The organization of sweet potato research across global regions began in earnest in the 1980s. Leading international institutions, notably CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) recognized the potential for science-driven development of a "neglected" crop. Sweet potato was second only to potato in root crop cultivation worldwide and the top tuber in Asia yet had not been subject to the internationally coordinated research that its importance merited. In this paper, I explore how scientists involved in sweet potato research attempted to respond to the call for new international research and development efforts while avoiding the limitations of predecessor programs associated with the Green Revolution. I highlight the challenges inherent in this work by focusing on ambitions for-and challenges to-providing standardized information about samples of varieties used in research and entered into genebank collections. As scientists and institutions grappled with critiques of the top-down model of development, many sought to address these through more inclusive research practices. As I show, accommodating diversity in crops and among cultivators and cultures entailed costs that ultimately limited the longevity and effectiveness of some enterprises that sought to maximize inclusivity.

This article presents new research on the impact and consequences of the incorporation of Puerto Rico into the American economic sphere of influence and how much change truly took place during the first decades of the twentieth century. As reconstructed here, Puerto Rico's social and economic structure did change after the American invasion. However, a closer look at the data reveals that, contrary to the generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become concentrated in fewer hands. Puerto Rico did experience profound changes with the rapid growth of US agribusiness and the penetration of American capital. In the process of arriving on the island, these two interests found a land tenure system in the firm control of local farmers (small, medium, and large). The American invasion and subsequent incorporation of the island into the American economic/political system as a non-incorporated territory provided the conditions for the numerical increase of farms and farmers in the island during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

The oleomargarine controversy was a case of academic freedom in which nineteen researchers resigned from Iowa State College to protest pressure from the dairy industry to change their research findings. This article explores the ways in which the boundaries between science and politics were more blurred than they seemed at the time or in subsequent historical treatments. The argument begins with a history of the unique composition of agricultural economics research at Iowa State, refocuses the affair from a conflict between the state college and the dairy industry to one among a much larger number of actors, and concludes by demonstrating that one professor, Theodore Schultz, was in the process of transitioning to a new career in prescriptive policy work with private policy associations that ended up being opposed to the practices and policy goals of some of the farm organizations in question.

During the 1970s many small-scale cattle ranchers across the Midwest reported finding their cattle mutilated. The episode, often dismissed as mass hysteria or sensationalized reporting, demonstrates the growing dissatisfaction of many ranchers concerning government intrusiveness and restrictive policies. These frustrations found a release in response to the mutilation phenomenon during which ranchers vented their anger by taking direct aim at the federal government. The turbulent economic conditions of the period paired with government interference in the cattle industry helped sustain the mutilation phenomenon as ranchers projected their fears and insecurities through the bizarre episode. The hostility ranchers showed toward the federal government during the mutilation scare presaged and helped provide the impetus for events such as the Sagebrush Rebellion. The mutilation phenomenon also underscores the pronounced effects of the libertarian movement of the 1960s that gave rise to the New Right and gained adherents across the West and Midwest.

In the early years of the twentieth century, rural America faced a population crisis as young people increasingly left farms for cities. Progressive reformers responded to this crisis with various suggestions meant to more firmly attach youngsters to their rural roots. Among the many solutions advocated were rural youth organizations. The Farm Boy Cavaliers of America, which also enrolled girls, pursued a more innovative path than most, emphasizing not only entertainment and instruction, but also a high degree of economic education and independence for farm children. The program offered an alternative to the Boy Scouts, which Dexter D. Mayne, the organization's founder, believed to be unsatisfactory and inappropriate for farm youth. Ultimately, the organization may have promoted too much freedom for the rural youth, advocating behavior that parents could not approve of or afford in the cash-strapped early days of the century.

The literature on the Dust Bowl conveys the impression of widespread exodus from the Great Plains. But farm populations were often more resilient than the iconic photographs of the era suggest. While recent studies highlight that tenacity, less is known about the process of recovery and postwar growth. This paper offers a window on both. The evidence discussed here survives as a legacy of a long-lived, state-run agricultural statistics program in Kansas. The State Board of Agriculture conducted annual household surveys of farms between 1873 and 1981. Linked together over time, these farm-level surveys offer a detailed record of the residential and land-use histories of three communities, and they begin to illustrate how farm households met the challenges of the drought years and adjusted to the new agriculture in the post-World War II era.

It is easy to understand why regions that produce very fine goods such as port wine tend to conceal technological and scientific inputs and praise the uniqueness of the terroir. This paper suggests that, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, viticulture in the Douro region of Portugal was as much a product of soil, local farming traditions, and individual entrepreneurship as it was of modern state science and national politics for agricultural improvement. the unprecedented public projects of building a railroad and fighting phylloxera permanently changed the land of port wine. Moreover, those engineering practices of rationalization, simplification, and standardization that were inscribed on Douro's landscape proved essential for the Portuguese experience of modernization and nation-building.

