Stirpiculture

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The scientific breeding and improvement of a particular strain or line of plants or animals through controlled selection of parent stock
2. Careful selective cultivation of a chosen family line or stock so that its desirable traits are passed on and refined over generations
3. The practice of raising and improving plant or animal lineages by deliberately choosing which parents produce the next generation

Etymology: Stirpiculture is a compound built from two Latin elements: "stirps", meaning stem, stock or race, and "cultura", meaning cultivation or culture. Put together, the word describes the cultivation of a stock, that is, the careful breeding of a particular line of descent, most often of animals or plants. The first element is the same ancient root that gives English words like "extirpate", which originally meant to pull up a plant by its stem, roots and all. The idea behind the word is the cultivation of lineage: tending a family line the way a gardener tends a crop, selecting which members should reproduce so that desirable traits are kept and passed on. Because the second element carries the older agricultural sense of tilling and tending land, the word reads as horticulture applied to descent rather than to soil.