# The impact of agricultural science 1850-2016: from a gentleman's amusement to the saviour or the world?

Paul Brassley

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Paul Brassley. The impact of agricultural science 1850-2016: from a gentleman's amusement to the saviour or the world?. Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France, 2017, 3 (6), pp.1-10. hal-04812959

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# Notes Académiques
de l'Académie d'agriculture de France

## Academic Notes
of the French Academy of agriculture

### Authors

Paul Brassley

### Title of the work

The impact of agricultural science 1850-2016: from a gentleman's amusement to the saviour or the world?

Year 2017, Volume 3, Number 6, pp. 1-10.

### Published online:

2 May 2017,

https://www.academie-agriculture.fr/publications/notes-academiques/n3af-conference-proceedings-impact-agricultural-science-1850-2016

The impact of agricultural science 1850-2016: from a gentleman's amusement to the saviour or the world? © 2017 by Paul Brassley is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International

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# The impact of agricultural science 1850-2016: from a gentleman's amusement to the saviour or the world?

Paul Brassley¹

¹ Honorary University Fellow, University of Exeter, UK

Correspondance :

paulbrassley@aol.com

Cet article est le texte d'une intervention effectuée lors du Colloque de l'Union européenne des académies d'agriculture UEAA (présidence française) « Science in agriculture : historical perspectives and prospective insights - Science en agriculture, perspectives historiques et prospective », Académie d'agriculture de France, Paris, 12 octobre 2016.

## Résumé

Vers 1850, les sciences agronomiques se sont transformées : d'un passe-temps d'amateur, elles sont devenues un travail de professionnels. Et cela a soulevé de nouvelles questions : la science agronomique était-elle simplement l'application des sciences pures aux questions agricoles, ou bien était-elle plus, et, en ce cas, de quels problèmes les agronomes devaient-ils traiter ? Cet article soutient l'hypothèse d'un développement au 19ᵉ siècle dû aux institutions agronomiques ; leurs modèles et leurs structures n'ont changé que récemment, en raison de la croissance des travaux de recherche et développement dans les pays à

revenus intermédiaires. L'article traite ensuite brièvement des résultats et des lacunes de la discipline, et discute les facteurs qui peuvent expliquer la plus ou moins grande influence de ses découvertes. En conclusion, il plaide pour des recherches sur l'histoire internationale de l'agronomie.

## Abstract

By 1850 agricultural science was already changing from an amateur pursuit to a professional occupation. As it did so, new questions arose: was agricultural science simply the application of the pure sciences to agricultural problems, or was it something more, and therefore with which problems should agricultural scientists concern themselves? This paper argues that the major nineteenth-century development was in the institutions of agricultural science, and that the patterns and structures developed then have only recently changed as a result of the increase in research and development in middle income countries. There follows a brief review of the achievements
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture
(N3AF)
Acte de colloque

and shortcomings of the discipline, and a
discussion of the factors that make its discoveries
more or less influential. Finally the conclusion
briefly argues for more work to synthesise a
global history of agricultural science.

Keywords

agricultural science; R&D; science history;
institutional change

Mots clés

science agricole, recherche et
développement, histoire des sciences,
changements institutionnels.

The title of this paper is designed to be debatable and disputable. Was agricultural science merely an amusement for gentlemen in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the implication that its results were unimportant and that it had little impact? Is the world currently facing problems that only agricultural science can solve, so that its impact is potentially enormous? And if the answer to either question is 'yes', or even 'yes, to some extent, up to a point', what happened to change agricultural science from one state to the other? The discussion in this paper is, as a result of the author's knowledge and experience, largely based on the British experience and the literature in English. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that comparable developments in agricultural science were happening in other countries, sometimes earlier, sometimes later (Fernández Prieto, 1992; Bieleman, 2010; Jones, 2016a).

