#agriculturalhistory — Public Fediverse posts

update on my WIP industrial ag zine:

starting in the early 1970s, the dream of scientific/industrial agriculture began to lose its shine for a variety of complicated reasons. although the dream lost some of its luster, the reality of industrial ag only intensified and globalized into the monstrous international network we have today.

as i'm picking out the pieces of text and images to include in the spread i'm calling "the end", i'm adjusting the visual style to match the visual style of the 1970s. we're done with the breathless "miracles!" of technicolor 1960s scientific ag and are now moving into a more grounded and restrained style, which i think is related to the contracting of american visions of progress that came with the oil crisis, intensification of the vietnam war, social movements exposing cracks in the american image of "abundance for all", the degradation of the american environment, and the hollowing out of cities with deindustrialization and white flight.

so below (on the left) is a little snippet of the spread - still in progress.

on the right is the cover of a 1974 USDA report called "protecting crops and the environment." i think it's an excellent example of "1970s business report" visual style.

btw, many thanks to the typography nerds who helped me identify the fonts used in some of the archival materials i'm using. "1970s business report" is such a distinct and instantly-recognizable visual style, and i wanted to evoke a bit of that. there was a lot of helvetica and i'm using "helvetica world", which is the only version of helvetica available for free on canva 🤷

#zines #art #wip #agriculture #agriculturalhistory #food #typography #fonts #visualdesign

industrial ag mega-zine update:

good news! both of my parents have signed off on my USSR pages.

and i got my mom to write a very nice piece about her memories being a city girl who had to do seasonal labor on collective farms.

i tried very hard on these pages... westerners get such flat images of the soviet union and i wanted to bring some life to the story... show that it was real people, not just stereotypes (poor babushkas, scary government officials, etc.)

as a visual artist, the USSR offers a rich visual vernacular to play with. doing anything visual with a USSR theme is campy and full of possibilities. there are big, bold colors and graphics. very recognizable iconography. i didn't get to do as much of it as i'd like, because i'm trying to focus on text and photographs, but i still tried to include some propaganda posters, stamps (lots of great stamps: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Agriculture_of_the_Soviet_Union_on_stamps ), etc.

mostly i wanted to get the story "right" in important ways. i think no one really knows everything that happened in soviet agriculture and why and how, but i wanted to convey enough of the story for people to come away with some of the major themes: the revolution was made by city people who didn't understand agriculture or rural people. stalin ruled for 30 years and it was a complete disaster: forced collectivization, famines, literal war on the peasants. after stalin, there were more good-faith (or perhaps "better-faith") efforts to improve agriculture, but it was always huge gambles, ramshackle implementation, massive fuckups, lack of input from people on the ground or agricultural scientists, and a hole that had already been dug so deep that it was probably impossible to make it work without overhauling the entire system of collective farms.

anyway, now that the USSR pages are mostly done, i'm getting close to the end!

i'm moving into the 1970s and the end of the thematic era that's the focus of the magazine: the high modernist period that praised scientific/industrial ag as the greatest thing since sliced bread (itself an invention of that time period). with oil crises, environmental problems, and failures of the grand promises of the green revolution, the dream of scientific ag lost some of its lustre, but the material reality of industrial agriculture just kept ramping up and up...it never went away and now here we are.......

#agriculture #wip #USSR #AgriculturalHistory #research #history

this endless rain has given me a chance to get into Žores Aleksandrovič Medvedev's giant book "soviet agriculture" from 1987 (full text available here: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/974e404a3542a2e769fa371313c72b60?&check=1 )

i'm about halfway through. i've gotten through the civil war, NEP, the nightmares of collectivization, the famine of the early 30s, WWII, the famine of 1946-47, and am finally into the post-stalin era.

it's so big and so messed up that i don't even know how to approach it in a 2 page spread that should be roughly 50% pictures, and will also include some stories from my mom about her times working on the kolkhoz as a seasonal urban worker.

so this is my basic understanding:

the people who made the revolution were city people and they didn't understand agriculture or the people who lived and worked the fields. they saw agriculture, the peasants, and the land as something to be extracted from for the purpose of building up industry in cities.

