Short Teaching Module: Agricultural Knowledge in the Late Nineteenth Century

Knowledge is not just science. Everybody knows something and experts can come from the most varied corners of society. For a few decades now, historians of science have also understood this and have broadened their horizon of study to a history of knowledge more broadly understood. The fundamental insight in this process is that scientific practice, as with any knowledge production, is situated in time and space. While scientists may have claimed their knowledge was objective and universal, they could never escape their subjective skins and particular environments. In this way, historians of science have opened their perspective to all manners of knowledge making and all kinds of knowledge makers. Indigenous knowledge, the know-how of craftspeople, and farmers’ knowledge have taken their place next to science in historical analysis. (Secord, 2004)

Looking beyond the bounds of science also means that the significant moment in knowledge production is no longer seen as necessarily the moment of “discovery” but rather what happened after. Rather than assuming that freshly “discovered” knowledge “diffuses” into the vague mass of the public, the negotiation of knowledge takes center stage. How could different knowledge makers come to an agreement on what was new, useful, and reliable knowledge? (Daston and Galison, 2014)

One example of knowledge negotiation is agricultural knowledge in the late nineteenth century. Several groups of agricultural knowledge makers interacted, particularly in the United States and Germany, arguably the two centers of agricultural innovation. Agricultural scientists produced knowledge removed from market pressures in university laboratories and experiment stations. They rose to prominence in mid-century by claiming chemical analysis, mathematics, and carefully measured feeding experiments could produce universal and therefore superior knowledge to that of practicing farmers. Opposing them were innovation-minded farm improvers who had earlier held much authority over farming knowledge. Improvers argued that the results of any innovation trials had to be placed into particular environmental and economic contexts so they could be adapted by skillful farmers in different contexts. One farmer’s profit was evidence enough to them. In improvers’ minds, universal principles developed by “book farmers” were largely useless since they were not produced on active farms under market conditions. To scientists, trial success measured in money by one uneducated “dirt farmer” made only one flimsy data point. Scientists and improvers used different evidence, language, and communication strategies to bolster their own side and discredit opposing claims. Scientists tried to convince farmers of laboratory-won insights, while innovation-minded farmers adapted experimental results from elsewhere to their region or farm.

In the 1850s, American and German agricultural scientists were still the new kids on the farming block. Their relevance depended on improvers using their new ideas, such as ideal rations. This innovation was a result of early research in nutrition. Scientists determined the nutritional supply of feed by chemical analysis and the nutritional demand of livestock by feeding experiment. The result was a recipe for a nutritionally most-efficient ration expressed in chemical components, such as proteins and carbohydrates, rather than in terms of particular feeds, such as oats or hay. Farmers only had to assemble ideal rations by a rather complex calculation from locally available and low-cost feeds. 

The German agricultural scientist Emil Wolff was a trailblazer in summarizing this research and communicating it to improvers. To target an improver audience, from the 1850s to the 1870s he transformed his pedagogical strategies of translating ideal rations to farmers in a German farm almanac (Mentzel und v. Lengerke’s Landwirthschaftlicher Hülfs- und Schreibkalender) rather than a scientific monograph. He moved from translating scientists’ ideal rations into improvers’ easy-to-use hay values (which equated the weight of all feeds to weight in hay), to calculating ideal sample rations and describing particular profitable feeding trials for improvers to adapt, and arrived finally at explaining the complex calculation of ideal rations. Over these decades and beyond, his initial translations s won over enough improvers who were versed in some scientific reading to demonstrate the validity of scientific claims and how to adapt them. Still, there needed to be compromise. At a meeting of the German Farmers and Foresters (Versammlung deutscher Land- und Forstwirthe) in 1865, one improver noted the proven profitability of scientific feeding, but criticized its complexity. Improvers were ready to agree with scientists that universal principles were true – they also did not have the chemical expertise to challenge their results – but that their usefulness still depended on the skillful and especially economic adaptation in place performed by improvers. Turning principles into profit on farms was improvers’ expertise, which scientists could not challenge from their ivory towers in universities and experiment stations.

