Riverside: Departments

Vegetable Crops
The Department of Vegetable Crops was established within the Citrus Experiment Station on the Riverside campus (as a section of the Davis department) on September 1, 1955 under the direction of Oscar A. Lorenz. Charged with the responsibility of providing increased research support to the vegetable growers of southern California, the department became recognized for notable contributions to the science of agriculture, particularly in the area of mineral nutrition of vegetables.

The department expanded from three staff positions (originally transferred from Davis) to eight in 1964. Research programs in soil physics, weed control, genetics, mineral nutrition, and growth physiology of vegetables, providing basic information of great benefit to the vegetable growers, were developed during this period.

When the College of Agriculture was established on the Riverside campus in the fall of 1961, the department participated in the interdepartmental majors leading to the B.S. degree in agricultural science, the M.S. degree in plant science (with fields of interests in vegetable crops), and the Ph.D. degree in plant science with an area specialization either in plant physiology or genetics. The only undergraduate student in the College of Agriculture during its first semester of operation was enrolled with a field of interest in vegetable crops. Department staff members participated in these programs by teaching courses in the Departments of Life Sciences, Horticultural Sciences, and Vegetable Crops. In 1965, one undergraduate and eight graduate students in the department were enrolled in these programs. source