Carl W. Campbell

Tropical and subtropical plant germplasm resources in South Florida

Conventional plant breeding together with improved cultural practices, e.g., effective pest and disease control, mineral nutrition, and irrigation, have been largely responsible for the enormous gains in crop productivity that have occurred in the developed countries during this century. Most of this effort has been concerned with field and horticultural crops of the temperate climatic zones. Advances in crop improvement that were brought about by conventional plant breeding using the principles of Mendelian genetics have had relatively little impact on the staple crops and income-earning export crops of the lowland tropics. Many staple tropical crops such as the edible