The Physical Library for Agricultural Analysis and Testing, Inc. (PLAAT) is building a reference library for the agricultural world.
Our first initiative is cotton, “the fabric of our lives”. Technology is continually advancing, leaving so much to learn. To enable, researchers need access to groups of samples with well-documented information. These are known as “reference sets” or a “reference library”. We wish that our ancestors had systematically saved their original samples for re-examination with new technology, but unfortunately, the necessary reference collections for cotton don’t exist today. We need to start building a new and comprehensive reference collection now! After exploring all the options, we decided crowdsourcing was the best way to get us started.
In this world around us, there is so much knowledge to be unlocked and this is possible only with documented and verified references samples. PLAAT’s goal is to collect samples and material to build a library that can easily be referenced in the future. PLAAT’s mission is to create a repository of “everything grown from everywhere”. With the appropriate reference sets, future researchers may one day uncover important information that we currently have no knowledge of.
We need your help. PLAAT is currently collecting cotton from farms across the U.S. We know it’s late in the season, but starting sooner is better than starting later or not at all. We are hoping you will consider assisting us.
Contributing cotton is easy. Just visit our website https://goplaati.com/submit-materials/, answer a few questions (we just want good records for the future), and we will send you a prepaid address label. (If you need an envelope, we can send you that as well.) We only require a handful of cotton, perhaps five bolls. Scraps from the edges of the field after harvest are perfectly fine.
If you would like to be recognized as a collector, we will make a note of that in our records. (We won’t share any personal information; we are big on privacy. You can read our privacy policy here.) If you wish to remain anonymous, we can work with latitude and longitude coordinates and even specifications from www.what3words.com or “what3words” app. Smartphones are a great way to provide this information. The specific coordinates are important because we plan to test regularly over the years to understand how the materials from the same location change through time. We don’t require any personal or company information from our contributors. We just need as many small samples of location-identified cotton as we can acquire in the remainder of the growing season.
In exchange for sending us a few bolls of cotton, we’ll send you a clear stadium bag and PLAATI sticker. Remember, the same rules apply to collection as they did in kindergarten. “If it’s not yours, don’t touch it.” You must be over 18 years of age and have permission to collect and send cotton. We want to build a better world and that starts with doing the right thing.
We hope that it will be possible to work with you to obtain samples yearly and that you’ll join us in this worthwhile effort.