报告题目：Horticulture in the US: Research, Industry, and Education
报告人：Dr. Changbin Chen, Assistant Professor, Horticultural Science, University of Minnesota

报告时间：2016年9月22日 （星期四）上午9:30-11:00
报告地点：上海交通大学闵行校区农业与生物学院 0区103会议室
邀请人：  车生泉 教授
报告摘要：
Horticulture is a combination of art and science of growing flowers, fruits and vegetables. Early in the history of the United States, horticulture was not differentiated from Agriculture, except there were a great number of plant hunters who collect germplasm worldwide for private gardens and seed companies. After extensive plant collection, domestication, horticulturists created abundant traits through plant breeding and selection, with the development of tools and equipment, USA is now the only nation who uses only 2% of its labor force in agriculture and horticulture. Nowadays, in the US, Horticultural researchers are focusing on three directions:
1. New trait development for high quality of specialty crops through understanding the correlation between plant phenotype and genome structure, which is often a joint effort from multiple institutions to work on a single group of plants, such as ROSEBREED; 
2. Environmental friendly landscape design by using native plant species to produce food for beneficial insects, birds, and to cover crop land and reduce the loss of soil nutrients, such as the forever green movement;
3. Organic and environmentally controlled crop to reduce farming cost for high quality and fresh local produces. For industry, the number of family owned organic farms, indoor and greenhouse farming businesses has been rapidly growing after recent economic downturn. In order to train future horticulture workforce, universities in the US are reforming traditional horticultural science major into two new majors (Plant Science and Food System) at the college level, and the horticulture major only offers to Master graduate students toward being licensed as professional of master gardeners.