Competition Among Crop and Pasture Plants

TLDR: The fuller understanding of competition among plants requires a greater knowledge of the response of plants to their environment, especially of theresponse to the environmental stresses created by neighbors.

Abstract: Publisher Summary In the early days of agriculture, man must have learned of the competition among individual plants within a crop or intraspecific competition, even though his knowledge was purely in empirical terms. He must have learned by experience that if the sowing rate were sparse, his harvest would be lean, and conversely that if the seed rate were increased beyond a certain value, the plants would be spindly and poorly grown. The fuller understanding of competition among plants requires a greater knowledge of the response of plants to their environment, especially of the response to the environmental stresses created by neighbors. Plant physiologists have studied the single plant, and agronomists have looked at the whole crop, but the plant within the community has scarcely been investigated. This is a field which promises both scientific depth and great potential reward in terms of crop production.