Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 278

It is difficult to imagine today’s agricultural industry operating without modern varieties of crops and grasses, pesticides or veterinary medicines, all derived directly or indirectly from the results of scientific research. Farmers also use technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) that were developed for other purposes. Working the other way, statistical techniques now in general use were developed at Rothamsted agricultural research station, and methods of assisted conception in humans originated in the science used in developing artificial insemination, semen storage, and embryo transplants for farm animals. For over 50 years from 1931 the UK’s Agricultural Research Council spent millions of pounds on basic and applied agricultural science, and today over a quarter of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s budget is devoted to projects relating to agriculture and food security. Since the Royal Agricultural Society of England was founded in 1838 with the motto ‘Practice with Science’, there is clearly nothing new in this. Yet in the last 30 years this Review has published fewer than ten articles directly concerned with the relationship between science and agriculture, and the most recent survey of the subject published in the UK – Blaxter and Robertson’s From dearth to plenty. The modern revolution in food production – is now more than 20 years old and was written by scientists and not historians.

How can we account for this? According to Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland it is not something confined to the UK. Introducing their book, they point out that science historians, or historians of biology, tend to neglect agriculture to the same degree that agricultural historians ignore science. There are some notable exceptions, although they are often found in history of science departments and publish in science history journals. From their work several common themes have emerged, such as the use of science to promote agricultural growth, and the interactions and relationships between science and government, experts and practitioners, and between science and technology. Agricultural issues have had an impact on the development of the life sciences, especially genetics and ecology, and agriculture provides some interesting case studies of the ways in which ideas and methods travel around the world.

Many of these topics are covered in this book. Roughly half of its 23 chapters are concerned with the twentieth century, with the some of the remainder going back as far as the middle of the eighteenth century. More than half of the authors are working in, or have some connection with, the USA, although several of them write about events in other countries such as Germany, Japan, France or China. Only three of the chapters – Matz on nutrition science in late nineteenth-century Germany, Derry on chicken breeding and Onaga on Japanese silkworm breeding, both in the twentieth century – are specifically concerned with animals. The pre-twentieth-century chapters cover a variety of topics, from the emergence of plant geography in Germany and France, and Napoleon’s interest in cotton growing, to the rise of scientific forestry and applied entomology in Russia, the impact of microbiology on the Japanese brewing industry, and the establishment of a botanical garden in Java. This last chapter, together with the following two on the emergence of ecology in the USA, raise some interesting questions about the emergence of scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines and their relationship with agriculture. Otherwise, most of the twentieth-century chapters are concerned with breeding and genetics, and the complexities of the relationships between their practitioners. As Margaret Derry points out, it was the lack of detailed understanding of poultry breeding practices that initially limited the influence of geneticists, who in any case were more interested in general biological problems. What changed, and increased the influence of the scientists, was not the science, but the organization of the poultry industry.

This brief survey of the contents cannot do justice to the variety and richness of the book. I had not thought about the influence of vegetarians, naturopaths, nudists and anti-vaccinationists on the emergence of organic farming in Germany, or the use of whale oil to combat the depredations of the brown planthopper on the Japanese rice crop, before reading this book. I was aware that plant breeders had used X-rays to induce mutations and thus attempt to produce useful variations in commercial crops, but its extent and the excitement it generated in the inter-war period eluded me until I read Helen Anne Curry’s fascinating chapter. There is no single unifying theme running through the book, but the editors end their introduction with the hope that this varied collection will stimulate further research. And so it should.