Accelerando

…under the pressure of endless human tinkering, cultivated plant varieties evolved too quickly for agricultural writers and lumbering printing presses to keep up…. See growing things as the earth’s software for which manuals can never quite keep pace. Rapid botanical change has been a constant feaure of the cultivated plant world since the beginnings of domestication.

—Stanley Crawford, “A Farmer’s Bookshelf [1993],” in The River in Winter, pp. 157-158