Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The theme of the book is that biological and institutional innovations were as important as mechanical innovations in making American agriculture so productive. Improvements in wheat, corn cotton, tobacco, vegetables and fruit trees plus new breeds of livestock and dairy cows enabled individual farmers to fight off insects, diseases, and weeds in the original colonies and gradually expand production into challenging new climates and conditions in the South, Midwest, the plains and the far west. After the Civil War, the new agricultural colleges and efforts by the USDA increasingly contributed to the development and adoption of new seeds, breeds and techniques. Collectively these long forgotten accomplishments were as significant as the much better know machines--cotton gin, mechanical reaper and tractor--in creating agricultural abundance.
This impressive and provocative book will likely have a profound and far-reaching impact on scholarship. By revealing the incompleteness of the prevailing narrative of agricultural development through mechanization, Creating Abundance offers a new paradigm for examining the history of agriculture in the U.S. The book convincingly demonstrates that creating new varieties of crops and farm animals was crucial for maintaining productivity in settled areas and for expanding agriculture to new geographic areas. Written not by historians, but by economists, the book also reveals flaws in some basic economic concepts and ironically this may prompt changes in the field of economics!
Click Here to see more reviews about: Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development
0 comments:
Post a Comment