those leaders were also totally happy to conduct massive experiments with human lives. nothing was small scale/pilot project/test and see/take a cautious approach. everything was big and URGENT. harvests were failing and people needed to be fed, so they sort of shuddered from one massive reform to another.

it was all made worse because these people really did not value individuals, especially not peasants. in their eyes, the job of the peasants was to stay put and work the fields and give everything to the state and be happy with any scraps that were left over for them.

stalin ruled for 3 decades. he was a murderous tyrant who killed or exiled anyone whose perspectives differed from his own. so anyone with any kind of expertise and integrity who might have been like "this plan is terrible", they were eliminated. this also applied to agricultural scientists and specialists.

he especially had it in for the "kulaks", who were slightly wealthier peasants (REALLY slightly...like 3 cows vs 1 cow per household). hundreds of thousands of them were shipped off to siberia. he also embarked on a completely disastrous collectivization plan in which they tried to get all the peasants onto collective farms that were oriented around historical villages. peasants rebelled by refusing to grow, hiding seed, and slaughtering their own animals before they could be taken from them. groups of state agents went from village to village to literally take grain from peasants.

during this period, WWII also happened. millions of able-bodied men were sent to the front, and the countryside was left to be tended by women and youth. millions of those men never returned to the countryside.

so basically at the end of stalin's reign in 1953, the peasants had been put through hell, squeezed beyond the point of tolerance, depopulated, with no investment, and still expected to produce on lands they didn't own, only to receive a tiny percentage of the harvest that was left after the state took the majority. this tiny amount was meant to act as seed grain for next year, food for their animals, and food for themselves. they were denied internal passports and there was no investment in any kind of village roads or trucks or electrification. they were not paid in cash and no consumer goods were made available to them (even basic things like tools or kerosene for their lamps).

stalin dies in 1953 and khruschev comes in. khruschev used to be a minister in ukraine and was aware of the problems of farmers there. so he was sympathetic, and wanted to make things better (which was at least a step up from "murderous" and "hateful of the peasants"), but everything continued to be extremely huge gambles at extreme urgency, without enough planning or consideration for complex effects. he also believed in lysenkoism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism) and got rid of capable scientists and administrators in favor of lysenko and his followers. and he also loved to reorganize bureaucracy, creating chaos and complexity.

he "opened up" vast areas of kazakhstan for farming (over the objections of local administrators - who he pushed out and replaced with his own people), which was ok for a few years while they exploited the built up natural fertility of the land, but once that was all gone, yields went down and then the environmental consequences started to come in with massive erosion and wind damage.

that's as far as i got so far...i'm only halfway thru the book.

i find myself resorting to nice soviet sayings like "we tried to make it better and it came out the same as always." or a joke my dad told me recently: "what would happen if the USSR took over the sahara desert? in 5 years, there would be a shortage of sand."

as you can see, these sayings help make sense of an extremely complicated set of circumstances that are like...one nightmare piled on another one....

and now you know why so many russian songs are sad!

#agriculture #USSR #history #AgriculturalHistory #food #farming #research

industrial ag mega-zine update:

i started researching USSR agriculture for the next part of the zine, and swiftly started shriveling into a husk, so i'm changing course: i am making a spread about potatoes.

standardized high-yield potato vareties were already quite well-developed and established before WWII, so the post-war story is less about breeding and more about utilization, which means "research on how to get more uses out of the crop".

it turns out that researchers (public and private - USDA was doing loads of research on developing new products for market) had great success turning potatoes into a million things.

and according to industry journals from the time, they were very happy with how much success they were having with getting people to buy all kinds of potato products. plus, things like dehydrated, frozen, and granulated potato products received a lot of uptake in institutions - the military, schools, hospitals, fast-food restaurants. a mass-produced crop for a mass-managed and mass-fed population.

so why was all this utilization research necessary? because farmers were producing loads of potatoes and people weren't buying enough of them in raw form. so it's not like they were trying to feed more people, they were trying to get more people to buy a crop that was producing "too much" year after year. so "how do we get the consumer to buy more?" "how do we get people to eat more potatoes?". that's what it was about.

