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Chris
10-24-2013, 07:00 PM
An interesting tidbit of history...

She knows there’s no success like failure And that failure’s no success at all ~Bob Dylan

Thomas Jefferson’s Farming Failures (http://modernfarmer.com/2013/10/thomas-jeffersons-farming-failures/)


http://i.snag.gy/mz0rL.jpg

Before taking up the presidency, Thomas Jefferson was a rice smuggler. Exporting the stuff out of Italy in the late 1700s was forbidden by penalty of death. And so he snuck his grains out of Lombardy in a tea canister.

Jefferson, you see, was on a mission to bring upland rice to the American south. Grown in dry soil, it could supplant, he hoped, the lowland rice that Georgia and the Carolinas depended on — “a plant,” he wrote, “which sows life and death with almost equal hand,” because the crop’s wetland habitat also bred ravaging pestilence (likely, malaria).

But his Italian rice didn’t take. So Jefferson tried rice from Timor, by way of the disgraced Captain William Bligh (who brought it back from his infamously mutinous voyage on the Bounty). Still unsuccessful, Jefferson tried African red rice. But it, too, never thrived, and after just a few harvests at his own Virginia estate, Monticello, he soon abandoned his efforts.

When it comes to agriculture, few have persevered more in their failures than Thomas Jefferson. And perhaps no other farmer has conceded as many failures as he. America’s third president grew 330 varieties of 89 species of vegetables and herbs in his terraced garden on Monticello’s mountainside — not to mention 170 varieties of fruit in his orchards and vineyards. He meticulously recorded their cultivation in his Garden Book, from 1766 to 1824, and the crop ledger is littered with the words “failed,” “failed nearly” and “killed by bug.”

According to Gabriele Rausse, Director of Gardens and Grounds at Monticello, his neighbors called him the worst farmer in Virginia. And yet Jefferson dedicated himself to agrarian exploration with a devotion akin to worship....

shaarona
10-25-2013, 08:18 AM
An interesting tidbit of history...

She knows there’s no success like failure And that failure’s no success at all ~Bob Dylan

Thomas Jefferson’s Farming Failures (http://modernfarmer.com/2013/10/thomas-jeffersons-farming-failures/)

I love this story about Jefferson..................

Ethereal
11-27-2013, 05:06 PM
Negative results are still important data. Because of Jefferson, we have empirical evidence for a large amount of seed/soil combinations that are relevant to agriculture. Even when Jefferson fails, he wins... :)

Chris
11-27-2013, 05:13 PM
If you read Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, failure is indeed the only way to learn and advance in science and individually.