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Updated: Jun 27, 2025

Reliable Method for Assessing Seed Germination, Dormancy, and Mortality under Field Conditions
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Debate: Seeds as Deep Time Technologies.

Courtney Fullilove

    Technology and Culture
    |April 25, 2024
    PubMed
    Summary
    This summary is machine-generated.

    Crop seeds are deep time technologies, not just natural products or property. Viewing seeds as a 19,000-year collaborative project reframes political economy and the history of technology.

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    Area of Science:

    • Agricultural Science
    • History of Technology
    • Political Economy

    Background:

    • Recent studies on plant domestication challenge viewing seeds solely as natural products or property.
    • Human-plant relations and agrarian knowledge span millennia, defying simplistic classifications.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To theorize crop seeds as deep time technologies.
    • To analyze agricultural studies through materialist approaches like historical materialism, agroecology, and actor-network theory.
    • To reframe the understanding of seeds beyond commercial and scientific logics.

    Main Methods:

    • Surveying materialist approaches to agriculture.
    • Analyzing plant domestication studies.
    • Theorizing seeds as technologies with a long history.

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    Last Updated: Jun 27, 2025

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    Imaging the Root Hair Morphology of Arabidopsis Seedlings in a Two-layer Microfluidic Platform
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    Main Results:

    • Seeds are understood as technologies shaped by human-plant relations over 19,000 years.
    • The concept of seeds as property or natural products is challenged.
    • Industrial time is no longer the dominant frame in the history of technology.

    Conclusions:

    • Framing seeds as a collaborative, deep-time technological project offers new perspectives on political economy.
    • This approach recasts how we understand the production of life itself.
    • It integrates historical, materialist, and ecological perspectives on agriculture.