News

Winter 2023 Project Update

8 January 2024

Read our Winter 2023 Project Update to learn about recent activities of the project and its many researchers. To subscribe to our newsletter, email us at hps-cultivation@lists.cam.ac.uk

Collection to Cultivation in Plants, People, Planet

28 December 2023

Associates of the Collection to Cultivation project feature as key contributors to a forthcoming special issue of the journal Plants, People, Planet on the history of crops and the future of food. You can check out a few articles that have been released in Early View over the past few months: Tad Brown on imperial science...

Peanuts in the shell, drying in and around a basket

New study of peanut packaging, intellectual property, and the making of modern food marketing by postdoc Tad Brown

19 September 2023

In an article newly published in Enterprise & Society , postdoctoral research fellow Tad Brown offers a lively history of contests over patents, trademarks, and control of the U.S. peanut market. Zooming in on the seemingly humble wrapper, he shows "how intellectual property became indispensable to peanut sales" — and...

From Collection to Cultivation in the journal Agricultural History

29 August 2023

The August 2023 issue of Agricultural History features new research by two members of the From Collection to Cultivation collective. Doctoral student Leo Chu takes readers on a tour of Taiwanese politics and agriculture through his history of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center and its relationship to the...

Doctoral student Daniela Sclavo publishes on gender in Mexican ethnobotanical research

21 August 2023

In a forthcoming special issue of The Journal of Ethnobotany , a contribution by project associate and HPS doctoral student Daniela Sclavo reveals the gendered assumptions built into pioneering ethnobotanical research in Mexico. As she argues, the first generation of Mexican ethnobotanists "placed women as part of the...

Pile of reddish green pimento-like peppers

Researcher Tad Brown on crop names, vegetable marketing, and the pimento pepper

20 August 2023

What's in a (crop) name? Tad Brown asks and answers that question with respect to the history of varieties of peppers grown in the southern United States in a new article, just published in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences . Situating the history of crop naming in the larger histories of botany and taxonomy...

Summer 2023 Project Update

3 July 2023

Read our Summer 2023 Newsletter to learn about recent activities of the project and its many researchers. To subscribe to our newsletter, email us at hps-cultivation@lists.cam.ac.uk

Rows of potatoes growing in a field, with exposed brown soil between the bushy green plants.

A Historical Perspective on the UK's Precision Breeding Bill by doctoral student Hitesh Pant

9 May 2023

Wondering whether and how "precision breeding" serves food security goals in the United Kingdom and beyond? Team member Hitesh Pant puts that question in historical perspective in a new article in the Cambridge Journal of Science and Policy. As his analysis suggests, "... unless the small farmers at the centre of the food...

Rows of corn growing in an open field, with green leaves and golden tassels. Photo by Fishhawk, courtesy of Oregon State University

Project PI Helen Curry explores the politics of hybrid seed histories

5 April 2023

In an article recently published in the Journal of Peasant Studies , project PI Helen Anne Curry explores the histories of hybrid seeds circulated by scientists and activists and especially the political work these accomplish. As she argues in the paper, the singular history of F1 hybrid corn inflected understandings of...

1935 Map showing the ‘Distribution of the Great Soil Groups’

Postdoc Tad Brown discusses the history and future of soil conservation on The Short Rows

20 January 2023

Can agricultural historians help develop a holistic vision of sustainable land use planning, based on the history of the intended New Deal? In a new analysis , team member Tad Brown and co-author Levi Van Sant suggest that an ambitious but thwarted New Deal soils programs might offer some hope for more effective government...