Harvesting Knowledge: The Uses of American Agricultural Science, 1862-1939

“Harvesting Knowledge” traces the history of agricultural science from the founding of land-grant schools in the 1860s to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It argues that by contending with various agricultural interests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American agricultural scientists crafted a field of science defined by its ability to navigate these competing interests by focusing on how to account for local conditions in their research. Chapter 1 shows how agricultural scientists sought professional legitimacy among their scientist peers by molding land-grant schools into research institutions dedicated to the production of useful agricultural knowledge. Chapter 2 discusses farmers’ reactions to these efforts, highlighting the dissatisfaction many farmers had for land-grant schools. The chapter shows how, to appeal to the farmers they hoped to attract to their schools, agricultural scientists looked to agricultural extension to help them better serve the needs and desires of farmers, renegotiating the useful knowledge ideal in the process. Chapters 3 and 4 tell concurrent stories of interests outside of the land-grant system trying to claim epistemic authority in the community of agricultural knowledge producers by providing their own kind of locally applicable knowledge. Chapter 3 uses the examples of commercial fertilizer, tractors, and hybrid seeds to show how the relationship between farmers and scientists changed as farmers found it financially or practically infeasible to perform trials of new agribusiness technologies on their own. Chapter 4 shows how the federal government attempted to create useful agricultural economic knowledge during the agricultural crises of the 1920s and 1930s, all the while looking for ways to keep agricultural economic research grounded in local conditions. The history of agricultural science told in this dissertation calls us to consider what historical lessons we can glean to help our present moment of environmental and social crisis.<p></p>