What we call modern agriculture is, in fact, a very specific version of farming that emerged in the US in the late 19th century and spread throughout the world in the 20th. Modern agriculture of the 20th century was largely based on the experiences and practices of American agriculture. By the end of the Second World War, much of American agriculture had been organised as a system of factory production.

There was great disjuncture in the world of agriculture based for a long time on the limits imposed by nature on human desire to extract more and more from it. The seed, the soil, the landscape and many other resources set both the limits and the possibilities of how much humans could get out of the soil. Many communities and civilisations which tried to overstep these limits perished or had to abandon their places. Throughout history, growth in the population of a community and agricultural productivity have been directly correlated. In many places where the people paid close attention to the natural limits and acted accordingly, communities survived for a very long time.

That farming could be organised as an industrial factory was totally novel in the world in the late 19th century. This was the result of the coalescing of three seemingly distinct fields of knowledge: classical economics, management as a science of productivity based on the division of labour and agronomy as an emerging branch of chemistry.

Classical economics saw agricultural production in the sense of comparative advantage. Different places would have different potentialities in terms of crops grown or processed. Therefore, the best production methods would be the one that would allow for these potentialities to flourish. For instance, if one region would be suitable for wine and another for coconut, then these regions would be better off in focusing only on those products in which they had a comparative advantage. However, this could be possible only if there was no curb on the flow of products across national borders. This was the core idea of free market principles that began to emerge in the late 18th century. For this to be operational, the means of production and the products of the place had to be perfectly mobile. This principle was, however, antithetical to the existing national laws across Europe. The land ownership system did not allow unencumbered buying and selling. In Britain, till the late 19th century, land was not a property to be bought and sold, but only a means of production that the owners had to hand over to their heirs in good condition. This began to change in the late 19th century when several laws were changed allowing reorganisation of land.

It was in the late 19th century that Frederic von Taylor began to experiment with running organisations involving many people, many pieces of equipment and many levels of hierarchy. The main objective that Taylor set for himself was to come up with a reorganisation of the system of relationships in any institution. The layout of the factory, the hierarchy among people and the tools and machinery all had to be designed for the maximum productivity of labour. Coincidentally, that was also a time when agriculture in America was getting mechanised. Large-scale farms, widespread use of heavy machinery and mobilisation of finance through banks were becoming key to any farming operation.

Third and, perhaps, the most important, factor for the new agricultural system in the US was the gradual emergence of agronomy as a branch of chemistry. Work on agricultural chemistry had been done mostly in Europe for much of the 19th century. This discipline assumed that soil was a mixture of different chemical elements, and soil productivity depended on how good the chemical properties of the soil were. Many Americans went to Europe, particularly Germany, to train with Europe’s prominent agronomists such as Justus Liebig who had set up his own laboratory to experiment with and analyse various aspects of soil.

By this time, the soil in a lot of places across America had come under serious strain. Improving the soil was becoming increasingly important, and farmers were looking for technical help from the scientific establishment. However, until the late 19th century, there were not many institutions involved in teaching agriculture. A few magazines and newspapers doled out ideas about good agricultural practices that they had gleaned from across Europe. Many ran regular reports on farmers’ experiences. It was only after some Americans came back from their training in agronomy in Europe that the process of setting up land grants and agricultural colleges began to speed up. Research and demonstration stations cropped up. The discovery of many minerals led to the production of various types of fertilisers. That plants needed nitrogen as a major input for their growth was established by the middle of the 19th century. However, it was only in the early 20th century that nitrogen was artificially produced.

Production for a market that was becoming increasingly trans-border, a management system that ensured the best combination of various means of production and agronomy that provided the necessary knowledge for soil productivity thus came to assume the major role in the way American agriculture was organised. However, the problem was that the basic production process was based on a very wrong and destructive assumption about the soil itself.

This allowed for general neglect of the living nature of the soil. Given the rudimentary knowledge about ecology back then, it was entirely logical for scientists to only believe in the chemical nature of the soil. They could not imagine that the elements that the plants needed were produced and transformed through the actions of teeming living organisms. Americans thought for a long time that their agricultural productivity resulted from the entrepreneurial spirit of the farmers, the diligence of the scientists and free trade. What they forgot, however, was the fact that the land they were farming had been built through millions of years of nature’s cycles.

It was this farming system that spread throughout the world following the Second World War by means of what we call the agricultural modernisation process. In Nepal, it began on Jan. 23, 1951 when the then Rana government — two months before its downfall — signed a cooperation agreement with the United States Overseas Mission to carry out a modest village development project. Some of the American advisers who came to run the project had experience in agricultural extension in many parts of America. By then, this agriculture had become dominant even in the socialist bastion of the erstwhile USSR. The American experts who were involved in widespread extension work through the growing number of agricultural and land grant colleges were invited to design agricultural production on the collectivised farms.

The fact that this resulted in catastrophic failures is an important topic for another essay. Suffice it to say here that we cannot understand the way our political and intellectual leaders — across the political spectrum — adored and continue to adore the factory system of agricultural production without understanding this history. Only one leader — BP Koirala — realised the limits of this after he came in contact with ideas such as those spelled out in E.F. Schumacher’s now famous book Small is Beautiful. By then, he was in no position to do much. Most of his disciples seem to have no clue about what their leader was thinking in the twilight days of his life.

Anil Bhattarai

anilbhattarai@gmail.com

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