An agricultural museum is a museum dedicated to preserving agricultural history and heritage.[2] It aims to educate the public on the subject of agricultural history, their legacy and impact on society.[3] To accomplish this, it specializes in the display and interpretation of artifacts related to agriculture, often of a specific time period or in a specific region. They may also display memorabilia related to farmers or businesspeople who impacted society via agriculture (for example, size of the land cultivated as compared to other farmers) or agricultural advances (for example, technology implementation).
An agricultural museum is said to be diachronic if it presents the entire narrative associated with subject of agriculture within its walls, or to be synchronic if it limits its displays to a single experience.[4]
Some agricultural museums, like Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, present agriculture in general as it relates to an entire country, while others, like the Tao Heung Foods of Mankind Museum in Hong Kong, aim to cover the entire scope of agriculture of the human civilization throughout history. Still others, like Sugar Cane and Rum Museum present the agriculture of a particular farming species and focused on a particular food and end product.
Open air vs. indoor museums
In terms of the venues for these museums, some agricultural museums are located in former mills, abandoned buildings, or warehouses, such as Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum. Other museums, on the other hand, are housed in structures specifically designed to accommodate an agricultural museum, such as Thailand's Golden Jubilee Museum of Agriculture. The museum architecture in such agricultural museums has been specifically designed and tailored to the purpose for that space.
Some open-air agricultural museums may present the history of how entire villages subsisted from their agriculture and may include many buildings spread over many acres; this is the case with the Kommern Open Air Museum. Other agricultural museums are strictly indoors-based and occupy just one building, such as the Agricultural Museum of Malaysia.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Agricultural_museum, and is written by contributors.
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