Agriculture and the plow originated 10–13 millennia ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, mostly along the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Indus and Yangtze River valleys, and were introduced into Greece and southeastern Europe ∼8000 years ago. The wooden plow, called an ard, evolved into the “Roman plow”, with an iron plowshare, described by Virgil around 1 ad and was used in Europe until the fifth century. It further evolved into a soil inverting plow during the 8th to 10th century. In the U.S., a moldboard plow was designed by Thomas Jefferson in 1784, patented by Charles Newfold in 1796, and marketed in the 1830s as a cast iron plow by a blacksmith named John Deere. Use of the plow expanded rapidly with the introduction of the “steam horse” in 1910 that led to widespread severe soil erosion and environmental degradation culminating in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. A transition from moldboard plow to various forms of conservation tillage began with the development of 2,4-D after World War II. No-till is presently practiced on about 95 million hectares globally. No-till technologies are very effective in minimizing soil and crop residue disturbance, controlling soil evaporation, minimizing erosion losses, sequestering C in soil and reducing energy needs. However, no-till is effective only with the use of crop residue as mulch, which has numerous competing uses. No-till farming can reduce yield in poorly drained, clayey soils when springtime is cold and wet. Soil-specific research is needed to enhance applicability of no-till farming by alleviating biophysical, economic, social and cultural constraints. There is a strong need to enhance sustainability of production systems while improving the environmental quality.

Evolution of the plow over 10,000 years and the rationale for no-till farming

In the twenty-first century, the production and use of scientific knowledge is more regulated, commercialized, and participatory than at any other time. The stakes in understanding these changes are high for scientist and nonscientist alike: they challenge traditional ideas of intellectual work and property and have the potential to remake legal and professional boundaries and transform the practice of research. A critical examination of the structures of power and inequality these changes hinge upon, this book explores the implications for human health, democratic society, and the environment.

The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power

MILITARY SERVICE, COMBAT, AND AMERICAN IDENTITY IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA by Sebastian Hubert Lukasik Department of History Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Alex Roland, Supervisor ___________________________ Claudia Koonz ___________________________ Peter Wood ___________________________ Richard H. Kohn An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2008

Military service, combat, and American identity in the Progressive Era

In the first half of the twentieth century, agrarian reformers in the American South and Mexico came to imagine themselves as confronting a shared problem. Diagnosing rural poverty, uneven land tenure, export-oriented monoculture, racialized labor regimes, and soil exploitation as the common consequences of the plantation system, they fostered a transnational dialogue over how to overcome that bitter legacy. Of the many voices in that conversation, particularly important was that of the Rockefeller philanthropies, who began their career in social uplift by targeting the poverty of the U.S. Cotton Belt in the Progressive Era. When they founded their renowned Mexican Agriculture Program of the early 1940s – a program that would ultimately provide the blueprint for the Green Revolution, or the Cold War project of teaching American-style scientific agriculture to Third World farmers – it was explicitly modeled on their earlier work in the American South, a region that Rockefeller experts used as a domestic laboratory for rural reform. While of great significance, the Rockefeller philanthropies were not the sole voice in the U.S.-Mexican agrarian dialogue, and the directionality of intellectual influence did not only flow southward. Especially during the radical 1930s, New Deal reformers worried about U.S. southern rural poverty looked to the Mexican Revolution’s evolving policy of land reform for inspiration, drawing upon it to draft similar programs for the Cotton Belt. Ultimately, the dissertation reveals that the project of rural “development” was decidedly diverse at mid-century, and was forged in a transnational crucible. Likewise, it demonstrates that integrating the history of the American South with that of Latin America and the Caribbean can get us beyond the historiographical dichotomy that separates U.S. and Latin American history in the twentieth century.

Agrarian crossings: the American South, Mexico, and the twentieth-century remaking of the rural world

...............................................................................................ii Acknowledgements..............................................................................................iii Table of

The Agrarian Seeds of Empire: The Political Economy of Agriculture in the U.S. State Institutional Capacity Building, 1849-1980

Born in the Country was the first-and is still the only-general history of rural America published. Ranging from pre-Columbian times to the enormous changes of the twentieth century, Born in the Country masterfully integrates agricultural, technological, and economic themes with new questions social historians have raised about the American experience-including the different experiences of whites and blacks, men and women, natives and new immigrants. In this second edition, David B. Danbom expands and deepens his coverage of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing on the changes in agriculture and rural life since 1945. He discusses the alarming decline of agriculture as a productive enterprise and the parallel disintegration of farm families into demographic insignificance. In a new and provocative afterword, Danbom reflects on whether a distinctive style of rural life exists any longer. Combining mastery of existing scholarship with a fresh approach to new material, Born in the Country continues to define the field of American rural history.

