Abstract
This chapter examines the environmental region as a middle level of knowledge production between local and universal, focusing on the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of Dryland Agriculture in the early twentieth century, under E. C. Chilcott. The office supported branch field stations dispersed across the Great Plains—a region experiencing a tremendous influx of farming immigrants during this period—and these stations undertook coordinated agronomic experiments and measurements of ecological variables throughout the region. Such a regionalized ecological approach to agricultural research was not only similar in many respects to research in the emerging field of ecology but also produced knowledge claims contrasting markedly with the contemporaneous “scientific soil culture” movement led by promoters such as Hardy Webster Campbell. At the same time, the practice of agricultural research involving systematic coordination of research design and uniform collection of ecological variables generated some tensions between federal and state scientists.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Worster (1985). In Worster’s framing of the problem, though focused on history of ideas more than practices, a related tension between “imperial” (what I would call cosmopolitan scientific) views of nature and “arcadian” views of nature drives the entire narrative of the history of ecology. For a recent volume of papers that collectively argue for the continuing relevance of place-based ecological approaches, along with a few historical contributions, see Billick and Price (2010).
- 3.
- 4.
Kingsland (2005 , p. 2). She goes on to point out that “the same need to rationalize resource use that supported the conservation movement also supported research in ecology” (p. 4), a connection which is only heightened and amplified by the comparison with agricultural science research that I develop in this chapter.
- 5.
A basic, laudatory overview, of both the USDA Office and the state experiment stations who collaborated, is provided in Quisenberry (1977). Historiography of the dry-farming movement, more generally, is still dominated by the thorough and comprehensive work of Mary W. M. Hargreaves (1957). For later developments, see Hargreaves (1993). Brief treatments are provided in Hargreaves (1948); Hargreaves (1977).
- 6.
Chilcott (1903, p. 446).
- 7.
Galloway (1906, p. 236).
- 8.
Chilcott (1903, p. 448).
- 9.
Publications by or associated with Campbell included books, articles, and periodicals, among which perhaps the most well known was his Soil culture manual, which was published in a few different versions in the early twentieth century, e.g., Campbell (1907b). Among the many overviews of Campbell’s life, one brief but solid synopsis is Hargreaves (1958). Laudatory popular accounts were also published during the early twentieth-century Great Plains dry-farming boom, including Cowan (1906).
- 10.
Campbell (1907b, p. 67, 70, 72).
- 11.
Campbell (1907a, p. 111).
- 12.
Chilcott (1911, pp. 247–48).
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Interestingly, this also meant that Chilcott’s primary “Great Plains” residency was nearly a 100 miles to the east of Aberdeen, South Dakota, which was the place where Campbell gained the “experience…[from which he] formulated the basic procedures of his farming system,” though Aberdeen was itself just barely west of the 98th meridian! See Hargreaves (1958, p. 63). As Hargreaves points out, Campbell had arrived in South Dakota in 1879, just in time for the Great Dakota Boom that peaked in the early 1880s (Hargreaves (1958, p. 62), thus suggesting that the dry-farming promoter himself had at least 20 years of practical experience in the region.
- 14.
Chilcott (1903, p. 450, 452).
- 15.
Galloway (1907, p. 319).
- 16.
Galloway (1906, p. 236).
- 17.
Chilcott (1903, p. 449).
- 18.
For a discussion of this historical taxonomy of field practice, including lay networks and surveys (discussed here), stations (discussed elsewhere throughout this chapter) and quarries (unimportant in agricultural research but common in extractive disciplines such as paleontology and archaeology), see Vetter (2012).
- 19.
Some key works on the early history of US long-distance weather networks and the organization of the US Weather Bureau through the early twentieth century include Fleming (1990); Fleming (2000); and Monmonier (1988). For a case study including the Great Plains and focusing on the interactions between lay observers and government forecasters, see Vetter (2011).
- 20.
Jensen (1910, p. 8).
- 21.
Dillman (1910, p. 11).
- 22.
Chilcott et al. (1915, p. 5).
- 23.
- 24.
Galloway (1907, p. 320).
- 25.
Jensen (1910, p. 3).
- 26.
Galloway (1907, p. 320).
- 27.
However, a significant difference was that the Chilcott, Briggs, and their collaborators viewed the key agent of change as human activity—whether in the form of plowing the soil itself or the multi-year crop rotations that were at the heart of the Office’s research practice—whereas Clementsian ecologists would ultimately come to focus on processes of ecological succession toward climax in the absence of human disruption. See Clements (1916).
- 28.
- 29.
Galloway (1908).
- 30.
Chilcott et al. (1915, pp. 2–3).
- 31.
Galloway (1908, p. 318).
- 32.
Cooperative Experiment Association of the Great Plains Area (1908, p. 3).
- 33.
Galloway (1908, pp. 319–20).
- 34.
Cooperative Experiment Association of the Great Plains Area (1908, pp. 7–8). The meetings of the organizing meeting in Washington, D.C., in November 1905, seem not to have been published, but a typescript labeled “Minutes of a Meeting Held at the Cosmos Club in Washington, November 15, 1905, for the Purpose Organizing a Cooperative Association for the Great Plains Area” can be found in University Archives, North Dakota State University, Institute for Regional Studies, Fargo, North Dakota Dickinson Experiment Station records (DES) 1/4.
- 35.
Love Library, University Archives, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Agricultural Experiment Station records, North Platte Experiment Station 10/14/1 (NPES); E. C. Chilcott to W. W. Burr, 21 April 1906.
- 36.
The unfamiliarity of the branch field station personnel with the intricacies of evaporation tanks, not just as scientific instruments but more generally, is suggested by another letter indicating the problems posed by the field agent at Highmore, South Dakota, having received a disassembled tank even though the company that manufactured it had promised to “furnish the tanks complete,” as noted in NPES; Chilcott to Burr, 14 May 1906.
- 37.
DES 1/6; J. H. Worst to L. R. Waldron, 19 July 1906.
- 38.
DES 1/6; Chilcott to Waldron, 26 July 1906.
- 39.
DES 1/6; Worst to Waldron, 27 July 1906.
- 40.
DES 1/6; Chilcott to Waldron, 6 August 1906.
- 41.
NPES 9; Chilcott to Burr, 29 August 1906.
- 42.
NPES 9; E. A. Burnett to Chilcott, 15 October 1905. At nearly the same time, as Nebraska station director, Burnett was also complaining directly to the USDA Bureau of Plant Industry chief, who was also Chilcott’s supervisor, about collaboration requests that he viewed as too indefinite from another agency within the Bureau—though, interestingly, Chilcott was invoked there as a positive model, due to his more definite lines of communication about “details and plans of the work,” where were deemed “satisfactory” as involving “mutual consideration,” as noted in NPES 9; Burnett to B. T. Galloway, 9 October 1906.
- 43.
NPES 9; Burnett to Snyder, 31 October 1906.
- 44.
NPES 1; Snyder to Burnett, 9 March 1911. For another example expressing a similar sentiment, see NPES 1; Snyder to Burnett, 18 September 1911.
- 45.
Taylor (1915, p. 150).
- 46.
Taylor (1920, pp. 186–87).
- 47.
Chilcott et al. (1915, p. 3).
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Vetter, J. (2015). Regionalizing Knowledge: The Ecological Approach of the USDA Office of Dryland Agriculture on the Great Plains. In: Phillips, D., Kingsland, S. (eds) New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture. Archimedes, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12185-7_14
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