and having gone through all the research on the green revolution, it's such a stark contrast: in developing countries, america was pushing certain crops and high-intensity agriculture to "feed hungry people", but in the US it was all about making $ and how to push more product.

i don't know, those two positions aren't inherently at opposite poles, but it does create a strange juxtaposition in my mind.

as a person whose ancestry is based in a potato and wheat part of the world (eastern europe), and who grew up eating loads and loads of delicious potato, potatoes are near and dear to my heart (even though i rarely eat them now. they're actually quite expensive here and i often have more access to local starches, like breadfruit, taro, and cooking banana. also, i eat more rice these days. potatoes really are expensive here!)

anyway, here's a picture i found in the course of my research: "engineers in Eastern Regional Research Center pilot plant process mashed potatoes into a continuous sheet that can be broken up into instant potato flakes." what a world! and how nice for industry to have the government running massive labs and even test plants to develop and test new products and processes for you!

#potatoes #food #AgriculturalHistory #agriculture #industrialization #FoodHistory #history #research

industrial ag mega-zine WIP update:

just finished the pages about rice. truly hair-raising stories:

* a vietnam war account from an american soldier with an agricultural background who was sent by the army to give improved rice variety seeds and training to vietnamese villagers. he was also ordered to unleash bombs on some of those same places.

* a photo of LBJ and philippines dictator ferdinand marcos standing together in an experimental rice field. marcos won re-election in 1969 partially on the strength of "modernized agriculture" in the form of improved rice.

* the improved rice that the US was spreading in south vietnam as part of its efforts to prop up the government of south vietnam was also adopted by the viet cong, who started planting it in their territories. it ended up helping the viet cong's food supply during the war.

and these weren't even all the stories. here's one that didn't make the cut: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/miracle-rice-international-rice-research-institute/

what topic is next? i'm not sure, but it might finally be time to make the pages about agricultural modernization in the USSR... **shudder**....i shudder because this is a huge topic and it's very hard to know what's true (you can't really trust western sources about it, and you can't really trust soviet sources about it..). first step is to read/skim zhores a. medvedev's 1987 "soviet agriculture". it's a breezy 488 pages.

#rice #food #AgriculturalHistory #agriculture #history #research #USHistory

you know what would be really interesting? a comparative history showing how and when different countries "modernized"/"industrialized"/"green revolutioned" their agricultural systems.

as i'm researching more about rice for my WIP industrial ag mega-zine, i'm coming across articles like "US funds irrigation dams in Sudan", or "world bank lending $9.5mn to help senegal raise peanut and millet output", or "philippines has changed agricultural policy to emphasize modernization" (the elements of that policy were surprisingly similar to the policy adopted by india in the mid-60s - the "new agricultural strategy", which prioritized the "modernization package" of price supports for farmers, increased $ for irrigation, increased fertilizer use, increased use of high-yielding seeds, etc.)

the west (in the form of the US gov, world bank, and private foundations like rockefeller and ford) were pushing developing countries in the "free world" to adopt these policies. but i would be really interested to know just how many countries were targeted with this package, and how "modernization" did or didn't happen in each country.

also, the communist countries pursued different trajectories in agricultural modernization. they also used agricultural policy and various 5 year plans etc., to pursue a similar track *technologically*, but not with the same investment vehicles (world bank loans, etc.). i'm sure there were many other distinct features of their paths, but i don't even know what they are.

i just find myself wishing for a comparative history that looked at many, many countries and the timeline of if/how/when they modernized. and of course, how much the west was involved in pushing them to modernize, and when.

there was clearly a package program that the west was pushing, but were they pushing it to all these different countries at the same time, or did they do a handful of countries and then decide "oh this is going to go be our package"? did some countries get it harder based on geopolitical interests? (i'm sure this is true - but which countries? how did this change over time?)

if anyone knows of books like this, feel free to share.