Born in the Country: A History of Rural America

The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930

The World of Hope: Progressives and the Struggle for an Ethical Public Life

Tom Philpott is the food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones. In Perilous Bounty he focuses on what he sees as the agricultural sustainability crisis in two essential production areas—California, and Iowa, which stands as a proxy for the Corn Belt as a whole.California's Central, San Joaquin, Imperial, and Salinas Valleys are the country's year-round primary sources of fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as almonds and pistachios. The ability of farmers in those valleys to produce for domestic consumption, as well as for export, is increasingly compromised by water shortages. California farmers' dependence on mountain snows to fill the reservoirs that provide their annual allocations has been sorely tested over the past decade, during which the state has been more or less continually in drought conditions. Making matters worse is the shift among some farmers out of row crops and into nuts, especially almonds and pistachios. Both are thirsty crops, especially almonds, which require nearly two thousand gallons of water to produce one pound of nuts.California farmers have coped with the water shortage by improving irrigation technologies and by tapping aquifers when they are available. But drawing aquifers down has brought a new set of problems. One is subsidence. As groundwater is taken, land on the surface slumps away, causing problems with the built environment, including existing aqueducts. The other problem is salinization. As aquifers are depleted the water that remains holds higher concentrations of minerals, including salts. Philpott notes that the increasing popularity of pistachios among farmers is due in large part to that crop's high tolerance for salt. Not that this shift is due solely to farmers' decisions. The Wonderful Company controls half a million acres of nut trees and provides a ready market for smaller farmers' almonds and pistachios.Just when he has you thinking that California is about to dry up and blow away, Philpott raises another—if possible, much more alarming—possibility, that there might be a repeat of the catastrophic 1862 flood. That year, weeks of heavy rains turned the Central Valley into a lake six or more feet deep, driving settlers from their homes and killing tens of thousands of cattle. Today 6.5 million people live in the Central Valley, and the wetlands that helped prevent the 1862 flood from being even worse have been drained. A repeat of that flood would be the most devastating natural disaster in American history.Then there's Iowa and the larger Corn Belt it represents. As Philpott notes, Iowa farmers used to raise a mix of crops, especially corn, and animals, especially hogs. For the first century of Iowa's European-American history they usually included a cover crop, too, such as hay, rye, or oats. The hogs ate the corn, the cover crops held the soil in place, and the manure generated on the farm maintained the fertility of the fields. Now most of this has changed, and the change, Philpott argues, has not been for the better. Today the vast majority of hogs are raised in massive confinement facilities that foul the water and the air. Farmers buy their fertilizers in chemical form from off-farm sources. They now grow little, if anything, but corn and soybeans, becoming what my Iowa friends used to call “CBF” farmers, for “corn, beans, and Florida.”Philpott contends that farmers have not benefited from this change. They are on an agricultural treadmill, producing more and more on bigger and bigger farms to remain in the same place economically. They won't change because of fear, government programs that encourage them to grow the same crops, investment in machinery and skills that are crop specific, and because the processing and marketing structure for alternative crops is not available. Helping them stay in their position are the people who gain most of the benefits—suppliers of inputs like Deere and Monsanto and processors like Cargill and JBS.The farmers' situation is bad enough, but the impact of modern Corn Belt farming on the environment may be even worse. Uncovered fields are vulnerable to erosion when late winter and early spring downpours come, and as valuable topsoil enters ditches and streams it carries agricultural chemicals—especially nitrogen—with it. Nitrogen fouls aquifers and local water systems, creates or exacerbates algae blooms in local lakes and ponds, and, if it enters the Mississippi River drainage system, some of it will end up contributing to the growing “dead zone” of blooming algae in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the river.When he moves from problems to solutions, Philpott takes a moderate approach, though his cures for the sustainability crisis will be difficult to achieve. For California, Philpott has hopes for the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which will be fully implemented in 2040 and will empower the state to control groundwater exploitation. He urges that production of especially thirsty crops be scaled back, and that growers focus on satisfying local markets. He argues that this would