Donate
Contribution
PlantVillage is an open access public resource at Penn State that aims to help smallholder farmers grow more food. Please consider donating LINK and helping us, help smallholder farmers. Your gift will go 100% to PlantVillage and is tax free in the USA.
The PlantVillage Blog
Be aware and beware crop-pathogen-environment interactions
By Rob Williams
We are all aware that different genotypes (varieties, cultivars) within a crop species can react very differently to pathogens and pathogen-vectors. This allows the selection and development of disease-resistant crop varieties.
We should also understand that the same crop genotype, i.e. a single variety or cultivar, can produce very different reactions to a specific pathogen even at one location in response to local variation in environmental factors.
The occurrence and... Read more
World Bank event and NURU testing in IITA
Hi all We are having a busy week here. I spent Monday and Tuesday in DC at the World Bank Annual Agriculture meeting. We got to share our work with field officers from the bank who are stationed across the world. We unveiled our AI assistant NURU which people were really impressed with. Still in the beta version but the potential is extremely high and people recognized that which is great. At the same time I was chatting the team in Tanzania (team leader, Amanda Ramcharan, engineer Pete McCloskey and undergraduate Annalyse Kehs) were running Nuru through her paces and testing her... Read more
Blog is back
Hi all We will be starting up the blog again to provide updates and general news
Tomatoes Build Pesticides From The Smells Of Their Neighbours
Tomatoes Build Pesticides From The Smells Of Their Neighbours
How many crops feed the world?
How many crops feed the world?
Keeping Up With The Plant Destroyers
Keeping Up With The Plant Destroyers
PlantVillage 2.0
It's hard to believe that it's already been a bit over a year since with launched PlantVillage. We're excited how well it has fared. We'll spare you the numbers for now, but we're breaking usage records on a almost a daily basis now. Today we are excited to announce PlantVillage 2.0. As you browse around, you will find two major upgrades: 1. Content is more accessible now. It's easier to jump between library entries and Q & As. The site also looks gorgeous on a any mobile device. 2. We are introducing "PlantJournals", an easy way for you to upload images and notes for your various... Read more
A tale of two villages
Growing our own food is a hallmark of human societies. It is the single biggest technological achievement we have made as a species and the ways we grow food are always changing, always adapting, always evolving. It is important to realize that nothing is written in stone and we can change things in which ever way we want. Here at PlantVillage we think about the potential for change a lot. We think about how people growing food- whether that are in Nebraska or Nigeria -could be connected to a world wide web of other growers through the phones in their pockets or the computers in their... Read more
Badges
We're excited to announce that we just rolled out a major new feature: badges. Badges is PlantVillage's way of showing others how much you have contributed, and how much the community valued your contributions. You can get badges for providing answers, questions, comments; for getting picked as the provider of most helpful answers; for participating in the community by voting; etc.
Some like it hot!
As you know, PlantVillage is all about knowledge sharing on edible plants. And as we post new plants, we provide some small details to go with on our blog. Today we have a plant that many people say is inedible - so why is it still here on PlantVillage? It is of course the Chili Pepper. The name Chili Pepper refers to the fruit of a number of different species of plants in the genus Capsicum, including Capsicum annuum (e.g. jalapeños and cayennes), C. frutescens (e.g. tabasco and piri piri), C. chinense (e.g. habaneros and Scotch bonnet), C. pubescens... Read more
New plants & new features
It's always growing season at PlantVillage! Even though we just launched less than a month ago, the user base and the number of contributions are growing rapidly. At the same time, PlantVillage itself is growing up - both in terms of content, and in terms of the features that we're adding. We've just added four new plants: Anise Bergamot Black Pepper
New crop alert: Cocoa-The food of the Gods
PlantVillage is constantly updating and we add new crops regularly. When we do we will make an announcement here on our blog. Drumroll please: We have a Cocoa page! Of the 80 plus crops we have now I would have to say Cocoa is the one I get most excited about. This is a tree from the Upper Amazon that was widely cultivated by the Mayans and Incas of South America well before Europeans arrived. The first European to discover it was none other than Christopher Columbus when he landed in Nicaragua in 1502. It was very important to both Native peoples and Europeans, and in recognition of... Read more
Common knowledge and experts
There is a wonderful event in the study of plant diseases which goes like this. In the fields of Bordeaux in SW France there are lots of grapes. The wine is world famous and growing grapes has long been a mainstay of the economy. It is said that in the 19th Century, farmers would prevent local kids from stealing and eating their grapes by applying a foul tasting dye along the pathways where young boys walked. During periodic epidemics of fungal diseases, a now famous French scientist called Pierre Marie Alexis Millardet is said to have noted that those plants sprayed with the dye were... Read more
The inaugural PlantVillage post: Part 2
Like David, I’m super excited about PlantVillage. PlantVillage is a simple idea – provide an open access system to connect people, helping each other to grow food. It seems easy enough, and in 2013, you would think that such a system exists. We looked at some of the systems out there, and we didn’t like what we saw, so we decided that we’d like to build a better system. The features that we built into PlantVillage – ease of use, open access, community driven– are not earth shattering per se. But put together, they provide a powerful platform. So let me take a moment to talk about... Read more
The inaugural PlantVillage post: Part 1
This is the inaugural blog post for PlantVillage. So some explanation of why it has come about and the history behind the platform is needed. Humans are agriculturalists! Perhaps the most important invention our species made was the ability to grow crops. And since the beginning, knowledge of better ways to grow has spread between people. But things have changed in recent decades for a number of reasons. For the first time in our history more than half of us live in urban settings and so removed from the soil that gives us food. Increasingly food is produced in mega farms in developed... Read more