"Farming with Figures: Foods, Atoms, and Value in American Agricultural Improvement, 1840-1860"

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

As American farming beginning in the 1840s became increasingly market-oriented, new forms of value based in cash encounted new forms of value based in chemistry. This talk will examine how American chemists and agricultural improvers reconceptualized farms, beginning to conceive of them as components in a cycle of chemical nutrition, fed or starved by limited flows of precious elements. These improvers promoted plant and soil analysis as a way of identifying value in the material transactions of the farm. Thus they offered farmers a solution to the problem of keeping track of profits through a complex system of material transformations. Reformers claimed that by using chemical analysis, fodder crops and fertilizers could be rationally compared. By redefining foods, fodders, and fertilizers as valuable collections of chemicals, chemists and improvers began to lay the foundation for new agroecologies and new industries of nutrients.