Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
farming, compared with nearly 50 percent at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, many lament the demise of the small family farm and the
public good it is presumed to provide.
Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and continuing
through today, the state and other farming interests have sought to control
and protect U.S. agriculture through the use of science. Long before the
work of physicists and engineers was seen as essential to national security,
agricultural science was proposed and accepted as a state project, intended
as an antidote to foreign competition, increasing cost-of-living expenses,
and a perceived decline in the quality of American rural life (Rosenberg
1976; 1977; Marcus 1985). The fi rst major step toward a formal system of
state-sponsored agricultural science began with the foundation of the land-
grant university system following the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of
1862. This federal legislation provided grants of land to states on the con-
dition that they would be sold and the profi ts used to found a college for
training rural citizens in agriculture and other practical crafts, a mandate
that came to be known as the land-grant mission. A system of agricultural
experiment stations, based on the land-grant university campuses, was also
begun in order to provide research on problems important to farming.
Through the fi rst several decades of the land-grant system, however,
scientists and farm communities remained relatively isolated: agricultural
researchers did not necessarily want to work on problems of immediate
practical interest to growers, and growers were often impatient with the
promises of long-term basic research (Marcus 1985). Therefore, around the
beginning of the twentieth century, a movement formed that called for a
system of extension work to be put in place, to bring research from the
land-grant schools to local farm communities. Members of the extension
movement argued that a system of extension advisors stationed in local
farming communities could bring improved methods of agriculture to rural
populations, thereby fulfi lling the land-grant mission. In 1914 the federal
Smith-Lever Act was passed, providing funds for each land-grant university
to establish its own system of extension work. The program was named
Cooperative Extension because funding for the advisors came from the
federal, state, and county levels of government. After a rapid expansion of
the program during World War I, most counties in the United States had
a Cooperative Extension advisor, affi liated with each state's land-grant
university and charged with promoting the latest methods and technolo-
gies for making local agriculture more productive. At that time, and likely