Gentlemen with an interest in agriculture and
some degree of scientific approach to its
problems existed by 1850 (Vivier, 2016). This is
not the place to attempt a complete listing of
them, for to do so would be to survey the progress
of agricultural science up to that date.
Furthermore, to decide whether they were truly
gentlemen is to stray into a minefield of social and
historical semantics (Bédarida, 1991; Price,
1993). While de Saussure (1767-1845) was born
into a family with money, Mathieu de Dombasle

(1777-1843) was an estate manager, and
Boussingault (1801-1887) received a
professional training as an engineer, although by
the end of their lives they would probably all
have been accepted as gentlemen (Jones,
2016b; Jones, 2016c). Humphry Davy, born the
son of a woodcarver in 1778, was employed by
the Royal Institution when he published his
*Elements of Agricultural Chemistry* in 1813, but
he was a baronet by the time of his death in
1829 (Knight, 1992). Similarly, Justus von Liebig
(1803-1873) was the son of a hardware
merchant and employed as a professor at the
University of Giessen when he published
*Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture* in
1840 (Brock, 1997). Albrecht Daniel Thaer
(1752-1828), an adherent of the humus theory of
plant nutrition and an agricultural writer and
educator, might be described as a gentleman by
virtue of his achievements and marriage. He
trained in medicine, married the daughter of a
nobleman, was given land by Frederick William
III of Prussia, and made his Mögelin estate into
an agricultural academy (Harwood, 2005). John
Bennet Lawes (1814-1900) was born into a
family of minor gentry in Hertfordshire in south-
east England, inherited the family estate, and
would have been wealthy enough to have lived
off his private income, but the agricultural
research for which his Rothamsted estate
became famous was financed by the profits from
the Lawes Chemical Manure Company (Russell,
1966; Dyke, 1993). By the middle of the
nineteenth century, therefore, agricultural
science was beginning to be more than simply a
gentleman's amusement, although it would be
difficult to argue that it had achieved the status of
a profession in the same way that medicine or
the law might be so called.

That the world faces problems of dealing with
climate change and feeding a projected
population of 9 billion by 2050 is indisputable;
whether agricultural science can solve the
problems is more debatable (Conway, 2012;
Brassley and Soffre, 2016). The point is that
agricultural science now has a claim to take part
in the debate, and agricultural scientists are now
among those who might have something useful
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
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to contribute to it. But this is not an undisputed
claim, and agricultural scientists are unlikely to be
alone in commenting on climate change and
future food production. The problem they face, as
Giuditta Parolini has argued, is that the definition
of agricultural science is ambiguous (Parolini,
2015). To some it might seem to be simply the
knowledge and techniques of the pure sciences
(the alternative term is "natural sciences"), such
as botany, zoology, genetics, chemistry, physics,
etc, applied to agricultural problems. Others might
argue that it is, or should be, husbandry, or
farming operations, carried out under
experimental conditions using scientific methods,
with statistical analysis of the results. However,
this second view of the subject risks confusion
with agricultural technology and its history, which
most observers would see as a wider or more
comprehensive subject area. Deborah Fitzgerald,
for example, defines agricultural technology as
"the process of systematically cultivating plants
and animals, including the economic, mechanical,
human, scientific, and institutional forces that
support such activity" (Fitzgerald, 1991). In her
definition, therefore, the history of agricultural
science would be no more than one component of
the history of agricultural technology. There is also
a problem of translation. "Agricultural science"
translates into French as "les sciences
agronomiques. Leaving aside the problem of its
pluralisation, it is worth reminding non-English
readers that an "agronomist" in Britain is a person
concerned with the growth of crops, often by
advising farmers on the selection of varieties and
appropriate applications of fertilisers and
pesticides. Clearly this implies a much narrower
understanding of the term than "les sciences
agronomiques" implies in French, and in other
languages too.

There is also an argument about whether it is the
role of the agricultural science simply to explain
what is happening in agricultural processes, or to
prescribe improvements or alternative methods
for practising farmers to adopt. It is the contention
of this article that this ambiguity is important
because it creates uncertainty about who should
do agricultural research and what they should do.
It also implies that what constitutes agricultural

science might change over time; that what would
be recognized as agricultural science in one
century might be different from how it was
perceived earlier or later. Since sciences are
human constructs, and consequently have a
history, it is worthwhile to examine the
emergence of agricultural science from
something more than a gentleman's amusement
to a possible solution of some of the world's
major long-term problems. In that way it might
perhaps be possible to see how this ambiguity
has arisen.

Much of what was published as agricultural
science in the 19th century was more descriptive
than analytical. In England the nearest thing to a
journal of agricultural science in the 19th century
was the *Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society
of England*. The Society was established in
1838, and one of its objectives, expressed in its
motto "Practice with Science", was to encourage
the application of science to agriculture. The first
volume of the journal was published in 1840
(Goddard, 1988). By 1878 it was a mature
publication, and that year's articles covered a
variety of topics, from drainage, moorland
reclamation, the early fattening of cattle, and the
pathology of pleuro-pneumonia, to the chemical
analysis of bat guano by the consulting chemist
to the Society, Dr Voelcker. With the possible
exception of this last article the remaining
contents were almost entirely descriptive, and
indeed Professor Yeo, writing on pleuro-
pneumonia, stated that he had "tried to avoid
any expressions which involve theories" (Yeo,
1878).

By the beginning of the 20th century in Britain
the number of scientists working on agricultural
problems had increased, and several of the
more prominent ones decided that a new *Journal
of Agricultural Science* was needed. Its first
volume, in 1905, reflected the dominance of
chemistry in the agricultural science of the time,
but also contained one of the first articles
applying Mendelian genetics to the breeding of
wheat varieties (Biffen, 1905). It remained
dominated by UK-based authors writing mostly
on temperate agriculture until almost the end of
the 20th century, but in the last twenty years or
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
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so it has become an international journal, with a
preponderance of authors based outside the UK
and much greater coverage of tropical agriculture.
There seems to be little doubt that, despite the
subsequent prominence of the *Journal of
Agricultural Science*, the expansion of the subject
in continental Europe and the USA was much
more rapid in the later 19th century than it was in
Britain, at least of the number of research
institutions is any measure of scientific activity.
Even Japan and Brazil had as many research
stations as Britain by the 1890s (Brassley, 2000;
Harwood, 2009). This was reflected in the number
of abstracts of agricultural science papers
published in the *Monthly Bulletin of Agricultural
Intelligence and Plant Diseases*, in which the
impression is that only a small minority of the
abstracted papers were in British publications.
This *Monthly Bulletin* was published from 1909 by
the International Institute of Agriculture, which had
been established in Rome in 1905, and would go
on to produce an increasing range of surveys of
agricultural science and social science across the
world until its work was subsumed into that of the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation
after the Second World War (Pan-Montojo, 2016).
It is clear that by the early 20th century
agricultural research was well-established across
most European countries and the USA.

The effectiveness of agricultural research, then
and later, is more difficult to judge. The ambiguity
and uncertainty about what agricultural research
is, or where its boundaries lie, make it difficult to
assess its impact. Several different approaches
may be found in the literature. Perhaps the most
obvious is to analyze the impact of research on
the output or productivity of agriculture. Silvey, for
example, analyzed cereal yields in England and
Wales and claimed that roughly half of the yield
increase was the result of genetic change, and
Harris conducted a similar exercise for potatoes
(Silvey, 1978; Harris, 1980). The problem with this
is that output can be affected by non-scientific
factors such as agricultural policy and trade. In
circumstances in which farmers are being
encouraged by government policies, or high
prices, to maximise output, they are likely to
increase labour and capital inputs, and vice versa

in different policy and trade environments.
Another difficulty is that the effects of research
can take a long time to reveal themselves. A
study of productivity in agriculture in the USA
argued that the effects of research and
development might not become apparent for
between 35 and 50 years (Alston et al, 2015).
An alternative approach is to examine the extent
to which agricultural science produces
discoveries or useful explanations of agricultural
problems, on the assumption that farmers who
understand why things happen will respond
more quickly to environmental or policy changes.
While this is probably true, it does not produce
any easily-understood metrics for assessing
impact. A third, and perhaps the most frequently-
employed approach, is peer review, but Kuhn
would probably argue that this is likely to be the
least effective method because it is more likely to
privilege the current paradigm and less likely to
accept radical changes (Kuhn, 1962).

