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Office Of Seed And Plant Introduction
The Section of Seed and Plant Introduction was the first official branch of the United States Department of Agriculture responsible for collecting and introducing new plant species and varieties to the United States. It was established in 1898, under the direction of David Fairchild and employed agricultural explorers to seek out economically useful plants to introduce to the United States from all over the world. It has introduced over 200,000 species and varieties of non-native plants to the United States including some of the most well-known and economically significant crops. The activities of the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction and its early successors were largely responsible for the industrialization of agriculture in the United States. Since the establishment of the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction there has continuously been an office within the USDA with plant exploration and collection responsibility, though its name has changed periodically. Today, the missi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Department Of Agriculture
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is an executive department of the United States federal government that aims to meet the needs of commercial farming and livestock food production, promotes agricultural trade and production, works to assure food safety, protects natural resources, fosters rural communities and works to end hunger in the United States and internationally. It is headed by the secretary of agriculture, who reports directly to the president of the United States and is a member of the president's Cabinet. The current secretary is Brooke Rollins, who has served since February 13, 2025. Approximately 71% of the USDA's $213 billion budget goes towards nutrition assistance programs administered by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). The largest component of the FNS budget is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as the 'Food Stamp' program), which is the cornerstone of USDA's nutrition assistance. The United Stat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Species
A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology (biology), morphology, behaviour, or ecological niche. In addition, palaeontologists use the concept of the chronospecies since fossil reproduction cannot be examined. The most recent rigorous estimate for the total number of species of eukaryotes is between 8 and 8.7 million. About 14% of these had been described by 2011. All species (except viruses) are given a binomial nomenclature, two-part name, a "binomen". The first part of a binomen is the name of a genus to which the species belongs. The second part is called the specific name (zoology), specific name or the specific ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plant Variety (law)
Plant variety is a legal term, following the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) Convention. Recognition of a cultivated plant (a cultivar) as a "variety" in this particular sense provides its breeder with some legal protection, so-called plant breeders' rights, depending to some extent on the internal legislation of the UPOV signatory countries, such as the Plant Variety Protection Act in the US. This "variety" (which will differ in status according to national law) should not be confused with the international taxonomic rank of " variety" (regulated by the ''International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants''), nor with the term "cultivar" (regulated by the '' International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants''). Some horticulturists use "variety" imprecisely; for example, viticulturists almost always refer to grape cultivars as " grape varieties". The EU has established a system that grants intellectual property ri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Fairchild
David Grandison Fairchild (April 7, 1869 – August 6, 1954) was an American botanist and plant explorer. Fairchild was responsible for the introduction of more than 200,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, including soybeans, pistachios, mangos, nectarines, dates, bamboos, and flowering cherries. Certain varieties of wheat, cotton, and rice became especially economically important. Early life and education Fairchild was born in Lansing, Michigan and was raised in Manhattan, Kansas. He was a member of the Fairchild family, descendants of Thomas Fairchild of Stratford, Connecticut. He graduated from Kansas State College of Agriculture (B.A. 1888, M.S. 1889) where his father, George Fairchild, was president. He continued his studies at Iowa State and at Rutgers with his uncle, Byron Halsted, a noted biologist. He received an honorary D.Sc. degree from Oberlin College in 1915. Career Barbour Lathrop, a wealthy world traveler, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exotic Species
An introduced species, alien species, exotic species, adventive species, immigrant species, foreign species, non-indigenous species, or non-native species is a species living outside its native distributional range, but which has arrived there by human activity, directly or indirectly, and either deliberately or accidentally. Non-native species can have various effects on the local ecosystem. Introduced species that become established and spread beyond the place of introduction are considered naturalized. The process of human-caused introduction is distinguished from biological colonization, in which species spread to new areas through "natural" (non-human) means such as storms and rafting. The Latin expression neobiota captures the characteristic that these species are ''new'' biota to their environment in terms of established biological network (e.g. food web) relationships. Neobiota can further be divided into neozoa (also: neozoons, sing. neozoon, i.e. animals) and ne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plant
Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars from carbon dioxide and water, using the green pigment chlorophyll. Exceptions are parasitic plants that have lost the genes for chlorophyll and photosynthesis, and obtain their energy from other plants or fungi. Most plants are multicellular organism, multicellular, except for some green algae. Historically, as in Aristotle's biology, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi. Definitions have narrowed since then; current definitions exclude fungi and some of the algae. By the definition used in this article, plants form the clade Viridiplantae (green plants), which consists of the green algae and the embryophytes or land plants (hornworts, liverworts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the semi-exclave of Alaska in the northwest and the archipelago of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The United States asserts sovereignty over five Territories of the United States, major island territories and United States Minor Outlying Islands, various uninhabited islands in Oceania and the Caribbean. It is a megadiverse country, with the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, third-largest land area and List of countries and dependencies by population, third-largest population, exceeding 340 million. Its three Metropolitan statistical areas by population, largest metropolitan areas are New York metropolitan area, New York, Greater Los Angeles, Los Angel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Plant Germplasm System
The U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) is a coordinated network of federal, state, and private institutions administered by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, Agricultural Research Service (ARS). Its mission is to conserve the genetic variation , genetic diversity of agriculturally important plants while facilitating the use of germplasm (seeds and other Plant propagation , propagative materials) for research, breeding, and educational purposes. The NPGS operates 27 specialized sites, each responsible for one or more crop collections. Long-term Seed bank , backup storage is provided by the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation (NLGRP). All NPGS collections are linked through the centralizeGermplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN)database. ThNational Germplasm Resources Laboratory (NGRL)in Beltsville, MD, manages the GRIN database and coordinates 40 Crop Germplasm Committees (CGCs)—composed of crop specialists that provide guidance to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War, defeating the Confederate States of America and playing a major role in the End of slavery in the United States, abolition of slavery. Lincoln was born into poverty in Kentucky and raised on the American frontier, frontier. He was self-educated and became a lawyer, Illinois state Illinois House of Representatives, legislator, and U.S. representative. Angered by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the territories to slavery, he became a leader of the new History of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party. He reached a national audience in the Lincoln–Douglas debates, 1858 Senate campaign debates against Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election, 1860 presidential election, wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isaac Newton (agriculturalist)
Isaac Newton (March 31, 1800 – June 19, 1867) was an agriculturalist who became the first United States commissioner of agriculture. Life and career Newton was born in Burlington County, New Jersey, on March 31, 1800, to Isaac and Mary Newton, a Quaker family of English descent. His father died when he was still a baby, and Newton grew up on his paternal grandfather's farm. He attended local schools but did not go to college. At the age of 21, he married Dorothy Birdsall and became the manager of a pair of adjacent farms in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to also open an ice cream and confectionery store in Philadelphia as a source of extra income. Around 1854, Newton bought 1000 acres of farmland in Virginia, which he hired overseers to run when his wife refused to live there. A series of disasters (among them the outbreak of the Civil War) sent Newton to Washington, D.C., in search of a government job. At some earlier point, he had begun se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Nicholas Meyer
Frank Nicholas Meyer (30 November 1875 – 2 June 1918) was a United States Department of Agriculture explorer who travelled to Asia to collect new plant species. The Meyer lemon was named in his honor. Biography He was born Frans Nicolaas Meijer in Amsterdam in 1875. For seven years Meijer was educated at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam as an assistant of Hugo de Vries. He emigrated to the United States in 1901 and became an American citizen in November 1908 adopting the name "Frank N. Meyer". In 1901 he first went to work for Erwin F. Smith at the United States Department of Agriculture. In 1902, Meyer began working at USDA's Plant Introduction Station in Santa Ana, California. Meyer was hired in 1905 by the USDA in their Office of Seed and Plant Introduction to send back to the United States economically useful plants as part of an effort, initiated in 1898, to augment United States agriculture and horticulture with plant varieties collected around the world. A particu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meyer Lemon
''Citrus'' × ''meyeri'', the Meyer lemon (), is a hybrid citrus fruit native to China. It is a cross between a citron and a mandarin/pomelo hybrid. Mature trees are around tall with dark green shiny leaves. The flowers are white with a purple base and are fragrant. The fruit is rounder than a true lemon, deep yellow with a slight orange tint when ripe, and has a sweeter, less acidic flavor. The lemons contain a highly acidic pH of between 2 and 3. This acidity level allows for these lemons to be used as antibacterial and antiseptic cleaners. It was introduced to the United States in 1908 as S.P.I. #23028 by the agricultural explorer Frank Nicholas Meyer, an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture who collected a sample of the plant on a trip to China. Though it is given his name, this variety was likely established thousands of years before he introduced it to America. The Meyer lemon is commonly grown in China in garden pots as an ornamental tree. It b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
