By Anaïs Got, University of Angers
In agriculture it all starts with a seed. In 1869 the German agronomist Friedrich Nobbe founded and theorised a new agronomic speciality called “Seed Testing”. From the end of the 19th century, it spread as a set of practices and knowledge built and mobilised by scientists, also called agro-botanists, who identified seeds as fundamental elements on which States should intervene in order to improve national agriculture. To this end, they developed a set of methods and techniques essentially based on the scientific examination of characteristics and faculties of seeds. From then on, seed agro-botanists asserted themselves both as agronomists, i.e. with a resolutely agricultural perspective and purpose, and also traditionally as botanists of a botany intended to be applied to the seeds of cultivated species as plant reproductive organs.
Agro-botanists operated in laboratories called seed testing stations where they undertook to answer technically and scientifically all the questions that agricultural and industrial seed application raised. To this end, they carried out both technical analyses and examinations of seed samples sent to them by the seed industry, as well as a variety of scientific research on seeds.
From the beginning, the practice of collection has therefore been fundamental and recurrent in Seed Testing. If analytical activities generated punctual collections of samples, they also made it possible to collect a variety of agricultural seeds preserved by the seed testing stations in order to be used as a guide and reference for subsequent manipulations. The experimental work also allowed seed collections to be made. Finally, from a transnational perspective, it appears that the agro-botanists of different seed testing stations, who have been very connected to each other since the end of the 19th century, frequently exchanged seeds in order to participate in comparative campaigns or to feed their respective collections.
In short, Seed Testing Stations started to collect seeds as the basic material, in turn support and referent, of their scientific and technical activities. In addition, collecting was at the heart of scientific process aimed at identifying and referencing the normal and the abnormal in order to understand and rationalise knowledge. Thus, new samples were listed, identified, analysed and then preserved in a scientific approach. During the 20the century, photography renewed traditional seed collection practices for obvious practical reasons: collections of Seed Testing Stations became then more iconographic.
