Rural Science: a research project on agricultural knowledge

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Since the Neolithic revolution, agriculture has been the foundation of human life. For most of human history, knowledge about soils, crops, and fertilizer, crucial for survival, has been rooted in local customs and obtained through ‘learning by doing’ processes passed down from one generation of farmers to the next. From the classical era, agricultural writers began to write advice books on household and farm management, enabling long-term preservation and sharing of farming knowledge. It was, however, only following the enlightenment that a scientific approach to farming emerged, novel because of its theory-based and experimental methods. According to a prevalent narrative within agricultural history, the birth of a scientific approach to farming practices and knowledge has traditionally been dated to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the almost simultaneous establishment of scientific agricultural societies in several European countries.

This narrative, however, misses a crucial chapter in the history of agriculture in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century England before the institutionalization of farming knowledge in scientific agricultural societies. My current research project focuses on this period in English agricultural history. It investigates how new forms of agricultural knowledge and expertise arose among agricultural writers, reformers, and natural philosophers as farming increasingly became a national concern during the seventeenth century.

Promoting cornucopian theories of infinite growth according to which any natural and human limits to agricultural improvement could be conquered by using the powers of science, these reformers were convinced that the new agriculture would bring about an era of wealth and happiness. To generate and promote their ideas, advice, and schemes, they published detailed agriculture books and tracts, met in experimental fields and gardens, and established extensive correspondence networks.

These agricultural writers and reformers often drew on networks among landowners and farmers. I investigate the reach and depth of these networks among gentlemen already interested in experimental natural philosophy and their connection to more extensive groups of farmers. Did writers and reformers draw on and generalize existing best practices among farmers to promote them in a wider public sphere?

Investigating the social world of agricultural writers and reformers further reveals how agricultural knowledge was embedded within contemporary economic and power relations. Practical farming knowledge was also knowledge about how to manage the labour force and land, feeding into the deep conflicts about changing property relations, new field systems, and a growing often itinerant labour force unfolding in the period. The experimental and theory-based approach to agriculture promoted by the writers and reformers further underpinned a growing disruption of the intellectual powers inherent to farm work caused by the increasingly competitive economic environment of an impending agrarian capitalism, clashing with what contemporaries perceived as “custom” and an emerging labouring identity and culture.

I have created the analytical concept of Rural Science to try to capture these diverse forms of knowledge practices among agricultural writers, reformers, experimental philosophers, and farmers. As such, Rural Science refers to the forms of knowledge, new ideas and theories about human agency and nature, and practices of knowledge production, such as information gathering, discussions, observations and conducting experiments, occurring in the spaces where experimental philosophers, agricultural reformers, and farmers interacted, corresponded, and met. These spaces took various forms, from farms, fields, and gardens to correspondence and information networks. 

The general rise of scientific farming had to wait until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of small immediate impact on contemporary farming, the often messy but not entirely disorganized rural science unfolding in England in the seventeenth century nevertheless constitutes a crucial although underappreciated chapter in the history of agriculture.

Finally, the project seeks to approach agricultural history in new ways by drawing on recent scholarships in the history of science and knowledge as well as environmental history and the history of ecological thought. By studying the practice of agricultural knowledge production and the creation of new forms of farming expertise among experimental philosophers, agricultural reformers, and farmers, the project explores how the relations between human agency, soils, and plants within a wider “oeconomy of nature” were reimaged.

The project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark as an international postdoctoral fellowship hosted by the Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University and by the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, where I have been invited as a visiting scholar. At Cambridge I will work with professor in environmental history and editor of the Agricultural History Review, Dr. Paul Warde. The project was further rewarded fellowships by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, which I, unfortunately, had to decline due to overlap in funding.