Just as knowledge production was historically contingent, so was its communication and negotiation. People adapted knowledge in the shape of matter, words, and practices to new local contexts around the globe. Knowledge needed to be malleable and mutable to be understood and useful to different people in different places. Some historians of science understand this as the “circulation” of knowledge. Others criticize this concept as suggesting too much free flow when in fact directionalities and obstacles between languages, classes of society, and geographies abounded. (Gänger, 2017; Raj, 2010)

During their virtually obligatory studies at German universities and experiment stations, American agricultural scientists took home the almanac Wolff had published in to communicate his translations of ideal rations. In the 1870s and 1880s, American scientists such as Wilbur Olin Atwater, Samuel Johnson, and Henry Prentiss Armsby used the almanac to convince farmers of scientific feeding. But when Atwater at a meeting of Maine farmers in 1874 assumed that the almanac’s German evidence of profitability was universally true, his improver audience disagreed and pointed out that German environmental and economic conditions did not apply in America. For example, the hot American summers dried out hay faster than farmers could harvest it, which was not a problem in Germany.

By contrast, in late 1873 Samuel Johnson was able to convince a meeting of the Connecticut board of agriculture of the benefits of scientific feeding. He admitted freely that the almanac’s German evidence was only relevant in Germany, but that the underlying principles could be adapted to American conditions. Feeds available in Germany could be substituted for feeds available in Connecticut and, should the attendees approve the first American agricultural experiment station, German methods of chemical analysis would provide specific evidence of American feeds. Henry Prentiss Armsby built on the American feed analyses produced by the experiment station Johnson’s audience had authorized. In the first American textbook for scientific feeding, published in 1880, Armsby integrated American feed analyses with the German data from the almanac in the same table. Through several interventions, American agricultural scientists had moved knowledge of livestock feeds from Germany to the United States. 

Agricultural knowledge did not just involve products grown locally, but also those that were part of imperial networks. One example is palm kernel meal, a byproduct of palm oil production, which centered in industrial oil mills in German harbor cities such as Hamburg and Bremen. This meal was part of a group of industrial byproduct cattle feeds promoted by German agricultural scientists, improvers, and the agents transporting, processing, and selling these feeds. Their consensus on the usefulness of this feed was also founded on the standardized quality of this industrial byproduct. 

Improvers and less innovation-minded farmers did not know this product grown and processed far away by unfamiliar means. Chemical analysis allowed sellers of industrial byproduct feeds to guarantee nutritional content. Should the product deviate from this guarantee, however, farmers and scientists alike would accuse them of adulteration. As a result, German agricultural scientists urged market agents to improve the sorting and cleaning of oil palm kernels in oil mills, and to push African farmers to do more thorough work removing the adulterating hard kernel shells. In the colonies, however, leaving part of the shell on saved labor and increased the weight of kernels. Colonized farmers could shortweight European traders. Adulterating crops for the oil and feed industry was a strategy of colonized farmers to resist the devaluation of their labor, thus using their knowledge of agricultural processes to their own advantage. 

Knowledge history makes clear how knowledge moved and changed between different groups of people and places. By shifting the focus of analysis from the “discovery” to the negotiation of knowledge, histories of knowledge complicate national histories of scientific heroes and emphasize the role of all kinds of knowledge makers in many places. The result is more than just how new knowledge changed the world but also how the world changed knowledge in every place anew.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2014.

Gänger, Stefanie. “Circulation: Reflections on Circularity, Entity, and Liquidity in the Language of Global History.” Journal of Global History 12, no. 3 (November 2017): 303–18.

Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Secord, James A. “Knowledge in Transit.” Isis 95, no. 4 (2004): 654–72.

Justus Hillebrand is an independent scholar as well as a research consultant and database designer for Digital History Consulting, Inc. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Maine in co-tutelage with the University of Cologne, Germany, in 2021. Currently, he is working to expand his dissertation “To Know the Land with Hands and Minds: Negotiating Agricultural Knowledge in Late-Nineteenth-Century New England and Westphalia” to a full-length book and to help historians understand and utilize databases as foundational to transformative digital research.