Effect of weather on crops

Press, 6 September 1980, Page 16

Effect of weather on crops

A Thai agricultural scientist, Waree Piyawong< somboon, is shown tending seedlings in an experimental station at Lincoln College. Her interest is weather — the effect of sunshine, temperature, humidity, wind, and rain on crops. Miss Piyawongsomboon is seconded, from the Thai Ministry of Agriculture

for a M.Ag.Sc. course at Lincoln. She is especially keen to relate water loss in plants to irrigation requirements. Her home town is in the arid north-east region of Thailand, 120 kilometres from Klion Kaen, where only one crop of rice a year is possible because of the short and concentrated rainy season and the gen-

eral lack of irrigation schemas over much of the region. Although Lincoln’s climate is a lot different from Thailand’s, Waree sayS the Scientific. prin- . ciples of her study can easily be applied in her homeland. A graduate of a Bang* kok university, she worked for the Ministry of Agriculture in the capital for five years before

arriving, at Lincoln in 1978. • • • During the next growing season she plans to study the effects of climate on a crop of fodder beet or sugar beet grown on college property. Back home she expects to be involved in similar studies of crops of. soya bean's, mung beans or corn. . ■ She is due to complete her master’s course next year.