Plant Science Merit Badge

Two answers decide this badge, not one

Requirements 1 to 7 and requirement 9 apply to everybody. Requirement 8 is where the badge splits, and it splits twice:

1. Choose an option: A Agronomy, B Horticulture, or C Field Botany.
2. Then choose an alternative inside it: five crops in Option A, four plantings in Option B, five study methods in Option C. Option B adds a third choice of its own partway up, at 8(B)(3). So the printed requirement 8 is much larger than the requirement 8 anybody actually does.

The question the requirements never ask: can you wait for a growing season?

This is the single most useful thing to know before choosing, and it is not grouped anywhere on the official page:

If your timing is tight, Option C, or Option A's Forage Crops or Small Grains, are the three routes that do not wait on a plant. If you want to grow something, Option B guarantees it.

Note that requirement 5 applies to everybody regardless: "Grow a plant by ONE of these methods", so nobody escapes growing something. The difference is scale: one plant, versus a plot or a season-long bed.

Requirement 8(C)(3) points at the wrong requirement

Field Botany's requirement 3 asks you to key out ten plants "in addition to those in general requirement 5 above". Requirement 5 is about propagation and contains no list of plants. Requirement 6 is the one with the plant lists.

The proof is inside the badge itself: over in Option B, requirement 8(B)(5)(C)(3) makes the same kind of reference and says "general requirement 6". The printed requirements book says "5" in both places, so one has since been corrected and the other has not.

In practice: the ten plants you key out for 8(C)(3) should be ten that are not already on your requirement 6 lists.

Some of these need arranging well before you need them

• 8(C)(6)(d) and 8(C)(6)(e) both begin *"Write ahead and arrange to visit"*: a herbarium, or a conservation organisation. The requirement itself tells you to write first.
• 8(B)(1) is a visit to a garden, arboretum, nursery, greenhouse or conservatory.
• Corn, Cotton and Oil Crops each need your counselor to inspect the plot, so your counselor has to come to it while it is standing.
• 8(C)(4) collects and presses plants "after gaining permission".

Requirement 9 is written in the past tense

It asks how you "have followed" the Leave No Trace Seven Principles and the Outdoor Code during field observation, specimen collection and identification. It is a report on what you actually did, so it cannot honestly be finished before the fieldwork in requirement 8 is.

What this page is

The Plant Science merit badge, drawn so that the option you choose is the only one you have to read. It is not a copy of the requirements: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.