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Washington at the Plow
The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery
Bruce A. Ragsdale
Harvard University Press, 2021

Winner of the George Washington Prize

A fresh, original look at George Washington as an innovative land manager whose singular passion for farming would unexpectedly lead him to reject slavery.

George Washington spent more of his working life farming than he did at war or in political office. For over forty years, he devoted himself to the improvement of agriculture, which he saw as the means by which the American people would attain the “respectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.”

Washington at the Plow depicts the “first farmer of America” as a leading practitioner of the New Husbandry, a transatlantic movement that spearheaded advancements in crop rotation. A tireless experimentalist, Washington pulled up his tobacco and switched to wheat production, leading the way for the rest of the country. He filled his library with the latest agricultural treatises and pioneered land-management techniques that he hoped would guide small farmers, strengthen agrarian society, and ensure the prosperity of the nation.

Slavery was a key part of Washington’s pursuits. He saw enslaved field workers and artisans as means of agricultural development and tried repeatedly to adapt slave labor to new kinds of farming. To this end, he devised an original and exacting system of slave supervision. But Washington eventually found that forced labor could not achieve the productivity he desired. His inability to reconcile ideals of scientific farming and rural order with race-based slavery led him to reconsider the traditional foundations of the Virginia plantation. As Bruce Ragsdale shows, it was the inefficacy of chattel slavery, as much as moral revulsion at the practice, that informed Washington’s famous decision to free his slaves after his death.

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Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West
First in Line for the Rio Grande
David Stiller
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Water has always been one of the American West’s most precious and limited resources. The earliest inhabitants—Native Americans and later Hispanics—learned to share the region’s scant rainfall and snowmelt. When Euro-Americans arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, they brought with them not only an interest in large-scale commercial agriculture but also new practices and laws about access to, and control of, the water essential for their survival and success. This included the concept of private rights to water, a critical resource that had previously been regarded as a communal asset.

David Stiller’s thoughtful study focuses on the history of agricultural water use of the Rio Grande in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. After surveying the practices of early farmers in the region, he focuses on the impacts of Euro-American settlement and the ways these new agrarians endeavored to control the river. Using the Rio Grande as a case study, Stiller offers an informed and accessible history of the development of practices and technologies to store, distribute, and exploit water in Colorado and other western states, as well as an account of the creation of water rights and laws that govern this essential commodity throughout the West to this day. Stiller’s work ranges from meticulously monitored fields of irrigated alfalfa and potatoes to the local and state water agencies and halls of Congress. He also includes perceptive comments on the future of western water as these arid states become increasingly urbanized during a period of worsening drought and climate change.

An excellent read for anyone curious about important issues in the West, Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West offers a succinct summary and analysis of Colorado’s use of water by agricultural interests, in addition to a valuable discussion of the past, present, and future of struggles over this necessary and endangered resource.
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Water and Power in Highland Peru
The Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development
Paul H Gelles
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Cabanaconde, a town of 5,000 people, is located in the arid Andean highlands. It is dominated by the foreboding Hualca Hualca mountain peak  that is the source of this town’s much-needed water. How the villagers obtain this water, Paul Gelles writes, is not a simple process: the politics of irrigation in this area reflect a struggle for control of vital resources, deeply rooted in the clash between local, ritualized models of water distribution and the secular model put forth by the Peruvian state. Water and Power in Highland Peru provides an insightful case study on the intense conflicts over water rights, and a  framework for studying ethnic conflict and the effects of “development,” not only in Peru, but in other areas as well.

Most of the inhabitants of Cabanaconde do not identify themselves with the dominant Spanish-speaking culture found in Peru. And the Peruvian state, grounded in a racist, post-Colonial ethos, challenges the village’s long-standing, non-Western framework for organizing water management.

Gelles demonstrates that Andean culture is dynamic and adaptive, and it is a powerful source of ethnic identity, even for those who leave the village to live elsewhere. Indigenous rituals developed in this part of the world, he states, have become powerful tools of resistance against interference by local elites and the present-day Peruvian state. Most importantly, the micropolitics of Cabanaconde provide a window into a struggle that is taking place around the world.

