Agricultural Improvement

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Agricultural Improvement

Colonial farmers mostly replicated the ways of Old World farms. They particularly embraced open-field husbandry, which divided lands into separate plots, rotating usage between pasture, arable fields, and fallow ones in which the soil was rested. This system hardly maintained soil fertility and required much acreage. Because of limited market opportunities, inadequate transportation infrastructure, and under-developed credit systems, colonial semisubsistence agriculture aimed at achieving a competency—security and independence for the family and succeeding generations. Printed agricultural information circulated only in almanacs, often with unhealthy doses of superstition. Most sons were content to learn their farming from their fathers.

In older seaboard communities, deteriorating soil fertility and dwindling farm sizes due to population pressure posed a threat to generational prospects. Some colonists concluded that open-field husbandry was unsustainable. In 1761 the Reverend Jared Eliot of Killingworth, Connecticut, published Essays upon Field-Husbandry in New-England, in which he discussed the system of horse-powered cultivation of the English agriculturist Jethro Tull. After Eliot's death in 1763, some colonists took an interest in European improvements like convertible husbandry. This practice emphasized planting grasses and legumes that restored nitrogen to the soil and provided excellent forage and fodder for livestock, whose manure was collected and applied to croplands to return nutrients to the soil. Other innovations included the use of horse-drawn implements like harrows and seed drills; draining and ditching lowlands; and the better care, feeding, and selective breeding of animals. American farmers preferred to emigrate to fresher western soils instead of adopting new, labor-intensive practices. Those attempting intensive agriculture were wealthy gentlemen who could invest in the large initial outlay and absorb the higher labor costs involved. Plantation lords like George Washington and northern landholders like Robert R. Livingston and Timothy Ruggles imported British agricultural publications, seeds, and improved breeds of livestock and corresponded with the progressive gentlemen transforming the British countryside. These early American improvers promoted the new farming as individuals before the Revolutionary War, relying on personal prestige and private networks.

Economic recovery, the establishment of the federal government, and growing national patriotism fueled a postwar agricultural improvement movement. The promise of more affordable and accessible material comforts induced farm families to increase production of surpluses for sale and whetted their appetite for agricultural information and market intelligence. The mid-1780s saw the creation of the New Jersey Society for Promoting Agriculture, Commerce, and Arts and similar societies in South Carolina and Philadelphia; statewide agricultural societies in New York and Massachusetts soon followed, as overseas trade spurred the rise of commercial agriculture and thriving market towns. The movement's leaders, including John Beale Bordley of Maryland, who published an influential review of the successful English Norfolk system of tillage in 1784, Richard Peters, John Lowell, and Livingston applied principles of cooperative action and public opinion making learned from Revolutionary War experiences. Their societies successfully lobbied for government support of their chief programs based on Enlightenment empiricism and experimentation: offering and awarding premiums targeted at particular ends and publishing in annual journals the observations and conclusions of the resulting experiments.

Before the War of 1812 a second wave of agricultural organizations arose. Claiming that the mass of farmers ignored the elite associations' volumes of transactions such as the Massachusetts Agricultural Repository and Journal and their state-funded premiums offered for agricultural experiments, Elkanah Watson and the founders of the Berkshire County (Massachusetts) Agricultural Society in 1811 instituted a new system of agricultural education and promotion based on competition and éclat. American agriculture would be better improved by the cumulative effect of self-interested families competing for local prizes offered for excellent specimens of specific plants, animals, and domestic manufactures. Visitors would be attracted to the annual exhibitions of the premium-winning productions by elaborate prize ceremonies, opportunities to socialize with neighbors and merchandize farm products, and cultural festivities, including parades and processions, dining and drinking, singing and dancing, and oratory and religious exercises. The resulting institution of the agricultural fair, the backbone of modern agricultural societies, spread quickly through the Northeast and Old Northwest, as state legislatures in the 1810s and 1820s provided newly organized county societies with grants for their premiums. A popular agricultural press simultaneously arose, as farmers gained appreciation for agricultural newspapers that first appeared in the late 1810s. Circulation figures of such periodicals as The Plough Boy, The Cultivator, and The New England Farmer soon reached the tens of thousands by reporting on agricultural improvements, providing practical advice for rural families, reviewing market conditions, and ennobling farming as a profession. Newspapers regularly included information on fairs.

Agricultural improvement became a successful popular movement during the depression following the Panic of 1819. Falling prices, especially on cotton, and tighter credit prevented planters and farmers from making mortgage payments and lowered land values. Only increased production promised to offset the declining value of capital investments in real estate and slaves. Marginal croplands and careless practices were no longer profitable. Agricultural societies patronized inventors, and annual fairs showcased new plows and labor-saving mechanized implements in the 1820s. In addition to animal manures, soil additives such as gypsum (or plaster of Paris), lime, marl, and other calcareous manures, were increasingly used to restore fertility and improve crop yields, although a basic understanding of soil chemistry would wait until the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig reached America in the 1840s.

bibliography

Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815. Chapel Hill, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

McClelland, Peter D. Sowing Modernity: America's First Agricultural Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Stoll, Steven. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.

Mark A. Mastromarino

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation