The Agricultural Sciences Flourish and Contribute to the Growing Size, Health, and Wealth of Western Nations

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The Agricultural Sciences Flourish and Contribute to the Growing Size, Health, and Wealth of Western Nations

Overview

During the nineteenth century the agricultural sciences flourished in the Western world. When the century began there was not one person who devoted a career to the scientific investigation of agriculture; by the century's end, however, at least two thousand scientists worked in one of the agricultural colleges, experiment stations, and laboratories devoted to the agricultural sciences found around the globe. In the course of one hundred years, scientific discoveries fundamentally reshaped the way farmers selected seed, fertilized fields, fed livestock, controlled pests, and processed foods. In an era of industrialization and urbanization, the application of science to agriculture contributed to the growing size, health, and wealth of many Western nations.

Background

For much of the nineteenth century agricultural chemistry was virtually synonymous with agricultural science. Beginning with the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), who operated a model farm of his own, scientists began to recognize that chemical compounds and reactions explained many issues related to plant and animal growth. Britain's Board of Agriculture commissioned Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) to give lectures on connections between chemistry and agriculture, leading to his influential 1813 text, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry. Meanwhile, demographic pressures in the German states, overused soils in the United States, and depressed farm prices in Britain caused agricultural productivity and profitability to stagnate and provided further incentive for agricultural scientific developments.

Rapid improvements in chemical education contributed to the greater reliability of laboratory analyses and increasing popular interest in chemical discoveries. In this context, in 1840 German scientist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) published the book that is generally considered the central work in nineteenth-century agricultural chemistry. In Organic Chemistry and Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, Liebig explained that the exact requirements for plant growth could be measured through laboratory combustion analyses, so that scientists could tell farmers precisely what they needed to maintain a balance of chemical inputs and outputs. More than a theorist, Liebig also vocally promoted and popularized his teachings, insisting that governments recognize chemistry's importance in agricultural and economic development.

The sudden interest in agricultural chemistry induced landowners, farmers' organizations, and various governments to establish educational and research facilities devoted to the agricultural sciences. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1802-1877), for example, operated an experimental estate in France after 1834. In 1843 English landowner and fertilizer manufacturer John Bennett Lawes (1814-1900) established a larger, more influential facility at Rothamsted that is still in operation. Meanwhile, German governments devoted public monies to similar institutions, subsidizing nearly 80 state-supported agricultural experiment stations in Germany by the turn of the century. In addition, several German universities established well-funded institutes devoted to agricultural science teaching and research. Similar institutions came more slowly to the United States, but a series of insect plagues, animal disease outbreaks, and chronic problems with fertilizer fraud and adulteration, combined with glowing reports of the German stations, led to the passage of the Hatch Agricultural Experiment Station Act of 1887. Under this bill the federal government provided funds that permitted each state and territory to establish facilities devoted to basic and fundamental agricultural research.

By the end of the nineteenth century the agricultural sciences were unusually well-respected and well-funded and were a high priority in the budgets of most of the industrialized nations of the world. In addition, growing urban populations were able to pressure agricultural scientists to devote attention to issues such as nutrition, public health, and food adulteration that carried this work beyond the farm. Yet the agricultural sciences were also entering a period of transition at the end of the century, as many questioned the centrality of chemistry in the study of agriculture. With the emergence of sub-disciplines such as physiology, nutrition, bacteriology, biochemistry, genetics, mycology, meteorology, mineralogy, applied entomology, and other sciences, the agricultural sciences eventually lost some of their significance and distinctiveness.

Impact

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the agricultural sciences was its status as a symbol of the usefulness of science in general. Early in the nineteenth century agricultural writers trusted the experienced farmer to make sound judgements about applying science to the agricultural enterprise. By the middle of the century, however, advances in the agricultural sciences shifted the notion of expertise to the trained scientist who had access to the specialized knowledge of the disciplines. To demonstrate their value to the rural economy, agricultural chemists conducted soil analyses and investigations of fertilizer fraud that also revealed the legitimacy of the laboratory as the locus for scientific work. Through organizations such as the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists in the United States and similar groups overseas, chemists developed coordinated and standardized methods that increased their usefulness. Soon, farmers' groups pressured scientists to expand their role in regulating the agricultural marketplace through analyses of seed quality, the values of animal feeds, and butterfat content of dairy products.

The emergence of the agricultural sciences also represented a democratization of the scientific enterprise. Publicly funded research and inexpensive publications displaced the elitist agricultural groups that controlled knowledge at the beginning of the century. Most scientists who entered the field gained a reputation as objective and knowledgeable public servants, and they thereby contributed to the rising status of professional scientists overall. Ample job opportunities also meant that the field was more open to the sons of farm and middle-class families than other branches of science and academia.

Though scientists debated, often heatedly, which chemical elements and compounds were most vital to plant nutrition, their enthusiasm for chemical solutions to agricultural problems helped to create the artificial fertilizer industry. Scientists and bureaucrats did not simply investigate fertilizers, they promoted them, linking them with both national prosperity and personal entrepreneurial opportunities. The ensuing search for bones, rock phosphates, guano, and potash salts, all of which had chemical constituents useful as fertilizers, became central issues in international political and economic history. By 1860 Britain consumed 50% of the world's production of fertilizers, reflecting the empire's international economic clout as much as any other survey of imperialism. Other nations also embraced fertilizer chemistry; in Japan, for example, the Meiji government recognized that expansion of fertilizer chemistry and food production was essential before further industrialization could occur. In general, the fertilizer industry predated the growth of other branches of the chemical industry.

Agricultural researchers were also on the forefront of developments in fields that had impact far beyond the agricultural sector. German botanist Julius von Sachs (1832-1897), for example, developed research methodologies while at the isolated agricultural experiment station in Tharandt, Saxony, that shaped the discipline of plant physiology. Wilbur O. Atwater (1844-1907), Oskar Kellner (1851-1911), and other founders of nutrition science began their work with agricultural subjects and produced detailed analyses of the metabolism of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Serious efforts to control food adulteration originated at Wilhelm König's agricultural experiment station in Mönster. Research on the role of soil bacteria in the nitrogen cycle sparked further research in symbiosis, ecology, and nitrification, and the subsequent discovery of a number of useful antibiotics. American plant breeder Luther Burbank (1849-1926), working without the aid of the genetics theory worked out by Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), created scores of useful plant varieties and hybrids that reshaped commercial fruit and vegetable industries. Developments in dairy science were also notable, as control of milk-borne diseases permitted the commercialization of dairy farming and brought important changes to Western foodways.

The agricultural sciences contributed to significant boosts in farm productivity, but not everyone benefited from these developments. Virtually everything that scientists recommended added to the costs of farming. Although relatively few farmers could afford fertilizers, pesticides, commercial seeds and feeds, and other capital expenditures, those who did faced fewer risks of crop failure. Declining risks permitted greater specialization in fewer and fewer profitable farm commodities, thus reducing the value of tending a variety of crops and animals. A decline in genetic diversity among the remaining varieties of commercial plants and animals has been another consequence. In brief, the advancements in the agricultural sciences helped quicken the pace of farm consolidation and rural depopulation in the nineteenth century. These developments also dramatically affected the colonial nations of the non-western world. European imperialists invested heavily in agricultural research in their colonies, where the commercial development of cash crops came at the expense of the food crops that were the basis of traditional agricultural practices.

MARK R. FINLAY