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Watering the Revolution
An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico
Mikael D. Wolfe
Duke University Press, 2017
In Watering the Revolution Mikael D. Wolfe transforms our understanding of Mexican agrarian reform through an environmental and technological history of water management in the emblematic Laguna region. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico and the United States, Wolfe shows how during the long Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) engineers’ distribution of water paradoxically undermined land distribution. In so doing, he highlights the intrinsic tension engineers faced between the urgent need for water conservation and the imperative for development during the contentious modernization of the Laguna's existing flood irrigation method into one regulated by high dams, concrete-lined canals, and motorized groundwater pumps. This tension generally resolved in favor of development, which unintentionally diminished and contaminated the water supply while deepening existing rural social inequalities by dividing people into water haves and have-nots, regardless of their access to land. By uncovering the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were ecologically unsustainable, Wolfe tells a cautionary tale of the long-term consequences of short-sighted development policies.
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Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico
Climatic, Institutional, and Economic Change
Hallie Eakin
University of Arizona Press, 2006
From floods and droughts to tsunamis and hurricanes, recent years have seen a distressing and often devastating increase in extreme climatic events. While it is possible to study these disasters from a purely scientific perspective, a growing preponderance of evidence suggests that changes in the environment are related to both a shift in global economic relations and these weather-related disasters.
 
In Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico, Hallie Eakin draws on ethnographic data collected in three agricultural communities in rural Mexico to show how economic and climatic change not only are linked in cause and effect at the planetary scale but also interact in unpredictable and complex ways in the context of regional political and trade relationships, national economic and social programs, and the decision-making of institutions, enterprises, and individuals. She shows how the parallel processes of globalization and climatic change result in populations that are “doubly exposed” and thus particularly vulnerable.
 
Chapters trace the effects of El Niño in central Mexico in the late 1990s alongside some of the principal changes in the country’s agricultural policy. Eakin argues that in order to develop policies that effectively address rural poverty and agricultural development, we need an improved understanding of how households cope simultaneously with various sources of uncertainty and adjust their livelihoods to accommodate evolving environmental, political, and economic realities.
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Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing
The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin
Jennifer Bess
University Press of Colorado, 2021
Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing examines the ways in which the Akimel O’odham (“River People”) and their ancestors, the Huhugam, adapted to economic, political, and environmental constraints imposed by federal Indian policy, the Indian Bureau, and an encroaching settler population in Arizona’s Gila River Valley. Fundamental to O’odham resilience was their connection to their sense of peoplehood and their himdag (“lifeway”), which culminated in the restoration of their water rights and a revitalization of their Indigenous culture.
 
Author Jennifer Bess examines the Akimel O’odham’s worldview, which links their origins with a responsibility to farm the Gila River Valley and to honor their history of adaptation and obligations as “world-builders”—co-creators of an evermore life-sustaining environment and participants in flexible networks of economic exchange. Bess considers this worldview in context of the Huhugam–Akimel O’odham agricultural economy over more than a thousand years. Drawing directly on Akimel O’odham traditional ecological knowledge, innovations, and interpretive strategies in archives and interviews, Bess shows how the Akimel O’odham engaged in agricultural economy for the sake of their lifeways, collective identity, enduring future, and actualization of the values modeled in their sacred stories.
 
Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing highlights the values of adaptation, innovation, and co-creation fundamental to Akimel O’odham lifeways and chronicles the contributions the Akimel O’odham have made to American history and to the history of agriculture. The book will be of interest to scholars of Indigenous, American Southwestern, and agricultural history.
 
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Wild Forests
Conservation Biology And Public Policy
William S. Alverson, Donald M. Waller, and Walter Kuhlmann
Island Press, 1994

Wild Forests presents a coherent review of the scientific and policy issues surrounding biological diversity in the context of contemporary public forest management. The authors examine past and current practices of forest management and provide a comprehensive overview of known and suspected threats to diversity.

In addition to discussing general ecological principles, the authors evaluate specific approaches to forest management that have been proposed to ameliorate diversity losses. They present one such policy -- the Dominant Use Zoning Model incorporating an integrated network of "Diversity Maintenance Areas" -- and describe their attempts to persuade the U.S. Forest Service to adopt such a policy in Wisconsin.

Drawing on experience in the field, in negotiations, and in court, the authors analyze the ways in which federal agencies are coping with the mandates of conservation biology and suggest reforms that could better address these important issues. Throughout, they argue that wild or unengineered conditions are those that are most likely to foster a return to the species richness that we once enjoyed.

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Wildly Successful Farming
Sustainability and the New Agricultural Land Ethic
Brian DeVore
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Wildly Successful Farming tells the stories of farmers across the American Midwest who are balancing profitability and food production with environmental sustainability and a passion for all things wild. They are using innovative techniques and strategies to develop their "wildly" successful farms as working ecosystems. Whether producing grain, vegetables, fruit, meat, or milk, these next-generation agrarians look beyond the bottom line of the spreadsheet to the biological activity on the land as key measures of success.

