The Profit of the Earth The Global Seeds of American Agriculture

About this book

While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past. The reality, as Courtney Fullilove shows, is that seeds are inherently political objects transformed by the ways they are gathered, preserved, distributed, regenerated, and improved. In The Profit of the Earth, Fullilove unearths the history of American agricultural development and of seeds as tools and talismans put in its service.

Organized into three thematic parts, The Profit of the Earth is a narrative history of the collection, circulation, and preservation of seeds. Fullilove begins with the political economy of agricultural improvement, recovering the efforts of the US Patent Office and the nascent US Department of Agriculture to import seeds and cuttings for free distribution to American farmers. She then turns to immigrant agricultural knowledge, exploring how public and private institutions attempting to boost midwestern wheat yields drew on the resources of willing and unwilling settlers. Last, she explores the impact of these cereal monocultures on biocultural diversity, chronicling a fin-de-siècle Ohio pharmacist's attempt to source Purple Coneflower from the diminishing prairie. Through these captivating narratives of improvisation, appropriation, and loss, Fullilove explores contradictions between ideologies of property rights and common use that persist in national and international development – ultimately challenging readers to rethink fantasies of global agriculture's past and future.

Contents

Prologue: In the Field

Field notes. “Green Revolutions”: Hunting Turkey Wheat
Part 1. Collection: The Political Culture of Seeds
1. The Museum of Seeds
2. Seed Sharing in the Patent Office
3. Failures of Tea Cultivation in the American South

Field notes. “Local Knowledge”: What the Pastoralist Knew
Part 2. Migration: Wheat Culture and Immigrant Agricultural Knowledge
4. For Amber Waves of Grain
5. Spacious Skies and Economies of Scale

Field notes. “Indigenous Knowledge”: Diversity and Endangerment
Part 3. Preservation: Indigenous Plants and the Preservation of Biocultural Diversity
6. Elk’s Weed on the Prairie
7. The Allegory of the Cave in Kentucky
8. Writing on the Seed
Epilogue: In the Gene Bank

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Courtney Fullilove is assistant professor of history, environmental studies, and science in society at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut.