TA Special Issue in commemoration of 100 years teaching and research

Tropical Agriculture (TA) was first published in 1924 and this issue contains republications of 20 of the papers published since the first issue, in commemoration of the faculty’s 100 years of teaching and research. The criteria for choosing the papers to be republished was that the articles should have been ground breaking when published  with  emphasis  on  (but  not  completely  comprising)  Caribbean  work.  It was decided  to include  two papers from each decade from the 1920s up to the 2010s. The 20 articles chosen were published in their original formats. The first paper published in this special issue is a republication of the first article in the first issue of TA; the second paper reminds us that the principles of biological control were known to the earliest humans. These two papers are followed by description of some early efforts to control Witch’s Broom and then the studies in West Indian soils by Professor Frederick Hardy was one of the few unanimous choices by the selection panel. The  1940s  were  times  when  plantation  export  crops  were  still  the  mainstay  of  West  Indian  economies  and  this is reflected by the works on sugar cane and banana improvement. Two tree crops, coconut and mango, were selected for the 1950s. The 1960s articles republished are on soil surveys and ticks affecting cattle. In the 1970s the late Professor George Sammy pioneered research into value addition in Trinidad and there is another paper on the work of the breeding of sugar cane in Barbados. The 1980s are represented by a paper on modern methods of commercial fruit production and an interesting review of the status of cocoa research in Jamaica. Another paper on cocoa is published as an example of the 1990s, together with a review of farming systems work which came to the forefront during the last 20 years of the last century. A further paper on small farming systems leads the articles chosen from the current century and this is followed by a detailed study on the management of soils in high rainfall situations. The last two papers are on breadfruit and yam, emphasizing perhaps the shift from working on export crops to food security crops and the need for tropical populations to increase consumption of tropical crops in preference to imported produce.