This article explores the transformation of lowland game shooting from its heyday in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods to state-imposed rationalization during the Second World War. It evaluates the extent to which the interwar years constituted a period of depression or regeneration in the way the activity was organized and pursued, followed by an in-depth analysis of the impact of the Second World War. The study shows that the prevailing wisdom about the reasons for the decline of game shooting merits reappraisal, particularly in view of the unprecedented changes to the sport that resulted from the government's control and direction of food production during World War II.

In May 1962 leaders from a variety of federal agencies and independent organizations gathered to "exchange ideas about the future course of American conservation policy." Central to the agenda discussed were certain Kennedy administration agricultural conservation programs that sought to apply the ideology of multiple use, which formed the heart of public land conservation policy for private lands. Key policymakers, most notably Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, used the conference and the subsequent years to argue that adjusting agricultural lands to new uses that still retained an agrarian foundation, such as on-farm recreation, would solve multiple societal problems, including rural poverty, the disappearance of the small farm, agricultural surplus, lack of outdoor recreational space for urban and suburban Americans, and urban blight. This article explains how and why federal policymakers during the 1960s attempted to transform private agricultural lands to meet these diverse, and at times competing, societal goals.

The family farm played an important role in the development of a welfare system for dependent children in the United States. This became increasingly true in the second half of the nineteenth century as the population of institutionalized children grew alongside the desire to place those children into the homes of families. Farm families, which held a special place in the ideology of a self-sufficient United States, partnered with institutions and child-placing agencies to house tens of thousands of dependent children. Those involved in child welfare believed that they could reverse the trend of dependency by placing children with Americans of high esteem. Farmers, for their part, could expect labor from their placement children in exchange for care. The availability of dependent children filled an important farm labor need while attempting to satisfy the goals of reformers.

In the nineteenth century many farmers kept a diary of the farming year to record such features as the weather, crop yields, animal husbandry, and prices. Research into church and people in the parishes of Fordyce and Portsoy in North East Scotland led to the discovery of a four-volume journal kept by James Wilson, a farmer in the Banffshire Parish of Deskford between 1879 and 1892. This journal provides a detailed picture of many aspects of rural life including farming, family, neighbors, religion, friends, and entertainment. Moreover, Wilson wrote poetry and kept a record of his lectures given to the local Mutual Improvement Associations. Taken together, the journal, poems, and lectures provide a significant body of literature giving insights into rural society. The journal also covers an important period in farming at the nexus between a time of "high farming" and the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century.

In 1994 the Virginia legislature created a vehicle license plate to memorialize the state's long history of tobacco agriculture. Other states have likewise created plates to allow drivers to voice support for farmers. Like Virginia's "Tobacco Heritage" plate, many use traditional imagery and direct appeals to the history of agriculture. Given the United States' automobile culture, the plates are prominent, if small, works of public history that offer official sanction to a particular view of agriculture's past. In creating the license plate, the Virginia legislature valorized a particular telling of tobacco's past and is best understood as part of a much larger effort to employ history to deflect criticism of the tobacco industry. This effort, like the license plate, relied on simplified imagery that elided the complex history of tobacco in Virginia

A longstanding assumption posits that white ranchers from the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, provided the knowledge to establish the first cattle ranches in Louisiana in the mid-eighteenth century, that blacks merely provided the labor, and that the herding ecology involved was the same as that of the Acadian ranchers who followed. Reconstruction of the locations of the first major ranches and the backgrounds of their owners and slaves, however, reveals that none of them came to Louisiana from Saint-Domingue and that the ranches occupied the western margin of the Atchafalaya basin, an environment quite different than the prairies of southwestern Louisiana later inhabited by Acadian ranchers. While the sources cannot yield a complete account of the process through which cattle ranching became established, they do suggest that none of the white ranchers brought relevant experience from the Caribbean or France, that some of the blacks might have brought such experience from Africa, and that people of African, European, native, and mixed origins all contributed knowledge and creativity, as well as labor, in founding a distinctive herding ecology that differed substantially from that of the subsequent Acadian ranches

During the early 1940s Greene County, Georgia's, Unified Farm Program, a model undertaking coordinating the efforts of federal, state, and local agencies, attracted national attention, largely through the work of sociologist Arthur Raper. At the core of the program was the effort to raise the standard of living for the county's rural poor through increasing home-farm production and improving diet. The initiative entailed active intervention by Farm Security Administration farm and home supervisors and illustrates the tension between the desire to promote independence among poor farmers and the impulse to closely supervise and monitor them. This treatment contributes to the discussion of modernism during the late rural New Deal.

