Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
in the USA, Bewick et al. (
2011
) reported that the USDA has created a Specialty
Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) for research, education and economics receiving
$US 230 million over 5 years addressing the scientific needs of horticulture. The
focus is to discover new knowledge and technologies which ensure a sustainable
supply of horticultural products and services. Additionally, this programme empha-
sizes the need for education and training of both the current and future workforce.
This is achieved through planning from university graduate to primary education
which aims at inspiring youth into choosing horticulture as a career as described
elsewhere in this Trilogy.
Horticultural Industries Created by Science
The application of basic science into horticulture has succeeded by providing tools
for the control of germination, growth, reproduction and post-harvest handling for
commodity crops, the design, construction and maintenance of macro- and micro-
landscapes, and the provision of plants which enhance physical and psychological
health. In this section are examined a series of science-led advances in horticulture
which have had and continue having enormous impact on profitability and sus-
tainablility. These are but a few of the many such advances that have taken place
over past decades. The perspective of history provides the identification of seminal
advances in horticultural science in the early part of the twentieth century which
laid the basis for industrial practices which have subsequently become common
commercial uses. Much early scientific effort was invested in attempts to produce
uniformity of growth in experimental material with the initial aim of providing
regularity and reliability for research studies. The early researchers wished, in par-
ticular, for control and regularity with perennial crops. Darwin (
1859
) pointed to
the two key sources of variation in biological systems, characteristics which are
inherited from two parents in the genotype and the impact of the environment on
their expression in the phenotype. Hence genotype (G) x environment (E) interac-
tion results in the phenotype (P).
Refinement and Development of Top Fruit Rootstocks
All top fruit trees, both pip and stone, consist of a rootstock onto which the scion
fruiting cultivar is budded or grafted and which results in two sources of genotypic
variation. The husbandry required for producing fruit trees formed from the union
of a rootstock and a scion has been known in Europe at least since the fourteenth
century and was developed to very high degrees of skill, particularly in part of the
Spanish Netherlands in what is now separately Belgium and The Netherlands. Both
the rootstock and the scion are influenced individually and collectively by the envi-
ronments in which they grow and by interactions between them. Scion cultivars, the
source of edible fruit, result from lengthy breeding and selection programmes and
