Growing plants at scale — soil fertility, rotation, irrigation and breeding, where yield meets what land.
11 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Farm Weeds of Canada
George H. Clark · 1906
Catalogues the weeds actually found in Canadian fields with the biology needed to control each one — how it spreads, when it germinates, what kills…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production
Vaclav Smil · 2001
Argues that synthetic nitrogen fixation via the Haber-Bosch process, more than any single crop-breeding advance, is what let the twentieth-century…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology
Justus von Liebig · 1840
Founds soil fertility on chemistry rather than folklore, arguing that crop growth is limited by whichever mineral nutrient is scarcest in the soil…
+5 more at this level
12 of 13 works
George H. Clark
Catalogues the weeds actually found in Canadian fields with the biology needed to control each one — how it spreads, when it germinates, what kills it — rather than treating weeds as a single undifferentiated nuisance.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FAO
Surveys how much crop genetic diversity survives in gene banks and farmers' fields worldwide and argues that diversity, not any single high-yield variety, is what keeps crops able to adapt to new pests, diseases and climates.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FAO & ITPS
Surveys erosion, nutrient loss, compaction and salinisation worldwide and argues most of the world's soils are now degrading faster than they are being restored.
link checked 17 Sept 2026European Parliament STOA
Surveys sensor- and data-driven farming techniques and argues their main value is cutting input waste — water, fertiliser, pesticide — rather than simply raising yield.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Vaclav Smil
Argues that synthetic nitrogen fixation via the Haber-Bosch process, more than any single crop-breeding advance, is what let the twentieth-century world population be fed at all.
Charles Mohler & Sue Ellen Johnson
Argues a rotation sequence has to be designed around a specific farm's pest, disease, fertility and market pressures at once, rather than followed as a generic textbook cycle, and works through the trade-offs each rotation choice creates for the crop that follows it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank, FAO & NRI
Argues that postharvest grain losses in Sub-Saharan Africa are large enough in value to rival the region's total food aid, making storage as important a lever on food security as growing more.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Justus von Liebig
Founds soil fertility on chemistry rather than folklore, arguing that crop growth is limited by whichever mineral nutrient is scarcest in the soil rather than by the total amount of nutrients present.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Harrison Shull
Reports that crossing inbred maize lines produces offspring that outyield either parent, identifying hybrid vigour as a breeding tool rather than an oddity, and starting the hybrid-corn breeding programmes that followed.
Vernon M. Stern, Ray F. Smith, Robert van den Bosch & Kenneth S. Hagen
Coins integrated control by arguing pesticide use should be calibrated against a pest's economic threshold and its natural enemies preserved, rather than aiming to eliminate the pest outright.
Allen et al.
Sets out the reference-evapotranspiration-times-crop-coefficient method that became the worldwide standard for calculating how much water a given crop actually needs.
300 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026R. Labrada
Updates weed-control guidance for developing-country agriculture around integrated management — cultural practice, biological control and targeted herbicide use together — rather than herbicides as the default first response.
link checked 17 Sept 2026