This blog accompanies John Lidwell-Durnin’s BJHS article Cultivating famine: data, experimentation and food security, 1795–1848

The promises of agricultural science are often structured around our fears of famine. This is as true today as it was at the close of the eighteenth century. In 2018, a number of news websites and outlets began to promote a story that algae was the food of the future. Rising population, climate change, and the unsustainable agricultural practices that constitute the present-day are all pressing motivations driving scientists and agricultural experts to search for replacement crops and nutrition sources. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the threat of famine took on immediate and present political urgency, redoubling interest in the promises of agriculturists and rural economists that sought to identify the crops, cultivation practices, and agricultural designs that would preserve the state and empire in the uncertain years to come.

In the eighteenth century, the potato was viewed by many European countries as an exotic vegetable, introduced with numerous purposes: as animal feed, as a delicacy, and as a crop suitable for peasants and farm labourers to cultivate in small gardens and allotments. However, pathogens that attack potatoes quickly followed its introduction to Europe. Agriculturists promoted its cultivation as a bulwark against famine, but by the 1780s and 1790s, finding cultivation practices or varieties of the potato resistant to the attacks of dry rot and curl had become central aims of scientific and agricultural institutions.

Agricultural science during this period depended crucially upon gathering expertise, observations, and cultivation practices from farmers, plant breeders, and even farm labourers. There were no experimental farms in Britain in the eighteenth century, and outside of a few small acres associated with botanic gardens in Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, institutions like the Board of Agriculture (founded in 1793) depended upon the efforts of its members to travel, interview, and observe practices on farms.

With no wild ancestor of the potato having been satisfactorily discovered in the Americas, there were many convinced that the diseases that attacked potatoes in Europe were symptomatic of degeneration in the plant, and others that viewed the diseases as being directly caused by unnatural cultivation practices. The emerging agricultural print networks of the early-nineteenth century encouraged farmers to report observations of disease in potato crops and to identify cultivation practices associated with the appearance of curl and dry rot. Occasionally entirely new diseases (such as ‘Bobbin Joans’, identified in Cornwall in 1843) appeared, but the apparent indifference these diseases displayed towards soil types, weather conditions, and regional differences reinforced the belief that cultivation played a crucial role in the occurrence of these disasters.

This article explores the efforts of the Board of Agriculture, the Horticultural Society of London, and the Royal Dublin Society to identify cultivation practices and key varieties of the potato that would usher in an era of farming free from disease and the threat of famine. The appearance of Phytophthora infestans (potato blight) in the 1840s casts an ironic and tragic air over these efforts—but during the early decades of the nineteenth century, many farmers were enlisted into the ranks of so-called ‘rational’ farmers and science-minded agriculturists. This period of debate raised new questions about the demarcation between nature and culture, and as communities traded and exchanged potatoes for seed, it created a framework by which blame for disasters could be apportioned to the practices and customs of others.

Read the full article in the British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS)

Main image: An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Daniel MacDonald, c. 1847.