#research #agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #GreenRevolution #industrialization #modernization #history #ComparativeHistory #WIP

updates on my WIP industrial ag mega-zine:

i've made good progress on the green revolution materials. i completed a spread about how the US began linking food aid to india to increased fertilizer use targets in 1965, and how they conditioned the release of food aid to india agreeing to allow foreign-owned fertilizer plants in their country (a really important story that i wanted to get right).

i also finished a spread featuring the triumphal story of the beginning of the green rev. and another spread about the creation of the green revolution myth and the importance of "The Image" to the green revolution and other stories of agricultural modernization. the stuff about "The Image" is central to the whole project and i hope that the spread is appealing enough visually to encourage people to read it, because it's kind of a complicated subject.

i haven't decided yet whether i want to do a whole spread that sort of goes through "myth vs more complicated reality" of every part of the green revolution legend (was there famine in india? was indian agriculture 'hopelessly mired in the past'? did the new seeds solve famine? was the green revolution foisted on developing countries? etc.). ideally that would be included, because the completed pages only hint at the fact that the legend wasn't the whole story. but i will go back and do that later because i want to move on. i've spent so much time just trying to understand the story of the green rev, going through loads of source materials, and picking out the texts and images i wanted to use. i want to move to something else.

the next topic is RICE. rice and wheat were the two main green revolution crops, and the development of the green revolution varieties of rice and wheat are both fascinating. i don't know if i'll do a whole spread about wheat, but i definitely want to do a spread about rice because there's crazy stuff about the philippines and marcos, and crazy stuff about the US promoting the green revolution rice variety in vietnam during the vietnam war. which is so crazy to me...it's really doing a number on my head... on the one hand, it's a classic example of western liberalism: "we bomb you with one hand, and offer 'help' with the other." on the other hand, i'm sure that the scientists and other agricultural workers who were trying to help vietnamese villagers grow better rice in the middle of a warzone thought they were doing something good and helpful (and maybe they were...i don't know...).... a lot of the stories i've read so far are like "look at these brave people trying to do agricultural outreach during a war!" and in my mind i'm going "yea, it's YOUR country that's doing the war too, so wtf." oh, and eventually the viet cong got a hold of the new rice variety and grew plenty of it and it supported their efforts, so yea, it was a huge mess.

finally, i don't know if this will make it into the magazine, but i just read a story from the jan. 9, 1967 issue of "foreign agriculture" about malaysia's agricultural efforts. they wanted to diversify their crops, get some higher yielding varieties of rubber, and they also wanted to get in on the new varieties of rice. but their people didn't like the new varieties of rice, so the government wanted to encourage doing 2 plantings a year of the new variety, export that, and use the money to import the rice varieties that their people liked (which presumably, was already growing in malaysia). so there ya have it - that's economic progress and efficiency apparently...

here's the issue if you want to read it yourself: https://archive.org/details/CAT10252662185/page/6/mode/2up

the malaysia topic also starts to get at something that i think is super important but that i'm not sure will make it into the final magazine: the fact that agricultural "modernization" or the green revolution or the industrialization of agriculture did not happen the same way in any two countries, and didn't even happen the same way across different regions of a large country like india. every country's history was different...different ways that land was distributed...different kinds of crops that lent themselves to different kinds of processes...a lot of the tropical crops didn't have as much research done on them as the crops of colder places because the colder places had more $ to invest in agricultural research on crops that were of economic importance in their countries... post-colonial land reforms had varying degrees of success...large-scale irrigation and road networks varied... the attitudes of every country's government varied toward agricultural "modernization" at different times in each country's history... and of course there was a huge split between the communist sphere and the western sphere - china and russia took totally different paths toward agricultural "modernization" than the countries that the US was trying to influence, like mexico and india.

#agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #rice #food #history #research #WIP #GreenRevolution #india

Prime Minister Mark Carney pays a visit to Draft Horse Town on final day of Stampede

Prime Minister Mark Carney paid a visit to Draft Horse Town on the final day of the Calgary…
#Canada #MarkCarney #agriculturalhistory #BrianHenderson #CalgaryStampede #DraftHorse #HillhurstCommunityAssociationStampedeBreakfast #primeminister
https://www.europesays.com/canada/127382/

i'm learning so much from the book "nature at war: american environments and WWII", edited by Thomas Robertson, Richard P. Tucker, Nicholas B. Breyfogle, and Peter Mansoor:

