Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 256

This volume (Green Revolutions. Agrarian systems and environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) is collected from a number of papers delivered at a meeting of the Arbeitskreis Agrargeschichte (the German equivalent of the BAHS) in 2004. The novelty of the collection is two-fold. Firstly, it follows in the pioneering path of the volume Agrarmodernisierung and ökologische Folgen (Agrarian modernisation and ecological consequences) that appeared in 2003, in explicitly linking the concerns of agricultural history, which has been primarily focused historically upon productivity, and environmental history. Secondly, it argues implicitly for seeing the major historic transformation in German agriculture as being a product of processes of changing energy regimes, the vastly expanded role of science in agriculture, and governmental interventions that are frequently associated with the green revolution in the developing world, although they were underway at an earlier date in Europe. Chapters cover shifts in the energy regime, developments in insurance, seed production, Spanish forestry (by Gloria Sanz Lafuente), soil science, pesticides and fungicides, government agricultural policy, and environmental protection (by Rita Gudermann). The geographical focus ranges from pre-war Germany and the two post-war Germanies, to Austria and Switzerland.

Fridolin Krausmann draws on his major collaborative study of three villages in Austria to provide a detailed quantitative assessment of energy flows and their influence on agricultural productivity since 1830. Krausmann views the agrarian world through the prism of social ecology, ‘society and nature as structurally bound systems’, and with a perspective that sees human influences as a ‘colonisation’ of natural processes. The work of Krausmann and others in the ‘Vienna school’ is beginning to exercise wider influence in European agrarian history and is well worthy of attention. He provides both a sophisticated model and striking evidence as to how Austrian agriculture shifted from a regime intent on conserving and raising the quantity of biomass to one utterly dependent on inputs of fossil fuels. He finds significant efficiency improvements in the century after 1830 (with a doubling in the ratio of energy outputs to inputs), but that a radical transformation in agricultural practice only occurred after 1950: a transformation that, in energetic terms, has vastly decreased the efficiency of agricultural work. While not the first to provide an ecological model for farming, Krausmann represents a state-of-the-art approach that could be widely adapted to identify critical shifts in agricultural practice.

Krausmann has next to nothing to say about institutions, but it is these that provide the focus of the other chapters. Frank Oberholzner provides a history of the slow birth of hail insurance in Bavaria over the nineteenth century, where private and statutory bodies had a chequered history until a system managed through the local administration took off in the 1880s. Peter Moser tells a fascinating story of academic and institutional rivalry, and state subsidy and monopoly controls in the development of crop breeding in Switzerland. By the 1930s Swiss seed production and crop varieties were tightly regulated by the national Organisation for Seed Breeding (Saatzuchtverband), and a network of regional bodies. Domestically-produced seed varieties were linked with national identity and a conscious drive for self-sufficiency until the model was overturned by forced privatisation following the GATT agreement of 1986.

Moser’s analysis of the institutional politics of farming links well with the chapters of Frank Uekötter and Jürgen Büschenfeld on the chemical industry and agriculture, and Arnd Bauerkämper on post-war environmental impacts. The former stresses the essential role of a particular knowledge regime in conditioning agricultural practice, a regime based not only on developments in science but relations of trust built up between experts and producers (and allowing for the rapid marginalization of dissenters). Uekötter sees the 1920s and ’30s as key decades in the triumph of the chemical industry in agriculture, resulting in a subsequent rapid loss of knowledge about soil quality. Büschenfeld traces Germany’s drive for high productivity, supported by subsidy and massive inputs of chemicals, to a reaction to the extreme shortages of the immediate post-war years, although a move towards self-sufficiency was general in post-war Europe. He notes, though, that the chemical industry’s greatest ally in its continuing leading role in agriculture has been the continual adaptability of insects in the face of chemical attack, which continues to keep insecticide producers busy and profitable. Unsurprisingly, Bauerkämper finds that agriculture in the Federal Republic, with the retention of some price pressure from international markets, a more responsive regulatory regime and greater flexibility in farm size and type, proved capable of both greater productivity increases and, in the long-run, more effective environmental protection than the vast centrally-directed farming co-operatives of the east, with the latter’s high degree of specialization and poor integration.

As is frequently the case with a conference-based collection of essays, the contributions are rather disparate in their theme, level of analysis, and evidential detail; many are essentially reports on work the authors have published elsewhere. The volume remains however a useful guide to contemporary developments in germanophone agricultural history of the modern era.