Written by agricultural journalist Brian DeVore, the book is based on interviews he has conducted at farms, wildlife refuges, laboratories, test plots, and gardens over the past twenty-five years. He documents innovations in cover cropping, managed rotational grazing, perennial polyculture, and integrated pest management. His accounts provide insight into the impacts regenerative farming methods can have on wildlife, water, landscape, soils, and rural communities and suggest ways all of us can support wildly successful farmers.
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William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics
Laurie Winn Carlson
University of Missouri Press, 2005
William J. Spillman (1863–1931), considered the founder of agricultural economics, was a scientist and popular agricultural educator for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As the author of more than three hundred articles and four books, Spillman left a lasting mark on American agriculture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with his pioneering solutions for the problems of overproduction and low prices.
Spillman grew up in Lawrence County, Missouri, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri in Columbia. In this biography, Laurie Winn Carlson looks at Spillman’s career as he moved from Missouri to Washington, D.C., where his concepts shaped what became the agricultural New Deal and, eventually, the current farm allotment programs. By placing Spillman’s story within the larger context of American agricultural history, Carlson takes readers inside the USDA during the years our nation’s agricultural policy took shape. She studies the development of the field of genetics, the conflicts regarding agricultural education and the creation of the Cooperative Extension Service, the overproduction crisis after World War I and Spillman’s ideas for allotment, and the commercial fertilizer industry and the Law of Diminishing Returns. She also looks at efforts to restrict research, the censorship of publications directed toward farmers, and personal rivalries within the USDA.
This examination of agriculture through Spillman’s eyes reveals that industrialized agriculture was not inevitable but a carefully crafted ideology that farmers were pushed to embrace. Although highly contested by farmers as well as employees within the USDA, industry, government, politics, and technology, industrialized agriculture moved people off the land, replacing them with large-scale mechanized production.
An iconoclast within the USDA bureaucracy, Spillman was a “farm evangelist,” taking his message of diversified farming across the country. He believed that farmers should integrate livestock and rotate crops, rather than continue the monoculture production that was evolving due to the increasing industrialization of farming. Those issues, as well as the Law of Diminishing Returns, sustainability, and popular education, all matters to which Spillman devoted his career, are more important today than ever.
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Wisconsin Agriculture
A History
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015

"I'm embarrassed to say I thought I knew anything substantial about Wisconsin agriculture or its history before I read this book. 'Wisconsin Agriculture' should be required reading in history classes from high school to the collegiate level. It makes me thankful that Jerry Apps has such a sense of commitment to Wisconsin's agricultural heritage--and to getting the story right." --Pam Jahnke, Farm Director, Wisconsin Farm Report Radio

Wisconsin has been a farming state from its very beginnings. And though it's long been known as "the Dairy State," it produces much more than cows, milk, and cheese. In fact, Wisconsin is one of the most diverse agricultural states in the nation.

The story of farming in Wisconsin is rich and diverse as well, and the threads of that story are related and intertwined. In this long-awaited volume, celebrated rural historian Jerry Apps examines everything from the fundamental influences of landscape and weather to complex matters of ethnic and pioneer settlement patterns, changing technology, agricultural research and education, and government regulations and policies. Along with expected topics, such as the cranberry industry and artisan cheesemaking, "Wisconsin Agriculture" delves into beef cattle and dairy goats, fur farming and Christmas trees, maple syrup and honey, and other specialty crops, including ginseng, hemp, cherries, sugar beets, mint, sphagnum moss, flax, and hops. Apps also explores new and rediscovered farming endeavors, from aquaculture to urban farming to beekeeping, and discusses recent political developments, such as the 2014 Farm Bill and its ramifications. And he looks to the future of farming, contemplating questions of ethical growing practices, food safety, sustainability, and the potential effects of climate change.

Featuring first-person accounts from the settlement era to today, along with more than 200 captivating photographs, "Wisconsin Agriculture" breathes life into the facts and figures of 150 years of farming history and provides compelling insights into the state's agricultural past, present, and future.

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The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl
Policy Lessons For A New Century
Steven Lewis Yaffee
Island Press, 1994

The controversy over the management of national forests in the Pacific Northwest vividly demonstrates the shortcomings of existing management institutions and natural resource policies. The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl explores the American policymaking process through the case of the spotted owl -- a case that offers a striking illustration of the failure of our society to cope with long-term, science-intensive issues requiring collective choices.

