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OCR: Indigenous scientific methods Papua New Guinea offers a particularly good laboratory for discovering indigenous knowledge about agriculture because there were so many small groups of people, mostly isolated from each other, each practicing their own style of agriculture. Because of the size and mountainous topography of the country, each group faced its own unique natural constraints on the growth of crop plants, ranging from drought to flooding to frost to plant diseases. The indigenous scientists, through their own experimentation and trial and error, managed to solve all these problems. By generations of careful observation and planting, they also developed many different varieties of many of their crops-a situation very different from the dangerous modern restriction to a few high-yielding varieties. This great agricultural reservoir of genetic characteristics can be of immense value to the modern world. For example, Papua New Guinean strains of sugar cane have been used by experimenters in Hawaii to improve the sugar cane cultivated there.