This path follows how people learned to improve livestock, from an estate reformer in eighteenth century Norfolk, through the statistical breeding, frozen semen, vaccines and nutrition research of the twentieth century...
12 stops
This path follows ten inventors of farm equipment in the order of their best-known machine, from a horse-drawn seed drill in 1701 to a self-propelled irrigation system in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Together they...
10 stops
The World Food Prize honors people who improved the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. This trail follows twelve laureates already in the atlas, from 1991 to 2021, and shows the prize moving from...
12 stops
Tropical tree crops stand in the same fields for decades, so a disease that arrives does not pass with the season. It stays and shapes what growers can plant. This path follows the pathogens behind the coffee, cacao and...
8 stops
Many of the diseases that cost herds and flocks the most are not passed from animal to animal directly but carried by something else: a tick, a biting fly, a mosquito, a midge or a wound-feeding blowfly. This path moves...
8 stops
This path follows the people who learned to understand and manage the insects, microbes and pathogens that threaten crops and livestock, from the first systematic reports on harmful insects in Victorian Britain to...
12 stops
This trail follows crop pests that are small, easy to overlook or both, and that still cost farmers harvests on a vast scale. It starts below ground with the roundworms that attack roots, moves to the mites on the leaf...
9 stops
This path follows the people who learned to put new genes into plants and what came of it: the discovery of how a soil bacterium transfers DNA into plant cells, the first engineered crops, the work on disease resistance...
10 stops
Farming did not change by itself. This path follows sixteen people born between 1674 and 1930, a landowner, writers, inventors, chemists, extension teachers, plant explorers, conservationists and plant breeders, each of...
16 stops
This trail follows the fungal and fungus-like diseases of crops from the cereal fields of temperate regions to tree crops in the tropics. It begins with leaf diseases of wheat and maize, moves to pathogens with enormous...
10 stops
This path follows the people who learned to treat soil as a living, measurable thing, from nineteenth century planters and chemists who explained why fields wear out, through the founders of soil classification, to the...
13 stops
These thirteen stops follow the diseases and parasites that livestock keepers and beekeepers live with, from cattle infections that test and slaughter programs have eliminated in some countries, through parasites of...
13 stops
Plant viruses cannot move on their own, so how each one travels decides where it strikes and how it can be stopped. This path begins with the first virus ever discovered, then follows viruses carried by aphids...
13 stops
This path follows diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry along one line: those that have been eliminated or pushed back, those that stay endemic and drive trade rules, and those now moving into new regions. Each...
10 stops
Eight bacterial diseases, from the pome fruit orchard to the rice paddy, show how a single microbe can reshape quarantine law, planting choices and plant breeding. The path runs from diseases that spread by blossoms and...
8 stops
Follow a century of plant breeding through eight figures, from a Santa Rosa garden to the seed banks and chromosomes of the twentieth century. The path moves from breeding by eye, through the science of hybrids and the...
8 stops
These ten insect pests share one story: each left its native range, or spread through a region it had once barely touched, and then proved hard to stop. The path begins with pests whose arrival reshaped a single crop...
10 stops
These twelve plant diseases show how a single pathogen can end a famine-prone staple, empty a plantation economy or force breeders to rethink how crops are bred. The path starts with the grain diseases that threaten...
12 stops
Eight stops through this wave's own research: the science of grazing land, the ancient practice of moving herds by season, an insect bred entirely out of the wild for its thread, two reactions against industrial...
8 stops
Agriculture's history is punctuated by its failures: a potato that rotted, a vine that died, granaries emptied by policy rather than weather. Eight stops through what famine and blight taught the world, ending with the...
8 stops
Ten thousand years of feeding ourselves in eight stops: a flint blade older than farming, the grass that became bread, the revolutions that remade the field, and the Arctic mountain where the whole story is kept in...
8 stops
Ten animals, walked in the order farming first tamed each one: sheep and goats from the deep Neolithic, the horse that broke the prairie, the bee that was never quite domesticated at all, and the turkey that crossed the...
10 stops
Five staple crops carried across the Atlantic after 1492, three of them newly filled in by this wave: the familiar New World grain that fed the Old World, the tuber whose own pre-Columbian journey is still debated, the...
6 stops