Steven Lewis Yaffee analyzes the political and organizational dynamics from which the controversy emerged and the factors that led to our stunning inability to solve it. He examines the state of resource management agencies and policy processes, providing insight into questions such as:

  • What caused the extreme polarization of opinion and lack of communication throughout the 1980s and early 1990s?
  • How can the inadequate response of government agencies and the failure of the decisionmaking process be explained?
  • What kinds of changes must be made to enable our resource policy institutions to better deal with critical environmental issues of the 1990s and beyond?
By outlining a set of needed reforms, the book will assist those who are involved in re-creating natural resource agencies and public policy processes for the challenges of the next century. In explaining the policymaking process -- its realities and idiosyncrasies -- The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl provides a framework for understanding policies and institutions, and presents a prescription for change to allow for more effective handling of current and future environmental problems.
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Women in Agriculture
Professionalizing Rural Life in North America and Europe, 1880-1965
Linda M. Ambrose and Joan M. Jensen
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Women have always been skilled at feeding their families, and historians have often studied the work of rural women on farms and in their homes. However, the stories of women who worked as agricultural researchers, producers, marketers, educators, and community organizers have not been told until now. Taking readers into the rural hinterlands of the rapidly urbanizing societies of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the essays in Women in Agriculture tell the stories of a cadre of professional women who acted to bridge the growing rift between those who grew food and those who only consumed it. 

The contributors to Women in Agriculture examine how rural women’s expertise was disseminated and how it was received. Through these essays, readers meet subversively lunching ladies in Ontario and African American home demonstration agents in Arkansas. The rural sociologist Emily Hoag made a place for women at the US Department of Agriculture as well as in agricultural research. Canadian rural reformer Madge Watt, British radio broadcaster Mabel Webb, and US ethnobotanists Mary Warren English and Frances Densmore developed new ways to share and preserve rural women’s knowledge. These and the other women profiled here updated and expanded rural women’s roles in shaping their communities and the broader society. Their stories broaden and complicate the history of agriculture in North America and Western Europe.

Contributors:
Linda M. Ambrose, Maggie Andrews, Cherisse Branch-Jones, Joan M. Jensen, Amy McKinney, Anne Moore, Karen Sayer, Margreet van der Burg, Nicola Verdon
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World Agriculture and the Environment
A Commodity-By-Commodity Guide To Impacts And Practices
Jason Clay; World Wildlife Fund
Island Press, 2003

World Agriculture and the Environment presents a unique assessment of agricultural commodity production and the environmental problems it causes, along with prescriptions for increasing efficiency and reducing damage to natural systems. Drawing on his extensive travel and research in agricultural regions around the world, and employing statistics from a range of authoritative sources including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the author examines twenty of the world’s major crops, including beef, coffee, corn, rice, rubber, shrimp, sorghum, tea, and tobacco. For each crop, he offers comparative information including:

• a “fast facts” overview section that summarizes key data for the crop
• main producing and consuming countries
• main types of production
• market trend information and market chain analyses
• major environmental impacts
• management strategies and best practices
• key contacts and references
With maps of major commodity production areas worldwide, the book represents the first truly global portrait of agricultural production patterns and environmental impacts.
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The World of Soy
Edited by Christine M. Du Bois, Sidney Mintz, and Chee-Beng Tan
University of Illinois Press, 2007

As the most ecologically efficient and economical source of complete protein in human food, soy is gradually attracting more use in the American diet for its nutritional and financial value. Derived from soybean plants--the leading export crop of the United States and the world's most traded crop--soy produced for human consumption is part of a global enterprise affecting the likes of farmers, economists, dieticians, and grocery shoppers. An international group of expert food specialists--including an agricultural economist, an agricultural sociologist, a former Peace Corps development expert, and numerous food anthropologists and agricultural historians--discusses important issues central to soy production and consumption: genetically engineered soybeans, increasing soybean cultivation, soyfood marketing techniques, the use of soybeans as an important soil restorative, and the rendering of soybeans for human consumption.

Contributors are Katarzyna Cwiertka, Christine M. Du Bois, H. T. Huang, Lawrence Kaplan, Jian-Hua Mao, Sidney W. Mintz, Akiko Moriya, Can Van Nguyen, Donald Z. Osborn, Erino Ozeki, Myra Sidharta, Ivan Sergio Freire de Sousa, Chee-Beng Tan, and Rita de Cássia Milagres Teixeira Vieira.

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