In the long run, it may be that one of the most
useful ways of assessing science is to examine
the development of its professional institutions.
University departments, research stations,
libraries, journals, and learned societies may not
by themselves carry out research, but they
increase the effectiveness of the individuals who
do, and their influence may be greater than that
of any single individual. Harwood, for example,
has argued that the problems studied by
biologists, and the methods and theories they
produced, have all been affected by the
institutions within which they worked (Harwood,
2009). Looking back from the twenty-first
century, it might be argued that the greatest and
longest-lasting contribution of the period
between 1850 and 1914 was in the emergence
of these institutions of agricultural research, and
that those countries that were most successful in
developing them, which would not include
Britain, made the most progress. By 1850
gentlemen such as Thaer and de Saussure were
dead, and their successors, such as Wilhelm
Crusius (1790-1858) at *Mockern and Lawes at
Rothamsted* were more employers of
professional scientists than active scientists
themselves, although Lawes was certainly a very
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
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(N3AF)
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active writer about agricultural science (Jones, 2016). The professionals, such as Justus von Liebig at Giessen and his student Joseph Henry Gilbert, who was employed by Lawes at Rothamsted, became the leaders of the discipline (Brock, 1997; Brassley, 2000). By 1900, according to one estimate (Grantham, 1984), there were 500 or so agricultural research stations in the world, employing 1500 professional scientists, but they were not evenly distributed. The bulk of them were in continental Europe and the USA, but very few were in Africa or Asia, and perhaps surprisingly few in Britain.

Grantham argued that the extent of agricultural research was likely to be greater if a country possessed a scientifically-literate bureaucracy, many scientists, farm organisations that favoured research, state funding, and succeeding generations of scientists trained by existing practitioners (Grantham, 1984). This neatly explains why there were so many researchers and research institutes in Germany and so few in Britain, at least until Sir Daniel Hall (1864-1942), who became the Director of Rothamsted after Lawes died in 1900, extracted funding for agricultural research from the Development Commission from 1910 onwards (Rogers, 1999). In 1892, for example, Britain, Spain and Portugal each had one agricultural experimental station, compared with 67 in Germany, 54 in the USA and 53 in France, according to one report (Cousins, 1895). Grantham's success conditions were met in the 20th century in most developed countries, and, as the authorship of articles in the Journal of Agricultural Science mentioned above suggests, over the last twenty years the contribution of the middle-income countries, in particular China, India, Brazil and South Africa, has increased considerably. According to a report in the prestigious science journal Nature, by 2011 government-funded agricultural research spending in middle-income countries was higher than that in high-income countries, although the increasing proportion of private-sector research spending in the latter meant that the high-income countries still spent more in total. Since private-sector research may not be disinterested these trends have not always been welcomed. As the

authors of the report concluded, “the retreat from public agricultural research and development by rich countries, and the continued comparatively low levels of investment in many poorer countries, are concerning” (Pardey et al, 2016). The changes in agricultural technology that occurred in the 20th century are well-known; the extent to which they were produced by agricultural science is perhaps more debatable. One area in which science clearly made a contribution was plant and animal breeding. From the use of Mendelian genetics to produce new wheat varieties early in the century, to the subsequent development of population genetics and the later development of genetic engineering, science obviously affected crop breeding (Brassley and Soffe, 2016). In animal breeding, the development of artificial insemination techniques, especially for cattle and pigs, was enormously influential. By 1960, 63 per cent of the dairy herds in Britain used only artificial insemination to impregnate their cows (MMB, 1960). Similarly, it is difficult to see how the range of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides currently available to arable farmers, or the vaccines, anti-parasitic treatments and antibiotics used by animal producers could have emerged without the efforts of scientists in general and agricultural scientists in particular (Blaxter and Robertson, 1995). On the other hand, the increased use of fertilisers and purchased livestock feeds appears to have more to do with the decisions of farmers than agricultural scientists, although the scientists have been involved in producing a greater range of products and finding ways in which they can be used with increased precision (Blaxter and Robertson, 1995). Likewise the mechanisation and motorisation of farming operations was perhaps more a product of the machinery industry than of agricultural science until recently, when there has been increased emphasis on automatic control of a variety of devices from tractors to milking machines (Dewey, 2008).

