Cord Baeumer

Cord Baeumer

Kord Baeumer (born October 25, 1926 in Tecklenburg , Westphalia , † August 16, 1998 in Göttingen ) was a German crop scientist . From 1967 to 1992 he taught at the Georg-August University in Göttingen . His research focus was the development of extensive, long-term stable arable farming systems.

Life path

Kord Baeumer, the son of a district court director, passed the special matriculation examination at the high school in Bielefeld in autumn 1946 and then worked as an apprentice on farms for two years. In the winter semester of 1949/50 he began studying agricultural sciences at the University of Bonn , where he did his doctorate in 1956 under Ernst Klapp with a thesis on vegetation studies on oat and gold oat meadows.

Since December 1, 1956, Kord Baeumer worked at the Institute for Plant Cultivation and Plant Breeding at the University of Göttingen . As a scientific assistant, he initially oversaw the crop rotation experiments there. With an experimental study on the problem of " clover fatigue " he qualified as a professor in 1963 and acquired the Venia legendi for the field of "arable and crop production". After a one-year research stay at the Wageningen Agricultural University (Netherlands), he was appointed to the chair for arable and crop production at the Institute for Crop Production and Plant Breeding at the University of Göttingen in 1967. He worked here until his retirement in 1992.

Research priorities

Kord Baeumer's main research idea was the development of long-term stable arable farming systems . For this purpose, he set up long-term field tests at different locations in the Göttingen area. In the years between 1970 and 1980 he primarily tested processing systems that completely dispensed with reversible soil cultivation. Together with a large number of employees, doctoral and diploma students, he investigated the long-term effects of this " plowless arable crop " and was able to gain new insights into the influence of soil structure, nutrient and water supply and the formation of root systems on the growth and yield formation of agricultural crops. The results of this research also received a lot of international attention.

In the years after 1980, the focus of Kord Baeumer's research activities was the idea of ​​gradually developing the previously common intensive farming towards a more system-oriented method of production. An endurance test that he set up in 1981 on the Reinshof test farm at the University of Göttingen also served this goal. Here he explored the possibilities and limits of system-oriented, extensive crop production in comparison to a more product-oriented, intensive form of agriculture. With such system-oriented ideas in agriculture, he was way ahead of his time and set standards that would define future priorities for research into plant cultivation.

The topics that were worked on by graduate and doctoral students during his tenure included, among other things, studies on the dormancy of " volunteer grain " on arable land, the nitrogen-fixing capacity of legumes , the ridging culture in the cultivation of broad beans and methods of root studies.

Teaching

In his courses, Kord Baeumer covered the entire field of arable and plant cultivation and also represented the subject of grassland teaching in lectures and exercises. He was an enthusiastic university professor, for whom the personal conversation with the students was very important. A special concern for him was the training of the next generation of scientists for his subject. However, he was reluctant to have a doctoral thesis written for every current problem. As a doctoral supervisor, he gave his doctoral students maximum freedom in carrying out their experiments as soon as he was convinced that they had the right flair for scientific research. Six of his employees completed their habilitation, some of whom have since been appointed to university chairs.

Baeumer did not see his teaching assignment as conveying factual knowledge prepared encyclopedically, but rather to make people aware of plant cultivation problems using selected research results. This didactic concept is most clearly reflected in his textbook General Plant Cultivation, which has been published several times .

Fonts (selection)

author

Essays

• Theses and antitheses on current agriculture and its alternatives . In: Work of the German Agricultural Society , Vol. 169 (1980), pp. 7-26, ISSN  0365-1665
• Environmentally conscious farming. Back to the ideas of the 19th century? . In: Reports on Agriculture , Vol. 64 (1986), pp. 153-169.
• Thoughts on a decision-oriented plant cultivation theory . In: Reports on Agriculture , Vol. 72 (1994), pp. 493-511, ISSN  0005-9080
• Agriculture and understanding of nature . In: Reports on Agriculture , Vol. 74 (1996), pp. 369-387, ISSN  0005-9080 .

Books

• Distribution and socialization of the smooth oat (Arrhenatherum elatius) and gold oat (Trisetum flavescens) in the northern Rhineland ( Decheniana - supplement; 3). Natural History Association, Bonn 1956 (also dissertation, University of Bonn 1956)
• General crop production ( UTB ; Vol. 18). 3rd edition. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-8252-0018-3 (EA Stuttgart 1971).

editor

• Long-term attempts to solve current problems in crop production. Reports of the 31st annual conference of the Society for Plant Production Sciences on 1/2. October 1987 in Freising-Weihenstephan (reports of the societies for crop science; Vol. 1). Wissenschaftsverlag Vauk, Kiel 1988, ISBN 3-8175-0034-3 .
• Soil fertility as a scientific and social problem. 1st Colloquium on Soil Use and Soil Fertility on October 20 and 21, 1988 . Robert Bosch Foundation, Stuttgart 1989.

literature

• Wolfgang Böhm (Hrsg.): Aims and ways of research in crop production. Festschrift for Kord Baeumer on his 65th birthday . Triade-Verlag E. Claupein, Göttingen 1991, ISBN 3-9801950-1-5 (with picture, bibliography of his publications and directory of the dissertations he oversees ).
• Wolfgang Böhm: Prof. Dr. Kord Baeumer in memory . In: News of the Society for Crop Science , 1998, Issue 3, p. 3, ISSN  0934-5116

Web links

• Literature by and about Kord Baeumer in the catalog of the German National Library