Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
and morality of rural life. Where “two blades of grass fl ourish,” many
believed, farm communities would fl ourish as well.
For many growers, especially those active in the Grange and other farm
movements of the late nineteenth century, the land-grant mission was less
about basic research and classical subjects than about practical solutions
that could be applied to the immediate problems of local agriculture: the
immediate conditions of the soil, the crop varieties to be planted, and
other specifi c details about local farming requirements. Grower-oriented
political movements like the Grange and the Populists called for university
researchers to concentrate on the practical aspects of farm education, pre-
ferring that land-grant institutions teach vocational farming courses instead
of the classical courses that private universities traditionally taught. Further,
many smaller growers were suspicious of “book farming” and of intellec-
tuals who claimed that their new knowledge and advice could increase
growers' yields. This sounds like a stereotype of growers as coarse anti-
intellectuals, but, in fact, growers were often exposed to and were wary of
“magic” formulas hawked by salesmen with claims of increased yields. In
addition, growers understood better than anyone the importance of local
conditions and their interaction with farm practices. If a new way of
farming did not mesh well with the local conditions of land, climate, and
farming practices already in place, then research results were useless, no
matter how promising they seemed on the university campus.
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Larger and
wealthier growers, by contrast, were often eager to accept the new methods
and technologies developed by the land-grant institutions. In fact, it was
many of these wealthier growers who promoted the creation of a system
of land-grant-based experiment stations under the Hatch Act of 1887
(Marcus 1985).
As an example of these confl icting goals and how they played out in
the context of the early land-grant system, consider the early history
of California's land-grant institution in the 1870s. The University of
California shared the interventionist mission of the Morrill Act and was
subject to the mission's ambiguity from its very inception. For example,
the university's fi rst professor of agriculture, Ezra Carr, believed, as many
in the Grange and Populist movements did, that practical, hands-on train-
ing for farmers was the primary responsibility of the land-grant school
(Scheuring 1995, 14-15). Taking a different view were those, like Daniel
Gilman, fi rst president of the UC, who believed that the university's