If it is clear that agricultural science has moved on from being a gentleman's amusement (if indeed it ever was so), is it also likely to be seen,
Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
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in future, as the saviour of the world? The need to feed an increased world population is clearly a problem to which agricultural science might make a contribution. There is also the issue of agriculture's contribution to the greenhouse gases that promote global warming, and the concomitant question of how agriculture can react to climate change (Brassley and Soffe, 2016). Despite ideas about history repeating itself, historians also know that circumstances change so that the repetition is rarely exact; prediction is better left to economists, who can put error terms into their algorithms. To argue that agricultural science has assisted farmers in feeding a rapidly-increasing world population (from 1.2 billion in 1850 to 2.5 billions a century later, but then 7.3 billion at present) is one thing; to argue that they will continue to do so is a different matter (Cameron, 1993; Millstone and Lang, 2008).

<table><caption>Table 1: World and UK yield data</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>World 1970</th><th>World 2012</th><th>UK 1965-1969</th><th>UK 2014</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Wheat (tonnes per hectare)</td><td>1.5</td><td>3.1</td><td>3.9</td><td>8.6</td></tr><tr><td>Barley (tonnes per hectare)</td><td>1.7</td><td>2.7</td><td>3.6</td><td>6.4</td></tr><tr><td>Potatoes (tonnes per hectare)</td><td>13.3</td><td>18.9</td><td>24.9</td><td>47.0</td></tr><tr><td>Milk (litres per cow)</td><td></td><td></td><td>3686</td><td>7897</td></tr></tbody></table>

Source: World 1970 data from FAO, 1971; 2012 data calculated from http://faostat.fao.org/site/567 (accessed 26/7 April 2014). UK 1965-9 data from Marks and Britton, 1989:164, 175, 230; 2014 data from DEFRA, 2016: 42-57.

As Table 1 demonstrates, world wheat yields have doubled since 1970, and perhaps more significantly yields of wheat, barley and potatoes in developed countries are at least twice the world average, so that there is much room for improvement with existing technology. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the rate of technical change in developed countries is slowing down (Alston et al, 2015). One estimate for the USA found that the annual rate of growth in multi-factor productivity was 2.07 per cent between 1949 and 1990, but only 1.18 per cent from 1990 to 2007.

Many people would also argue that the undoubted achievements of agricultural science have also been accompanied by problems. Plant breeding has increased crop yields, but genetically modified organisms remain controversial, at least in Europe. Not all of the fertilisers applied to fields become incorporated into crops. Part of the nutrient content is washed into rivers, and thence to the sea, with effects that one observer termed "an unprecedented large-scale biogeochemical experiment whose eventual impacts we can predict only poorly" (Smil, 2001). Pesticides have enabled farmers to increase yields or reduce costs, but there are numerous examples of their deleterious effects on wildlife, from the impact of chlorinated hydrocarbons on the breeding success of raptors (i.e. hawks and falcons) to the effects of neonicotinoids on bees (Whitehorn et al, 2012; Henry et al, 2012; Goulson, 2013). Animal feeds by themselves are usually benign, but their increased use in intensive livestock operations has meant that the concentration of animals has increased in some regions to the point that it produces eutrophication problems. Many of the vaccines and anti-parasitic drugs used by farmers also appear to be without side-effects, but the use of antibiotics in agriculture, especially their incorporation in feeding stuffs for non-acute use, has led to antibiotic resistance problems (Bud, 2008). The contribution of science to farm mechanisation is, as argued above, debatable, but there is no doubt that the use of heavier machinery has produced soil structure problems, and the replacement of
muscle power by fossil-fuel-derived power is
obviously one of the sources of greenhouse
gases.

