Biography:
Ph.D., Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Faculty of Agriculture, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan.
Dr. Al-Ansary was born in 1975 in Alexandria Egypt. He graduated in 1997 and got his bachelor of agricultural science in Pomology (Horticulture) with a general grade of excellent with honor from the faculty of agriculture, University of Alexandria, Egypt. He received the certificate of superiority for being the top of his class during his four years of study; and was employed as a demonstrator. That was followed by his masters degree in 2001 that focused on improving the post-harvest technology of Mangoes in Egypt. In 2003, he succeeded in obtaining the Japanese government scholarship to do his PhD at the faculty of Agriculture of Okayama University, Japan. I won the Okayama University grant for encouragement of students of 2006 for my research work on developing the new water-efficient irrigation strategies under the Japanese horticultural conditions. In April 2007 he returned to Egypt and was appointed lecturer at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Alexandria. In 2008, he has established the Precision Agriculture Laboratory (PAL). His lab is interested in improving the efficiency of agricultural activities for both on-farm and regional scales to maintain high yield and quality of fresh produce and its post-harvest life based on flavor and nutritional quality.
Abstract:
Origins of Agriculture and Evolutionary Horticulture: From Polyculture to Monoculture
The origin of agriculture dates back to ten thousand years ago or approximately from four hundred human generations before written records were kept. Agriculture started independently in three main places in the world: Egypt in the Middle East (wheat, barely, melons, grapes, figs, dates, apples, lentils), Mexico and Guatemala in Mesoamerica (corn, beans, tomato, peppers squash, papaya), and North China (rice, soybeans, cabbage, peaches). During the last two thousand years, plant species originated in the main places as well as others originated in Africa (sorghum, cowpeas, yams, oil palm), South Asia (sugarcane, oranges, mangoes, bananas, coconut), and South America (peanuts, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, pineapples), have spread to the entire world. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the British naturalist Charles Darwin discovered that life on earth continue to evolve by the process of natural selection. At the same time, the classical work of Gregor Mendel provided the basic principles for human selection (artificial selection) as the next step after natural selection. Primitive and advanced human selection technologies enabled rapid improvements in yield and quality of crops by the act of selecting, saving, and cultivating the desirable traits such as rapid uniform growth, shorter vegetation phase, more flower set, fruit attachment to plant until maturity, larger fruits, less non-digestible fibrous in fruits, resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and longer postharvest shelf life. One of the applications of evolutionary horticulture is the shift from ployculture (mixed species) to monoculture (single crop species) using commercialized elite improved varieties.