During the mid-nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Americans responded to agricultural instability and developing market economies by involving themselves in "agricultural improvement." As authors, readers, experimenters, consumers, critics and observers, improvers promoted widespread changes to farming practice. In particular, they supported the rise of agricultural chemistry as a way of understanding processes of transformation on the farm economically. Chemistry was to help farmers see land as a "bank," the nitrogen in the atmosphere as the "capital of nature," eating as a form of transaction, and the landscape of mixed-farming as a constant cycling of atoms of capital. This project will explore the ways in which the numerical practices of the early nineteenth century's developing market economy supported and resisted this economic understanding of nature between 1830 and 1860, placing chemical analysis in the context of changing surveying, accounting, and mensuration practices. Focusing on improvers' activity in New York State, it will ask how new market values and quantitative practices changed the way that farmers understood and interacted with landscapes, plants, and animals. In preparation for this project, the researcher has examined the role of statewide institutions of improvement in integrating the New York landscape into the market system. The funding requested from NSF will permit the researcher to examine the role of quantification in the lives of working farmers. Where research about urban institutions can be conducted with the assistance of archival grants, research on rural populations requires extensive research in dispersed local archives, which cannot afford to fund researchers. Lack of funding has led to the neglect of vital resources. For such research, support from the NSF is crucial. This proposal therefore requests funding for 11 short research trips to a total of 26 archives in New York State, to be taken between August and December of 2007. During these trips the researcher will examine farm diaries, letters and account books, as well as the records of local agricultural improvement societies. These documents will provide evidence of changes in numerical and farming practices, for example in the form of recorded feeding and fertilizer experiments, altered accounting and mensuration practices, use of agricultural maps and surveys and discussions of economic conditions and land values.
Intellectual Merit. This project will illuminate the spread of quantified ways of knowing nature, connecting them to economic modes of calculation. As such, it will contribute to a growing literature in the history of science that describes the rise of quantification and quantifying practices during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While scholars like Theodore Porter and Mary Poovey have focused primarily on urban experts such as economists, actuaries, and accountants, this project will extend to the rural population of improving farmers. Looking at those who worked to manage living organisms and make them profitable, it will increase our understanding of the connection between sciences and changing modes of production, and of the development of a managerial approach to natural processes. Further, by exploring the mix of expert and lay interests that made up agricultural improvement, and analyzing the different ways in which chemical and geological theories were strategically deployed, the project will add a new dimension to the literature on popular science.
Broader Impacts. The results of this project will be presented at the conferences of several disciplinary groups: historians of science, environmental historians, and agricultural historians. It will also form the basis of articles to be sent to professional journals and will ultimately be incorporated into a monograph. The results will also be integrated into the researcher's teaching, as part of classes in environmental history and the history of science. The success of books like "The Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation" indicates powerful public interest in the cycles of nutrition that end in the food on their plates. The processes of industrialization that fascinate modern readers began with the commoditization of the farm ecosystem. Through this research we will better understand how the ecologies of modern farming have come to be economically organized.
