What use is a PhD in horticulture?

摘要

Horticultural industries around the world are thriving. Global trade in fresh products from temperate countries is expanding with exciting new cultivars offering improved flavour, texture or appearance. New technologies are allowing increased quantities of highly perishable tropical products to be sold far from where they are grown. Advanced horticultural industries are highly sophisticated operations that may use satellite data to guide their tractors, remote sensing to target inputs, biocontrol tomanage pests, mechanised harvesting, on-line grading, sophisticated packaging, track-and-trace technologies and consumer science to understand which quality attributes are most desirable. At the other end of the scale, small farmers in developing economies with adequate access to water are finding that devoting at least part of their land to horticulture can increase both their total income, and the frequency of their income, as long as they know who wants to buy their products and how to reach that market. Underlying these advances is an enormous wealth of horticultural knowledge, which is expanding each year and much of which is emerging from the efforts of PhD students around the world.