AP Research

Sustaining the global population is becoming an increasingly difficult task to perform taking the effects of climate change into account. Pollution and climate change damages soil quality and the ability for plants to grow in particularly affected areas as a result. This poses a threat to providing means for global food production due to decreasing facilitation for crop growth. As a result, it becomes imperative to implement horticultural methods to develop more rugged, hardy crops, capable of growing in the harsher environments inevitable from environmental damage. A proposal for this solution is the implementation of plant grafting, a horticultural technique to improve rates of crop survival, growth, and output. However, grafting as a concept is relatively uncovered in the space of the general public, rendering the practice essentially inaccessible to those unfamiliar with the field of horticulture, not to mention existing stigma against the supposed unnatural nature of grafting plants. This project researches the practice of plant grafting to argue for its de-stigmatization and advocate for its utilization by the public through providing easily accessible information about the practice.