Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the
states may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practi-
cal education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions
in life.” Note that this passage is precise in some senses and quite vague in
others. Although ultimate authority about how to implement the Act's
mandates is left to the states, the mandates themselves are left “deliberately
nebulous and open to varying interpretations” (Marcus 1985, 129). Conse-
quently, the Morrill Act and the mission it decreed for the land-grant
universities stood as a rhetorical toolkit for a wide array of actors, each with
an agenda for U.S. agriculture, and these actors often had divergent ideas
of how the land-grant mission should be approached. For any question one
might ask about the land-grant system and its mission, the answers were
tied with confl icting interests.
For instance, for the agricultural scientists, the mission was (and often
still is) about using research to make new advances in the basic scientifi c
understanding of natural processes that will benefi t applied agricultural
practices. In the period in which the land-grant schools were developed,
the budding profession of agricultural science modeled itself quite explic-
itly on the example of German agricultural chemistry. Many young U.S.
scientists trained there and were indoctrinated with the German university
system's emphasis on basic science and experimentation. These researchers,
fresh from their formative years in German chemistry departments, argued
for classes in the sciences and lobbied for the institutionalization of agri-
cultural research. Many of the administrators who created the individual
land-grant schools and shaped their curricula also had these same biases,
preferring courses in the classical university tradition over those they con-
sidered vocational (Rossiter 1975; Rosenberg 1976; 1977). Thus, the land-
grant mission, according to these administrators and agricultural researchers,
was to bring the power of rational scientifi c methods and experimentation
to bear on the problems of U.S. agriculture. Science could bring increased
productivity, which would, as Rosenberg reports, renew the moral and
public good of U.S. farming: “[Agricultural scientists'] ideological stance
rested on an unquestioned faith in the transcendent virtue of productivity;
to increase the productivity of the soil—to make two blades of grass fl our-
ish where one had before—was to act in an unambiguously moral fashion”
(1977, 403). This is a crucial point: for agricultural scientists there was little
contradiction between increased productivity and the more general health
