The conventional wisdom, as illustrated for millions of readers in the July 2011 issue of National Geographic, holds that the twentieth century was a disaster for crop diversity. In the popular press, this position is so entrenched that it no longer needs a citation. We conduct a study of all...

Contrary to popular belief, the twentieth century was a good one for commercial apple varietal diversity. As measured by availability in commercial nursery catalogs, significant gains were made in both absolute number of apple varieties and the available number of pre-1900 historic varieties. In...

The intellectual property system does not seem to drive the rate of innovation in the market for vegetable varieties. Drawing on a unique data set of all plant patents, plant variety protection certificates, and utility patents among 42 vegetable varieties, this short paper examines the...

According to the conventional wisdom, the twentieth century was a disaster of monumental proportions for vegetable crop diversity. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Our study of 2004 commercial seed catalogs shows twice as many 1903 crop varieties surviving as previously reported in the iconic...