This essay expands and refines academic knowledge of English beekeeping during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scientific beekeeping focused on improvement, which, in turn, depended on the dissemination of ideas and practices. This analysis, therefore, encompasses the mentalities and tactics of popularizers. The article also identifies two neglected concepts in the popularization campaign. First, popularizers saw scientific beekeeping as a way to end the tradition of killing the bees in order to safely harvest. Second, they sought to promote a rural industry for the economic welfare of the nation. The case study of Exeter's Western Apiarian Society reveals precisely how popularization functioned in reality. The result is a more thorough history of scientific beekeeping and how the rhetoric of improvement related to the culture of practice.

Though they are often seen as foils for each other, ecology and agricultural science co-evolved. With shared roots in late nineteenth-century botany, ecologists and agronomists fostered important connections during the Progressive era that have been largely overlooked despite a number of finely nuanced studies of ecology's origins. But if 'applied ecology' once effectively meant agriculture, over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century the relationship between ecology and scientific agriculture grew strained. Agriculturists narrowed their focus to increasing yields, and ecologists sought to establish their discipline as a distant theoretical science and so distanced themselves from its agricultural applications. By the end of World War I, the process of disciplinary specialization was well underway. In time, the two disciplines diverged so completely that the once vital connections between them were obscured and forgotten.

During the 1870s Belgium followed the path of other European countries and created its first public agricultural laboratories under the direction of Arthur Petermann, a young German agricultural scientist. Petermann had been trained in the well-established European stations of renowned chemists such as Wilhelm Henneberg and Louis Grandeau. The mission of these laboratories was to acquaint the local farming community with the new scientific approach to farming, which included the use of chemical fertilizers. The laboratory scientists hoped to achieve this through education, information dissemination, and regulating chemical fertilizers. But farmers and fertilizer traders, whose practices relied on age-old family tradition, commonsense, and mutuality, were not pleased with this interference. Therefore, the scientists had to develop strategies to establish their authority.

When Wendell Berry and others criticize contemporary agriculture, their arguments are often dismissed as naive and grounded in longstanding agrarian myth, rather than engagement with contemporary problems. But Berry's proposals developed in response to a series of learning methods he encountered, and options for advocacy he explored, during the 1960s and 1970s. Agricultural institutions sought to assign more power to institutionalized scientific knowledge, shrinking the role of farmers. Berry sought an alternative definition of knowledge, drawing upon his training as a writer, as well as his experiences with manual farm work and the methods of environmentalist organic growers. He eventually concluded that only a community of farmers could produce and store effective knowledge and insisted that knowledge must be tacit -- largely situated in locality, skills, and culture. His ideas had little influence on most people employed in contemporary agriculture. However, those ideas profoundly shape the work of sustainable food advocates, such as Michael Pollan, who like Berry fear reductionism and celebrate the values of traditions.

This is the story of failure: in this case, an irrigation project that never met its boosters' expectations. Between 1880 and 1930, Wichita Falls entrepreneur Joseph Kemp dreamed of an agrarian Eden on the Texas rolling plains. Kemp promoted reclamation and conservation and envisioned the Big Wichita River Valley as the "Irrigated Valley." But the process of bringing dams and irrigation ditches to the Big Wichita River ignored knowledge of the river and local environment, which ultimately was key to making these complex systems work. The boosters faced serious ecological limitations and political obstacles in their efforts to conquer water, accomplishing only parts of the grandiose vision. Ultimately, salty waters and poor drainage doomed the project. While the livestock industry survived and the oil business thrived in the subsequent decades, the dream of idyllic irrigated farmsteads slowly disappeared.

The Georgia peach boom around the turn of the twentieth century was often hailed as a successful experiment in diversification. Peach growers, the story went, threw off the tyranny of King Cotton by pledging their allegiance to the "Queen of Fruits." This portrayal is partly true; unlike other proposed alternatives to cotton, peaches flourished in many places. But the history of the "labor problem" in the Georgia peach belt makes it clear that peach production depended on the cotton economy. Peaches required large amounts of labor only at harvest time, which came during a lull in the cotton season. Thus, for many years, growers found a ready labor supply in a rural population otherwise at loose ends. As this population relocated to cities, and as cotton farmers mechanized their operations, peach growers turned increasingly to the federal government to help shore up their workforces.

Iroquois maize farmers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced three to five times more grain per acre than wheat farmers in Europe. The higher productivity of Iroquois agriculture can be attributed to two factors. First, the absence of plows in the western hemisphere allowed Iroquois farmers to maintain high levels of soil organic matter, critical for grain yields. Second, maize has a higher yield potential than wheat because of its C4 photosynthetic pathway and lower protein content. However, tillage alone accounted for a significant portion of the yield advantage of the Iroquois farmers. When the Iroquois were removed from their territories at the end of the eighteenth century, US farmers occupied and plowed these lands. Within fifty years, maize yields in five counties of western New York dropped to less than thirty bushels per acre. They rebounded when US farmers adopted practices that countered the harmful effects of plowing.