Homepage Agronomy Collection
Opening hours: no public exhibition
Prof Rolf Rauber
+49 551 39-24352
Email
Anja Wrobel
+49 551 39-24351
Email
Plant cultivation, the teaching and research field of the cultivation, care and harvesting of agricultural crops, is a central specialism of agricultural science. The term "plant cultivation" was introduced into the German language in 1767 by Johann Beckmann (1739-1811), a cameral scientist who taught in Göttingen. Since this time, agricultural plant cultivation has also been taught at Göttingen University. However, the rise to a leading teaching and research discipline only began with Gustav Drechsler (1833-1890), who established an agricultural university institute on Nikolausberger Weg in Göttingen in 1873 and carried out many years of pioneering fertilisation experiments on a nearby experimental field.
The collection of the plant cultivation department has been documented by Wolfgang Böhm in recent years. The impressive centrepiece of the collection is a large-format picture from 1873 showing the trial fields and framed by photos of crops from the era of Conrad von Seelhorst (1853-1930). Recognising and assessing seeds is a sub-area of agricultural crop production. The plant cultivation department contains several storage and demonstration containers with original seed, including from the years 1891 and 1900.
An important part of the collection is made up of around 80 large-format scroll plates, which were created by hand at the Institute of Plant Cultivation between 1955 and 1960 under the aegis of Arnold Scheibe (1901-1989). Each panel depicts an agricultural crop and highlights its specific recognisable characteristics. The didactically outstanding plates are still used today in agricultural botany courses. In addition, there are around 100 printed large-format weed charts by the Norwegian agricultural scientist Emil Korsmo (1863-1953) from the 1930s.
Arnold Scheibe was - before his time as director of the Institute in Göttingen (1955-1970) - head of the German Hindu Kush Expedition in 1935. He donated almost all of the archive material from this expedition (diaries, expedition reports, etc.) to the Göttingen Institute of Plant Production. It is now on permanent loan to the manuscript collection of the Göttingen University Library.
Wolfgang Böhm
