AGRICULTURE

The so-called agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century sprang from scientific and nonscientific sources, but the period beginning from the mid-eighteenth century saw increasing scientific concern with agricultural productivity. Scientists in Europe and outside it exchanged seeds and information in the attempt to develop or acclimate new crops.The hope of agricultural improvement had a long history in the development of Western science, but despite some experimental work there had been little direct application of science to the problems of farmers.

The most influential publication on agriculture in the eighteenth century, The New Horse Houghing Husbandry (1731) by Jethro Tull (1674–1741), was written by a farmer rather than a scientist. Influences on Tull’s new theories included the science of his day, classical farming literature dating back to the ancient Romans, and his observations of viticulture in the south of France.Tull’s new farming relied on thorough hoeing to make the resources of the soil more available to the plants and the use of a seed drill he invented for sowing, rather than scattering.Tull’s more questionable ideas included opposition to manuring, which he regarded as valueless, and to crop rotation.

One area with a high level of interest in both science and agricultural development was Scotland, home of an early agricultural society, the Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture, active between 1723 and 1745. One of the earliest works of agricultural chemistry was Principles of Agriculture and Vegetation (1757) by the Scottish professor Francis Home (1719–1813). It was translated into French and German, but its influence was limited by its old-fashioned chemistry, like Tull’s, still based on the Aristotelian four elements.

The second half of the century saw the creation of many new institutions concerned with agriculture. Some were societies specifically devoted to agriculture; others included its improvement as part of an overall mission of economic development. There were also many agricultural periodicals founded in this period (agriculture was second only to medicine in the number of journals devoted to it), including the Journal of Agriculture; Commerce and Finance, which ran from 1763 to 1783; and Annals of Agriculture, which ran from 1784 to 1815, edited by the British agricultural writer Arthur Young (1741–1820).

Tull’s work was brought to France in 1750 by Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700–1782), himself from a landowning family.This was not simply a matter of translation, as Tull was a very obscure writer and his science had to be brought in line with current French thinking. The indefatigable Duhamel du Monceau also set up an experimental farm to test Tull’s and other theories, and maintained a correspondence with other experimental farmers. The results of his work were published in 1762 in the two-volume Elements of Agriculture, frequently translated and reprinted.

The previous year had seen the foundation of the Paris-based Royal Society of Agriculture, the centerpiece of a vast state-led effort to promote agricultural enlightenment through the creation of a network of provincial associations. The later Committee on Agriculture of the Finance Ministry, founded in 1785, was a more bureaucratic body. Its secretary was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, himself an active experimental farmer. The French government also attempted to improve animal husbandry by encouraging the foundation of the world’s first school of veterinary medicine at Lyon in 1762, and a second at Alfort, on the outskirts of Paris, in 1766.

By the late eighteenth century, the idea of agricultural improvement through institution building had spread over Europe. In 1797, a Hungarian nobleman, György Festetics, founded the Georgikon, a school for agricultural technology, on his estate in Keszthely, hoping to improve its productivity.

The leading French agronomist in the decades before the French Revolution was the chemist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737–1813), admitted as a member of the Royal Society of Agriculture in 1773 and best remembered as the great promoter of the potato in France. Unlike Duhamel du Monceau, Parmentier was laboratory oriented. Building on the work of Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari (1682–1766), a Bolognese who had first broken down flour into gluten and starch, Parmentier launched an exhaustive series of chemical analyses of common food products, including bread and milk.

His work on the potato was first put forth in Chemical Analysis of Potatoes (1773). Parmentier vigorously promoted the potato as a supplemental food that could be grown in soil inhospitable to grain rather than a dietary staple, having to overcome many prejudices against it. He gave famous dinners for members of the French elite (most of whom associated potatoes with poor peasants) in which every course was potato based. In the Napoleonic period, Parmentier was one of the many scientists working on the extraction of sugar from grapes and beets to substitute for British-controlled cane sugar.

British agricultural societies originally formed spontaneously rather than as part of a governmental effort.The London-based Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce, and Manufactures, founded in 1754, offered prizes for agricultural innovations as well as industrial. The Society of Arts, as it was known, also supported agricultural innovators in the American colonies, after the American Revolution, with the founding of agricultural societies in Philadelphia and South Carolina in 1785.

One of the most important provincial societies with an exclusively agricultural focus was the Bath and West and Southern Counties Society, founded in 1777.The society had connections with local scientific circles. It purchased a ten-acre plot of land for an experimental farm in 1779, although the effort came to nothing. In 1805, it set up a chemical laboratory for soil analysis.

The British government began to follow the French example of direct involvement in agricultural improvement in the 1790s, founding the London Veterinary College in 1792 and a board of agriculture in 1793. Beginning in 1803 and ending in 1812, the board sponsored a series of annual lectures by Sir Humphry Davy on agricultural chemistry, focusing on soil analysis and plant nutrition. The lectures were published in 1813 as Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, which was frequently reprinted and translated into French, Italian, and German.

The degree to which all this intellectual activity affected actual farming outside experimental farms is obscure. Many farmers distrusted “book farming” and thought the changes recommended by agricultural improvers to be too risky.

By William E. Burns in "Science in the Enlightenment, An Encyclopedia", History of Science Series, ABC-CLIO, USA, 2003, excerpts pp. 3-4. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.