"In the South, the government encouraged farmers to plant quick- growing kudzu, the bane of many of today’s native plant enthusiasts and gardeners, with payments up to eight dollars an acre. Hence, even after the war cut off access to kudzu seed from Japan, Soil Conservation Service nurseries in states across the South kept farmers supplied with kudzu. Kudzu and lespedeza took on new significance during the war. Because nitrate factories produced bombs as well as fertilizers, enriching soils with nitrogen-fixing crops meant more artificial nitrogen could go to munitions. As one 1942 booster of legumes put it, “Oregon’s 200,000,000 pound crop of Austrian winter pea, vetch, and crimson clover seed this year is the quivalent of 24,000,000 100-pound bombs.” The crops’ use as animal feed also took on new wartime meaning. Legumes like kudzu made protein-rich hay that could replace the protein-rich components of animal fodder cut off by the war, like fish meal, which were seen as essential to maintaining and boosting meat production."

#WWII #agriculture #history #AgriculturalHistory #kudzu #InvasiveSpecies #plants

📖 The book 'Plantation Knowledge' includes a chapter by Marta Macedo that 'explores the deep entanglements established between São Tomé and the Congo through projects of cocoa plantations over the course of two decades, from the early 1890s to the early 1910s.'

🔓 The book is available via #OpenAccess: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/17059

#Histodons #Colonialism #Belgium #Portugal #Congo #SãoToméEPríncipe #Plantations #Cocoa #AgriculturalHistory

Briggsdale Scale and Silos: Monuments of Rural Persistence

https://gregurbano.com/2026/01/23/briggsdale-scale-and-silos-monuments-of-rural-persistence/

Nabowla Tasmania Lavender Fields Postcard
.
#LavenderFields #Nabowla #Tasmania #AustralianPostcard #RuralLandscape #LavenderFarming #AgriculturalHistory #VintagePostcard #PurpleFields #Countryside #Australia

Der Historiker Peter Staudenmaier übt harte Kritik an einer neuen anthroposophisch finanzierten Studie über Faschismus und bio-dynamische Landwirtschaft: https://groups.io/g/waldorf-critics/message/34391

"For those looking for an honest reckoning with the biodynamic movement's past, there is still a long way to go."

#history #anthroposophy #biodynamics #agriculturalhistory #peterstaudenmaier #waldorfcritics #fascism #demeter #dachau

🌾 A primeira actividade da IHC Visiting Scholar, Lavinia Maddaluno (Università Ca' Foscari), será a conferência "Rice: ersatz, cultural artifact, object of knowledge, unruly crop", a ter lugar na Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal no dia 16 de Julho.

ENTRADA LIVRE

ℹ️ https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/events/rice-ersatz/

#Histodons #AgriculturalHistory #EnvironmentalHistory #EnvironmentalHumanities #Rice #LaviniaMaddaluno #OpenLecture #HistóriaDaAgricultura #Arroz #HistóriaAmbiental

🖥 Sugestão de serão:

Conferência de Miguel Carmo no ciclo “Terras e Paisagens no Sul”, organizado pela Câmara Municipal de Beja, sobre a degradação do solo e a fertilização em Portugal, numa intervenção que entrelaça a história do solo e a história agrícola.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zuLkqk8cYg

#Histodons #AgriculturalHistory #SoilHistory #EnvHist #Fertilization #Soils #Agriculture #Portugal #HistóriaAgrícola #HistóriaAmbiental #Solos #Fertilização

"From Farm to Freeway | LA Foodways | KCET"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eAeQzWuPkU

#AgriculturalHistory #LosAngeles

USDA's National Agricultural Library currently has an online exhibit on the history of Farmers Markets (in the US, 20th and 21st c.)

https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/localfoods/exhibits/show/stands-and-markets/farmers-markets

#History #AgriculturalHistory

NEW BLOG POST.
DVD REVIEW: Tales From the Green Valley
In an old stone-built cottage experts recreate how life would have been in 1620, in the reign of James I of England.
#17thcentury #agriculture #agriculturalhistory #farmlife #review #blog #socialhistory #domestichistory
https://ukgenealogylinks.com/2023/01/15/dvd-review-tales-from-the-green-valley/