Abstract Frustrated with the slow pace of improvement in their region, many white New South agricultural reformers looked for a scapegoat. They found one in the Black tenant farmer, whom they blamed for the Cotton Belt's failure to diversify production and adopt intensive, scientific methods. This article explores white reformers’ main ideas for replacing the so-called Negro tenant system. Many of them called for supplanting the Black tenantry with white yeoman farmers. This idea was especially popular among the supporters of the Southern Immigration Movement, a loosely coordinated effort to bring European immigrants to the region. Southern immigration advocates argued that European immigrants’ expertise in mixed farming and intensive methods made them the obvious choice to reform Southern agriculture. These immigration supporters urged landowners to divide their holdings and sell them to a new class of European smallholders who could help bring scientific farming to the Cotton Belt.
Abstract By the start of the First World War in 1914, debates about whether to use horse-powered or motor-powered technologies raged in both domestic agriculture and military service. Small light horses and heavy draft horses served as mounts for soldiers and hauled weapons, food, and other critical supplies. In histories of the First World War, horses are often overshadowed by their mechanized counterparts: tractors, trucks, automobiles, and tanks. These competing technologies were often used, when available, but within military operations they were nevertheless a complement to horses rather than a replacement for them. This article illuminates how horses remained valuable to the US Army during the First World War, even during this era of profound technological change. How the US engineered the warhorse demonstrates the interconnected nature of American agricultural, military, animal, and technological histories.
Abstract This article uncovers managerialism's footprints within the postindependence developmental imagination in India—specifically its forays into the rural socioeconomic world. It argues that by following this trail of managerialism, we can gain new insights into the intellectual frameworks of rural development and the many ways in which they have historically reproduced and propped up structures of power in the countryside. The article focuses on an experiment conducted in the 1970s that sought to stimulate the productivity of the “rural poor” through the promise of skilling and the conceit of “problem solving.” It situates this experiment in the gradual unfurling of the Green Revolution, which laid bare the contradictions inherent in the question of agrarian productivity. Furthermore, it shows how the issue of rural nonagrarian labor during this period was being taken up by the emerging discipline of “rural management,” which in turn produced its own reformist rationales. This article analyzes the inherent contradictions of these rationales and the developmental discourse they legitimized.
Abstract In the mid-twentieth century, blueberries became one of American agriculture's small-fruit success stories. Some three decades of collaborative experiments involving federal and state governments and entrepreneurial farmers had unlocked the secrets of cultivating a berry that both consumers and farmers liked. Contrary to conventional thought, however, this was not the beginning of the blueberry industry in the United States. It was, rather, its transformation. The widespread harvesting of blueberries for urban markets began with the transportation revolution in the 1840s, but this industry was fundamentally different from the one that replaced it. Not only were these berries called “huckleberries” everywhere but New England, they were also harvested entirely from the de facto commons. This history provides a case study of how a commons resource—considered property of the harvester—became a private one owned by the landowner and of the social, cultural, and economic effects of that transformation.
Abstract From 1935 to 1942, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) ran two educational initiatives—the Schools of Philosophy and the Group Discussion Program—to engage farmers and agricultural leaders in subjects such as history, philosophy, and economics. These programs sought to foster informed, participatory policymaking and democratic engagement in planning by inviting farmers into policy discussions. Drawing on USDA program office archives and site-specific records, this study examines variations in content and delivery across time, region, and audience. It reveals important differences between events for predominantly white audiences and those for Black participants, with the latter featuring explicit antiracist themes. The analysis also reveals a shift in program focus around 1940, from broadly educational goals toward rallying patriotism, mobilizing early defense production, and addressing the threat of war. These findings illuminate how federal educational programs adapted to political pressures and wartime imperatives while shaping civic discourse in rural America.
Abstract This article discusses the historical development of cacao experimentation in Colombia, highlighting the role of British plant pathologist Frederick J. Pound, based in Trinidad. Pound's expeditions to the Amazon basin in the late 1930s, financed by the British Empire, aimed to find disease-free cacao trees, leading to the discovery of cacao variability. His subsequent visits to Colombia in the 1940s contributed to boosting a cacao development and research program despite the challenges the Colombian cacao industry faced, including the mismatch between supply and market demands. This led to the need for imports, despite Columbia's status as a cacao-producing country. The article emphasizes the intertwined relationship between geographical locations, individuals, disciplines, and institutions in advancing agricultural knowledge. It offers a unique perspective on the complex origins of the Green Revolution while emphasizing debates over quality or quantity within the global agricultural productivist discourse. The cacao development plans discussed in this article involved local and foreign experts in driving the agrarian science around cacao, and the exchange and adaptation of their ideas led to the modernization of cacao science.