encourage farmers elsewhere to grow fruits and vegetables. Certainly, fresh produce comes from Florida, but not enough to meet consumer demands. There was a time when fruits and vegetables were widely grown in the Upper Midwest and canned there. But we have become accustomed to fresh produce year-round, and changing that would require a reacceptance of seasonality on the part of consumers.There is another possible answer to the problem of water in western agriculture that is being implemented right now—move the water from the countryside to the cities, doing away entirely with agriculture as it is now practiced in much of the West. In Colorado, which, like California, is a “first in time, first in right” state in regard to water, fast-growing municipalities are buying water rights from farmers, who then rent their land out for dryland farming or grazing. The city of Aurora, for example, has been buying water rights from farmers in the Arkansas Valley, nearly two hundred miles away!Philpott's prescription for Iowa agriculture mostly involves a shift away from the exclusive emphasis on corn and soybeans, including ending federal programs encouraging these crops, especially the ethanol program. He thinks that Iowa farmers should include cover crops in their rotation, which would hold soil and water, diminish the need for nitrogen fertilizers, and facilitate carbon capture. He also believes they should return to raising hogs and cattle, thereby reducing the environmental and aesthetic curse of massive confinement facilities while providing natural nitrogen fertilization.These steps would undoubtedly improve the sustainability of Corn Belt agriculture by diversifying it and diminishing erosion while lowering chemical costs. Local nonfarmers would benefit from fewer floods and lakes and rivers less fouled by chemicals. But the execution would be a problem. As the ethanol program demonstrates, the closest thing to eternal life in modern America is the federal farm program, and eliminating any part of it is devilishly difficult. Getting farmers to change their ways is no snap either. Introducing cover crops on land where they have not been grown for a couple of generations will entail a new learning curve for farmers, and perhaps new expenses for equipment. Reintroducing animals would probably be the heaviest lift. Animals require a lot of attention that Iowa farmers, accustomed to less-demanding crops, might not be prepared to give.Ever since I have been involved in this enterprise, the sustainability of the American agricultural regime has been in serious doubt. Some of the factors many believed would doom it—such as running out of petroleum—have disappeared. Some of the suggestions that were offered to reform it, such as organic production and the consumption of local foods, have had effects that we see in our supermarkets and farmers' markets. But the question of the sustainability of most agricultural production in this country remains with us. Indeed, it is probably more immediate now than it has ever been.The increasing immediacy of climate change exacerbates the problem of agricultural sustainability, as the drought in California and the heavier spring rains in Iowa illustrate. The sustainability crisis and the climate change crisis are also linked by the reality that both are slow-moving crises, with no Pearl Harbor or 9/11 moment that would galvanize the public to demand and support action. As I write this review, the western drought is in yet another year, the fire season has started earlier, as seems to happen every year now, heat in the Northwest has been so intense that millions of shellfish have perished along the coast, and Lake Mead is so low that power generation has been compromised. Here in my state a 120-mile stretch of the Colorado River has been closed to fishermen owing to low flows and high temperatures that have stressed the trout.But by the time you read this review, it will be cooler, the fires will be under control, and we will probably have had fall and winter moisture. Climate change will fade as a pressing public concern. We'll be moving on with our lives, hoping that this summer will be wetter and cooler. Likewise, the grocery shelves will be stocked, the meat counter will be full, and the array of fresh fruits and vegetables we expect will be abundant. There will be nothing to lead us to expect that an agricultural sustainability crisis looms. The lack of immediacy of the threats that loom before us prevents us from giving them the sustained attention they demand, and until we are unable to maintain the diet to which we have become accustomed, we are unlikely to make the changes that might sustain us, even changes as mild and commonsensical as Philpott suggests.Tom Philpott is a journalist, and, as one would expect, he writes well, though sometimes more self-referentially than I would prefer. He has a story to tell, not a totally new story, to be sure, but one deserving the attention of readers of Agricultural History. It will repay the time you devote to it. 

David B. Danbom

Papers

Born in the Country: A History of Rural America

The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930

The World of Hope: Progressives and the Struggle for an Ethical Public Life

The Sustainability Crisis . . . Again