Many years ago, in 1973, historian Clarence F. Danhof lamented that scholars of agricultural history had generally failed to address broad interpretive questions and often produced works of little significance for the historical profession. Eighteen years after that, the prominent historian of technology Deborah Fitzgerald wrote in Technology and Culture of the needs and opportunities for more serious, sophisticated, and critical studies of the relationships between technology and agriculture. In particular, Fitzgerald called on scholars to seek alternatives to narratives of agricultural “progress” measured largely in terms of the conquest of nature and raw increases in farm productivity. More optimistically, she hinted that serious examination of ecology and the environment offered one potential new direction for research.1

Another nineteen years have passed, and three new works by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, J. L. Anderson, and Christopher Henke offer evidence that scholars have addressed Danhof’s and Fitzgerald’s pleas. Although the authors differ in their backgrounds and methodologies (Olmstead and Rhode are economic historians, Henke is a scholar in the sociology of technology and science, and Anderson is a more traditional historian of technology), each demonstrates that the interwoven relationships among technology, agriculture, and the environment are rich areas for research. Each might be characterized as part of the emerging genre labeled “envirotech,” as each shows that presumed boundaries among technology, agriculture, and the environment have become ever more blurred. Led by scholars with ties to both the Society for the History of Technology and the American Society for Environmental History, the “envirotech” approach challenges presumptions that technology’s impacts on society, the economy, and plants and animals are predictable, deterministic, and unidirectional. Instead, envirotech scholars deny that technology and the environment are distinct and oppositional historical subjects; they seek to uncover reciprocal and interdependent relationships among the living and nonliving components of environmental and technological systems.2 Anderson, Henke, and Olmstead and Rhode all have produced impressive books that fit within this framework. They assess the contingencies and complexities of the technological choices that affect agriculture, they examine their unintended consequences on rural landscapes and societies, and they consider nature’s continual and reciprocal role in shaping technological change.

The most essential work of the three is Olmstead and Rhode’s Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. xii+467, $80/$23.99). Comprehensive in both its geographic and temporal scope, the book makes clear that farmers have been creative and innovative, not Luddites reluctant to try new technologies and methodologies. In chapter after chapter, Olmstead and Rhode trace the history of specific crops, such as wheat, corn, cotton, and tobacco, and animals such as dairy cows, horses, and mules. Farmers made continual improvements to these organisms in multiple ways: by experimenting with new plant and animal varieties better suited for the United States’ various ecological and climatic circumstances; by fighting the multitude of pests that themselves continually evolved and found homes and nourishment on American farms; and by empowering state and federal government agencies to shape the search for ever more biological innovations.

Olmstead and Rhode demonstrate that several often overlooked innovations altered the course of American history. Thinking beyond the standard view of tractors as labor-saving tools, the authors highlight these machines as “one of the greatest land-saving innovations in the history of agriculture” (p. 11), for they allowed about 160 million acres to be converted from forage crops that fed draft animals to food crops that fed humans. In the case of wheat, farmers faced an onslaught of insects, rusts, scabs, smuts, and weeds, all while pushing production into ever more challenging climatic zones of the American West. According to Olmstead and Rhode, wheat yields that were essentially flat over the course of the nineteenth century were actually an impressive achievement. In the case of dairy technologies, celebrated machines like cream separators, artificial insemination techniques, and milking machines hardly would have been necessary had not improved cows yielded substantially more milk. The authors also make new contributions concerning cotton’s overlooked but significant postbellum history. Struggles to combat the boll weevil and other pests are well known, but perhaps more important were later efforts to find new uses for cotton by-products and to breed plants designed to match developments in mechanical technologies.

In showing that unsung innovators, anonymous farmers, and engaged entrepreneurs continually engineered these innovations, Olmstead and Rhode follow recent trends in the history of technology that emphasize incremental change rather than celebrated inventors and breakthrough inventions (see especially Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium [2007]). Because farmers recognized that prosperity depended on careful seed selection and intelligent culling of less desirable members of livestock herds, many cared more about minor biological improvements than expensive innovations like tractors, reapers, and gins. While not easily traced through patent records, anthropogenic changes in agricultural species have been among the most important of the nation’s technological achievements, and the plants and animals currently in production bear little resemblance to those of the past.

Although J. L. Anderson’s Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945–1972 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008, pp. x+238, $32.95) examines only the state of Iowa after 1945, and although he largely bypasses issues of genetic and biological change that interest Olmstead and Rhode, his story nevertheless overlaps with theirs. Based on numerous interviews and evidence from virtually all of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties, Anderson focuses on the chemical and mechanical inputs that revolutionized midwestern agriculture between World War II and the early 1970s. Herbicides, pesticides, hormones, agricultural antibiotics, and other innovations emerged directly from wartime research laboratories, while postwar labor shortages further impelled midwesterners to give tractors and other new technologies a try. With a clear understanding of farm technologies and their social impacts, Anderson also describes the augers, sprayers, hay balers, corn dryers, pipeline milkers, picker-shellers, manure tanks, combines, and various other tools that became standard in the Iowa famers’ inventory. By the early 1970s, farmers had access to a “new suite of technology” (p. 5) that made older machines, labor-intensive practices, and the “hired man” obsolete. By now these changes are inscribed on the state’s envirotechnical landscape. In contrast to earlier scenes of mixed husbandry, hogs on pasture, corncribs, and haystacks, now only two crops (corn and soybeans) are commonly seen, confinement operations keep most livestock hidden from view, and Iowa farmsteads typically are lined with a series of ever-larger cylindrical grain bins, testimony to the postwar era’s ever-increasing crop yields.

