During the latter half of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, agricultural knowledge made major advances in France. Many leading thinkers, such as Quesnay (1694–1774) and Turgot (1727–1781) in economics, or Lavoisier (1743–1794) and Boussingault (1802–1887) in chemistry, were involved in these advances and helped agriculture move forward. But scientific knowledge of this kind was not easily passed down to the French peasantry. The structure of French agriculture, with its millions of small or micro-farms, made it hard to transmit knowledge on a broad scale. So while the scientific knowledge networks of the ‘enlightened’ period around 1800 are quite well known, the process by which scientific knowledge was transmitted to farmers, particularly to the innumerable small and micro-farmers, has been uncovered only in part.

Few historians have given attention to the process of knowledge transmission. For them, and particularly with regards to France, there were two preferential research topics. One was the careful study of the dominant scientific body, the Institut des Recherches Agronomiques (IRA), later called the Institut National des Recherches Agronomiques (INRA), as in the edited volume by Bonneuil, Denis and Mayaud. The other topic appears in publications by Muller and other sociologists. Muller gave a detailed account of the workings of the Departmental Agricultural Services (Services Départementaux de l’Agriculture) and the role of the agricultural engineers who headed these services (Directeurs des Services Agricoles). But his focus was mainly institutional and on the experts at the top. Conversely, Brunier presented an analysis of the activities of local advisers. With this exception, no one has examined the spread of knowledge among French farmers in the course of the twentieth century. If the transmission of information has been dealt with at all, it was often from a limited viewpoint: the history of a particular scientific organization or of a state service, or of publicity to promote plants, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and the like. It is the farmers who are often absent from the historical accounts of the ‘agricultural revolution’ after the Second World War. Consequently, it is hard to see where they fitted into this revolution; they often seem outsiders to the process.