At a more theoretical level, Scott has argued that agricultural science does not deal well with complexity, as a result of which it may ignore long-run effects such as the soil structure and water quality problems mentioned above, and that scientific approaches that have worked well in Europe and North America have been less successful in Africa (Scott, 1998). Similar methodological issues have been discussed by Harwood, who points out that experiment-based research does not always resolve conflict by producing evidence for one theory or against another (Harwood, 2015). He cites the example of high-yielding plant varieties that were tested under experimental conditions which proved to be more favourable than those found on the farms for which the new varieties were designed. Therefore, he argues, it is important to know why some theories and experiments have been more successful than others in persuading farmers to adopt new technologies. This question was discussed in relation to the development of artificial insemination in pigs by Brassley, who put forward the idea that different actors gain and lose authority over a scientific debate at various stages of the development of a technology, and that these authority changes are often accompanied by changes in the discourse employed, whether scientific or practical, and the media used, which can vary from scientific journals to word-of-mouth dialogue (Brassley, 2007).

In conclusion, to return to the questions posed at
the beginning of this paper, it appears that by the
middle of the 19th century the time when
gentlemen amateur scientists (or “natural
philosophers”, as they would probably have called
themselves) might make a significant contribution
to agricultural science was already passing. The
subsequent history of the discipline is one in
which, perhaps by the end of the nineteenth
century, and certainly by the beginning of the First
World War, it had developed the professional
institutions that enabled it to be recognised as an
independent branch of applied science. However,
this is not to say that its role or purpose remained

uncontroversial, or even that the boundaries of
competence between agricultural science and
other pure or applied sciences were firmly or
clearly drawn. Nevertheless, researchers who
would describe themselves as agricultural
scientists can legitimately claim at least some of
the credit for increased understanding of
agricultural operations and for the technical
changes that have enabled farmers to feed a
dramatically-increasing world population. The
other question posed at the outset, about
whether this will continue to be the case, is, we
have argued, not one for historians. They should
be busy enough with further work on the history
of agricultural science, which still lacks, at least
in the English language, an approachable,
comprehensive, international survey. Whether
this survey should best be approached as a
collection of studies of agricultural sciences in
different countries, or of individual branches of
the subject (e.g. fertilisers, plant physiology,
genetics, animal growth studies, etc.) across the
whole world, would depend upon the interests of
the contributing historians. The ideal approach
might be a study of the subject as a whole
across the entire world from an individual
scholar, but whether a historian exists with
sufficient expertise and time to accomplish such
a project is a different question.

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Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France
Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture
(N3AF)
Acte de colloque

presentation available at http://www.academie-agriculture.fr/actualites/academie/colloque/academie/union-europeenne-des-academies-dagriculture-ueaa-presidence.

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### Edité par

Hervé This, AgroParisTech-Inra International Centre for Molecular Gatronomy, membre de l'Académie d'agriculture de France.

### Rapporteurs

Laurent Brassart est Vice-Président Culture, médiation scientifique et Learning Center, et Maître de conférences en histoire moderne à l'Université de Lille 3

Nathalie Joly est Maître de conférence en sociologie, AgroSupDijon/UMR CESAER.

Malcolm Hadley, membre de l'Académie d'agriculture de France.

### Rubrique

Cet article a été publié dans la rubrique «Actes de colloques» des *Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France*.

### Reçu

12 décembre 2016

### Accepté

16 mars 2017

### Publié

2 mai 2017

### Citation

Brassley P. 2017. The impact of agricultural science 1850-2016: from a gentleman's amusement to the saviour or the world?, *Notes académiques de l'Académie d'agriculture de France / Academic Notes from the French Academy of Agriculture*, 2017, 3(6), 1-10.
https://doi.org/10.58630/pubac.not.a505824.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Paul Brassley est Honorary University Fellow en histoire de l'agronomie à l'Université d'Exeter, UK. Il a été Chair de l'Executive Committee de la British Agricultural History Society.