanical fleshcraft and trying to identify functional genetic markers to select against a trait in an otherwise agronomically useful khersite crop hybrid which causes the plant to generate intensely distressing infrasound prior to floral initiation (defence mechanism)).

[thebotanicalarcade]

While Edouard Manet once called still lifes "the touchstones of painting," a recent study notes that this pictorial tradition also gives valuable insight into how fruits and vegetables have changed over the years.

"Plant-based food is lavishly depicted by thousands of artists throughout the ages and offers a vast and unique insight into the stunning evolution in shapes and colors of our modern-day groceries. Capturing this information can demonstrate when and where particular varieties emerged, how common they were, and what correlation existed between food habits, trade routes, and newly conquered lands," they wrote in their study, which was published in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

While Dutch agronomer Otto Banga once believed that the modern orange carrot found its origin in the Netherlands in the late 16th century, De Smet and Vergauwen have affirmed that the vegetable appeared in drawings dating from the Byzantine Empire.

Similarly, historical paintings suggest that the modern cultivated strawberry emerged only 250 years ago, although archaeological evidence indicates that this fruit has been consumed by humans since the Stone Age.