As rapid as these transformations were, Anderson also argues that Iowa farmers played an active role in shaping them. Skeptical of bankers, agricultural scientists, and extension experts, farmers carefully assessed each step in the technological revolution and chose the options that best fit their own circumstances. Many hoped more careful cultural practices would obviate the pressure for technological fixes, while others used their own skills as tinkerers and craftsmen to alter or redesign machines and equipment. Often, they tried a new technology in order to address an unintended consequence or minimize the risk of a previous purchase. Nature threw up additional impediments. As weeds, pests, and diseases developed resistance to the new chemical inputs, farmers responded with their own formulas, timetables, and methods of application. In the end, Iowans had little choice but to adopt most of the new technologies, but Anderson insists that result was not inevitable or predetermined. Like Olmstead and Rhode, Anderson highlights the agency of individuals: “It was farmers, people with grease under their fingernails and Atrazine and crop oil on their overalls, who industrialized the rural landscape” (p. 193).

Christopher Henke’s Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, pp. xi+226, $32) addresses a somewhat different case, focusing on California’s Salinas Valley, a region long known as “America’s salad bowl.” Quite unlike the family farmers of Iowa, the main operators there are large corporate vegetable “growers”—responsible for large percentages of the nation’s lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, artichokes, celery, garlic, and other crops—and the thousands who work for them. But industrial agriculture on this scale was not inevitable there, either. According to Henke, it is rooted in the “ecology of power,” the intense management of water, labor, expertise, capital, and other inputs that kept and still keeps vast industrialized farm operations in business.

Employing the methodologies and language of anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies, Henke unpacks how an interconnected network of agricultural scientists, bankers, politicians, food producers, regulators, and extension agents all became committed to seeing a consistent flow of farm products from the Salinas Valley. He especially investigates the agents of the University of California Cooperative Extension Service, advisors who have become a “kind of organizational technology” for growers (p. 112). These experts have found “maintenance” of existing systems far preferable to fundamental transformations; thus, most “repairs” to the Salinas Valley’s agricultural systems have been minor and generally keep existing infrastructure intact. For instance, in a chapter on rivalries between the valley’s sugar beet and vegetable growers during World War II, Henke makes clear that even pressures of the war emergency were not enough to upset local farm practices. Henke’s field work and interviews also reveal that extension agents had little time for the Mexican Americans who hoped to establish strawberry cooperatives that might alter existing market and power relationships. In general, extension agents and other experts have became so enmeshed with local interest groups that they can frame any issue—international contracts on immigrant labor, the design and reporting of field test results, and the distribution of water rights—in ways that only help to maintain existing power relationships.

Like the other two works, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power demonstrates that nature continually resists anthropogenic interventions. Changes in soil fertility, new pests, water shortages, and other challenges emerged to threaten the immense investments in Salinas Valley specialty crops and their infrastructure. Allowing nature to take its course was never an option, for growers have been more concerned about environmentalism than the environment. They long have minimized the risks associated with agricultural sciences and technologies, for their priorities have been to limit regulations and to maintain a positive image for their industry. Struggles ensued over how to manipulate these envirotechnical systems, who would control the processes, and who would pay the price, but not over how to make fundamental changes.

In all, each of these works offers a compelling response to Danhof’s hopes for more sophisticated approaches to agricultural history and Fitzgerald’s call for more critical analyses of the connections between agriculture and technology. Olmstead and Rhode, Anderson, and Henke each capture the dynamic and messy complexity of the intersections between humans and their envirotechnical creations. Each suggests that agricultural sciences and technologies are manifestations of power relationships, rooted in illusory hopes to discipline the organic world and minimize agricultural uncertainties.

These authors also ask questions that are pertinent for those who look toward new biotechnologies for solutions to issues like climate change, sustainability, and the apparent triumph of large-scale industrial agricultural systems. As Olmstead and Rhode remind us, nature is always moving, and unintended consequences and evolutionary change await those who expect to fully control it. Henke concludes that the current model of industrial agriculture is not sustainable: the time has come for transformative change rather than minor repair. He also suggests that cooperative extension and land-grant university personnel could play a leading role, while Anderson teaches that farmers have reason to resist the recommendations of such so-called experts. Above all, these books demonstrate the perils of assumptions of technological determinism and make clear that the natural environment will fight back—and that humans will respond by creating ever more complex envirotechnical systems. Thanks to these three fine works, future historians will have useful models for assessing their successes and failures.

1. Clarence H. Danhof, “Whither Agricultural History?” Agricultural History 47 (1973): 1–8; Deborah Fitzgerald, “Beyond Tractors: The History of Technology in Amercan Agriculture,” Technology and Culture 32 (January 1991): 114–26.

2. Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe, introduction to The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History (Charlottesville, 2010). Cited with permission of the authors and the University of Virginia Press.

Mark Finlay is professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, where he teaches courses on envirotech themes. His most recent publication is Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security (2009).

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 2 (April 2010)