Environmental Factors in Agriculture: Observation and Experiment in Agricultural Meteorology (ca 1900-1950)

环境因素，如天气条件、虫害和水资源的可用性，对农业的成败有着重大影响。在这些环境因素中，天气的主要相关性是无可争议的。因此，在世纪上半叶，一门新的科学学科-农业气象学-建立起来，以研究天气对作物生长和牲畜生产的影响。农业气象学是一个被历史学家忽视的主题，如果我们想了解天气条件如何影响粮食生产和农业可持续性，农业气象学的发展则具有高度相关性，这些问题由于气候变化而日益引起关注。该项目将从全球和地方的角度调查二十世纪上半叶农业气象学的制度历史和物质文化。它将提供一个由国际组织（世界气象组织和国际农业研究所）的学科的发展所作的贡献的概述，除了分析在选定的国家（美国，英国，德国，法国，意大利）农业气象的发展。此外，该项目将深入进行一项当地案例研究：英国农业气象学的历史，英国农业和渔业部制定了关于天气和作物的长期观测和实验计划。通过将全球和地方的视角相结合，该项目将实现三个主要目标：1）揭示现代农业气象学的起源; 2）调查观测和实验在农业气象学中的作用; 3）研究农业气象学如何有助于我们理解环境及其对人类经济活动的影响。该项目开发的农业气象学的历史帐户将感兴趣的几个研究领域：农业科学史，农村历史，应用气象学的历史，科学数据的不断增长的文献，领域科学的历史，当然，环境历史和政策。

Environmental factors, such as weather conditions, pest infestations, and availability of water resources, significantly affect success and failure in agriculture. Among these environmental factors the primary relevance of the weather is uncontested. For this reason, during the first half of the twentieth century, a new scientific discipline, agricultural meteorology, was established to investigate the impact of the weather on crop growth and livestock performance. A subject much neglected by historians, the developments of agricultural meteorology are instead highly relevant if we want to understand how weather conditions can affect food production and agricultural sustainability, issues which are increasingly raising concerns due to climate change. The project will investigate the institutional history and material culture of agricultural meteorology during the first half of the twentieth century by taking both a global and a local perspective. It will provide an overview of the contributions made by international organisations (World Meteorological Organization and International Institute of Agriculture) to the growth of the discipline, besides analysing the developments of agricultural meteorology in selected countries (the US, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy). In addition, the project will pursue in depth a local case study: the history of agricultural meteorology in Great Britain, where the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries set up long-term observational and experimental schemes on weather and crops. By connecting a global and a local perspective, the project will achieve three main objectives: 1) to uncover the origins of modern agricultural meteorology; 2) to investigate the role of observation and experiment in agricultural meteorology; 3) to examine how agricultural meteorology has contributed to our understanding of the environment and its influence on human economic activities. The historical account of agricultural meteorology developed by the project will be of interest to several research areas: the history of agricultural science, rural history, the history of applied meteorology, the growing literature on scientific data, the history of the field sciences and, of course, environmental history and policy.