A Personal Web Site Full of Agricultural Data

I rarely cover personal sites that are explicitly defined as personal sites, but in the case of Paul ten Hove I'll make an exception. Paul ten Hove worked for Euroconsult for 30 years, eventually becoming a agronomist who specialized in rice and sugar cane. Then he retired and put his knowledge on a Web site which you can find at http://www.paultenhove.nl . (And, I'm informed, that's a Dutch herring he's eating on the front page.)

There are several sets of information on this page. There's the "Exotic Technical Compendium," consisting of various bits of information garnered over a course of years, topically listed from Agriculture to Wood. Some of the information is brief and snippet-like (One entry: "In Burkina Faso (fuel) wood consumption is 1.5 m³ per capita per annum in urbane areas and 1.0 m³ per capita per annum in rural areas.") and some of it is fairly extensive (an overview about doing a topographical survey in Bengkulu, Indonesia.)

There's also a list of technical terms translated from English to Spanish, French, Indonesian, and Dutch. Wonder no more about how to say "basin irrigation" in Spanish. There's also a list of plant names, which is a table that lists the names of plants across several languages, including English, Dutch, French, and Urdu. (not all plant names have entries in every language.) Finally, there's a list of Indonesian abbreviations and acronyms.

This is rather an odd site in that it is so varied in the information it contains, but at the same time the information is so well organized (you can search individual sections by keyword) and the design itself is so clean and quick-loading. Really nicely done.

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