Lecture #9: The Machine in the
Garden: Agricultural Revolutions
Suggested
Johann Heinrich von Thunen,
Von Thunen's Isolated State (1826), translated
1966.
David Potter, People of Plenty, 1954.
H. J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology,
1962.
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis:
Outline:
I. Secular Trends in Agriculture
Note general trends from 1800 on: population growth;
cities grow more rapidly than country, urban surpasses rural in 1920; rising
mechanization in ag and industry; replacement of
solar energy with fossil energy; increasing soil intensity (fertilizer);
increasing capital intensity, labor efficiency (100 bushels of wheat took 373
person-hours in 1800, 108 in 1900; 9 in 1970).
Can we abstract these trends?
II. Von Thunen's
Der Isolierte Staat and the Proliferating Market
proliferation of market relationships central to emerging economy and
environmental change
Heinrich von Thunen's The
Isolated State (1826) as useful way of abstracting geographical
consequences of the market as interface between city and country.
Imagine city in midst of featureless agricultural
plain: how far goods will travel to city depends on their price, cost of
transport, and value of land on which they're produced
key
insight: different goods/productive regions will array selves around city in
rings
inner
ring: perishable, high value goods (dairy, orchard, vegetables) produced with intensive
agriculture on lands with high rents, direct response to urban demand
1859 census: vegetables & milk adjacent to
cities, fruit, butter & cheese farther out, hay & hops urban too (hay
for horses for transport, and hops for beer)
next
ring: extensive agriculture, especially of grain crops, on lands of
lower value
grains
capable of paying longer journey to market, especially wheat; corn highly
desirable as frontier subsistence crop, but had to convert to pork or whiskey
for urban demand
corn
concentrated in
lumbering
also an extensive activity in this ring: white pine from
third
ring: livestock raising, animals graze land of low value; (lumbering extensive
too)
outer
ring: hunting, trapping, trading. Furs
& skins of high value relative to weight and bulk,
can still pay transport costs, with no land rents at all. Beyond: wilderness?
general
implications: market hierarchy expressed geographically, and transport
innovation (along with actual resource distribution) will change spatial
expression of rings
so NYC in 1820 surrounded by market gardens, grain ag farther out; opening of Erie brings cheap western grain
east, drives New Eng & NY farmers to intensive ag
or bankruptcy, as did rising rents in vicinity of cities
F. J. Turner's westward moving frontier can be seen
as moving von Thunen rings, with intensive ag around cities, extensive grain in Midwest, livestock on
Great Plains
southern tobacco & cotton shift west for soil
exhaustion, but strong urban links too: high yield from English and
northeastern markets meant capital and labor-intensive agriculture, with labor
capitalized in form of slaves, non-capitalist social relations as foundation
for most commercial (hence capitalist?) of American crops
III. Relative Factor Costs: People
of Plenty, People of Waste
Potter's People of Plenty said Turner right
not about free land but resource abundance.
H. J. Habakkuk cast abundance in terms of classic
factors of production (land, labor, capital) to argue
that British-U.S. factor shares accounted for differing technologies
in
hence:
American employers had strong incentive to buy labor-serving machinery, source
of technological innovation and diffusion (cf. rapid spread of John Deere's
plow and Cyrus McCormick's reaper in mid-19th)
increasingly involved replacing human energy with non-human energy: solar to fossil
also
increased inputs of fertilizer from imported Peruvian guano: growth begins c.
1850
also:
conserve labor rather than resources.
"waste" of resources economically
sensible
Americans assume goods to be used up & replaced,
not kept: more innovation, but more waste
central
dialectic of