reading yet another book about agricultural history for research reasons

the great thing about Books About Agriculture is when they're pure shit, you absolutely already know by page 3

for instance, by this book's page 3 we already have two (2) completely serious "did u know?? that kids these days think food comes from grocery stores??" from that most reliable source on urban consumer attitudes, farmers

and one (1) reverential mention of planters undertaking the "earthy tasks" of farming

hahahahaaaa stay wild, Mr Author Dude

why am I reading this book that is basically guaranteed to be awful: because it's considered A Very Important Milestone Work In Agricultural Studies that people told me to read so I could "understand how agriculture evolved"

"Everything old & valuable has a provenance!" this book solemnly declares, & tells about how In The Beginning this farm's land was deeded to a church by King George the Third

damn this here history book is promising

The land "came into [Xth gen farmer] Keilty's hands overgrown and weedy with invasive species. Creating it, planting it, making it pay have been his work for twenty-five years."

fancy way to say "his family totally dicked it over & it doesn't matter, they still got to keep it"

goes on to describe this farm's completely standard and somewhat half-assed manure management as "hard to practice" and "completing a cycle"

sure, if you mean the part of the nitrogen cycle where it off-gases into N2O so you waste nutrients AND get global warming

author is now ruminating about how amazing it is that he went to this farm and got real, live shit on his shoes

in case you're wondering, yep he's a Yalie

and to be fair this book was published in 2002 which was way before anyone told Yale that BIPOC are involved in ag history too

found the obligatory section where the author's obsessed with plowing but doesn't know why people do it, complete with thinly veiled psychosexual...stuff

for those who have questions lol

just a whoooole lot of talking about how plows plunge through the soft, passive soil

like a LOT of talking about that

but with zero mention of WHY plowing is done, which you'd think would be important in a book about ag

If you pay attention to writing about agriculture, you'll see this almost every single time people talk about plowing & why it's destructive.

They literally just cannot get away from describing it as a tragic loss of virginity.

And to be clear, plowing is a super problematic practice!

and getting stuck on trying to use it as a sexual metaphor of "degradation" is the opposite of fixing the damage

but it sells books I guess lmao

BTW if you've ever heard the phrase "virgin soil" uhhhhh now you know why, it sounds gross because it is.

oh jesus now we're talking about the Tigris & Euphrates & civilizational collapse

This book solemnly states that silted-up irrigation canals "caused the cities of Babylon to be abandoned in the 18th century"

Reality: Babylon was fully occupied well into the Middle Ages, when it slowly wound down just because trade routes moved.

To be clear, irrigation is tricky. But:

1) Salt buildup in ancient Sumeria (2-3K BC) was caused by sea level rise, not "irrigation"

2) Ancient Mesopotamia, the Minoans, & Hittites crumbled *thousands of years* after that, in an event called the Bronze Age Collapse ~1200BC

and we still *have no idea* what caused the Bronze Age Collapse. It definitely wasn't salt buildup from irrigation- ancient Mesopotamians knew what that is & literally had textbooks on how to prevent it.

wait is this book the reason I keep running into literati who think "irrigation causes fragile civilizations that collapse"??? is2g

Docking this book 3 million points for "Mesopotamia is where farming was invented!" when there are at least 11 centers of crop domestication, and Mesopotamia's claim to be the oldest is uhhhhhh tenuous at best

just word-searched the book for "Enclosure" and it shows up 3 times as a side remark

in a book about changing farm methods in the 18th/19th centuries

inside baseball here, but that's like a book about Godzilla only having 3 casual throwaway mentions of Japan

Motion for everyone who wants to Write Important Books About Agriculture to take a soil science 101 class

who's going around telling these people that manure spontaneously creates nutrients out of nothing? like a perpetual motion machine of shit smh

I will say, this book is extraordinary for revealing that M*chael P*llan truly does nothing but recycle Whig talking points from the 1820s

Me 2 years ago: Wow weird how USDA organic standards ban some uses of fire that are straightforward, environmentally appropriate, & traditional all over the world except for Europe

Agricultural thought leaders in the 1800s:

Oh here we have someone telling bourgeois gentlemen farmers that if they really want to farm they need to stop building monuments to themselves & just farm already

with specific mention of ~stone barns~ as unnecessary showpieces LMAO

I have just been informed by this book that mechanical grain milling was invented by a Delaware farm boy in 1784

Using water power to grind grain has been done since at least the time of classical Greece

This book is also accidentally amazing for documenting W*ndell B*rry's key role in US society

a bridge between 1800s gentleman farmers whining "why do our workers keep leaving for their own land on the frontier"

& today's bougie farmers hustling free work from "interns"

One Edmund Ruffin is known as "the father of American soil science" for "inventing" adding lime to southern soils to help w centuries of damage from cotton monoculture.

Fun fact, England & northerners had already been liming their fields for centuries! It wasn't new at all!

Anyway Ruffin was also an ENTHUSIASTIC slaver & drama queen

-Went to John Brown's execution

-Credited w firing the 1st shot at Ft Sumter?

-So depressed when the South lost that he set up an elaborate rifle stand, wrapped himself in a Confederate flag & shot himself in the face

I'll give you one guess as to the real reason he's remembered, & it's not because he had any new ideas agriculturally speaking

here we get to the part of the book where "oh yeah W*ndell B*erry and the Nearings are part of this legacy"

ah yes the legacy of doing the same ol' bougie shit from the 1820s but now we're calling it "counterculture"

the gentleman farmer hustle never ceases

These back-to-the-land reformers drew on exactly the same "capital-intensive farming of the wealthy" traditions that industrialized farming does

with exactly the same carefully-studied obliviousness about BIPOC in agriculture.

"counterculture" lmao

Anyway I think we might have come to the last of the useable material in the book, and also a denouement about my personal frustrations with Anglocentric ag reform movements