The Balance Sheet of Nature: Markets, Quantification and the New York Farm, 1830-1860

在19世纪中期，成千上万的美国人通过参与“农业改良”来应对农业不稳定和发展中的市场经济。作为作者、读者、实验者、消费者、评论家和观察者，改良者推动了农业实践的广泛变革。特别是，他们支持农业化学的兴起，认为这是一种理解农场经济转型过程的方法。化学帮助农民将土地视为“银行”，将大气中的氮视为“自然资本”，将饮食视为一种交易形式，将混合农业景观视为资本原子的不断循环。本项目将探讨1830年至1860年间，19世纪早期发展中的市场经济的数值实践是如何支持和抵制这种对自然的经济理解的，将化学分析置于不断变化的测量、会计和测量实践的背景下。聚焦于纽约州改良者的活动，它将询问新的市场价值和量化实践如何改变农民理解和与景观、植物和动物互动的方式。在筹备这个项目时，研究人员审查了全州范围内的改善机构在将纽约景观纳入市场体系方面的作用。从国家科学基金会申请的资金将允许研究人员研究量化在劳动农民生活中的作用。关于城市机构的研究可以在档案补助金的帮助下进行，而关于农村人口的研究则需要在分散的地方档案中进行广泛的研究，而这些地方档案无法为研究人员提供经费。缺乏资金导致了对重要资源的忽视。对于这样的研究，来自NSF的支持是至关重要的。因此，本提案要求在2007年8月至12月期间对纽约州的26个档案馆进行11次短期研究旅行。在这些旅行中，研究人员将检查农场日记、信件和账簿，以及当地农业改进协会的记录。这些文件将提供数字和耕作方法变化的证据，例如以记录饲养和肥料试验、改变的会计和测量方法、使用农业地图和调查以及讨论经济条件和土地价值的形式。知识价值。这个项目将阐明认识自然的量化方法的传播，并将它们与经济计算模式联系起来。因此，它将为科学史上越来越多的文献做出贡献，这些文献描述了18世纪和19世纪量化和量化实践的兴起。虽然像西奥多·波特和玛丽·普维这样的学者主要关注城市专家，如经济学家、精算师和会计师，但这个项目将扩展到农村人口中的农民。看看那些致力于管理生物体并使其盈利的人，这将增加我们对科学与不断变化的生产方式之间联系的理解，以及对自然过程管理方法发展的理解。此外，通过探索构成农业改良的专家和非专业人士的兴趣组合，并分析化学和地质理论被战略性部署的不同方式，该项目将为科普文献增加一个新的维度。更广泛的影响。该项目的研究结果将在科学历史学家、环境历史学家和农业历史学家等几个学科小组的会议上发表。它还将成为发送给专业期刊的文章的基础，最终将被纳入专著。研究结果也将作为环境史和科学史课程的一部分，整合到研究人员的教学中。《杂食者的困境》和《快餐国家》等书的成功表明，公众对他们盘子里的食物的营养循环产生了强烈的兴趣。吸引现代读者的工业化进程始于农业生态系统的商品化。通过这项研究，我们将更好地了解现代农业的生态是如何被经济组织起来的。

During the mid-nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Americans responded to agricultural instability and developing market economies by involving themselves in "agricultural improvement." As authors, readers, experimenters, consumers, critics and observers, improvers promoted widespread changes to farming practice. In particular, they supported the rise of agricultural chemistry as a way of understanding processes of transformation on the farm economically. Chemistry was to help farmers see land as a "bank," the nitrogen in the atmosphere as the "capital of nature," eating as a form of transaction, and the landscape of mixed-farming as a constant cycling of atoms of capital. This project will explore the ways in which the numerical practices of the early nineteenth century's developing market economy supported and resisted this economic understanding of nature between 1830 and 1860, placing chemical analysis in the context of changing surveying, accounting, and mensuration practices. Focusing on improvers' activity in New York State, it will ask how new market values and quantitative practices changed the way that farmers understood and interacted with landscapes, plants, and animals. In preparation for this project, the researcher has examined the role of statewide institutions of improvement in integrating the New York landscape into the market system. The funding requested from NSF will permit the researcher to examine the role of quantification in the lives of working farmers. Where research about urban institutions can be conducted with the assistance of archival grants, research on rural populations requires extensive research in dispersed local archives, which cannot afford to fund researchers. Lack of funding has led to the neglect of vital resources. For such research, support from the NSF is crucial. This proposal therefore requests funding for 11 short research trips to a total of 26 archives in New York State, to be taken between August and December of 2007. During these trips the researcher will examine farm diaries, letters and account books, as well as the records of local agricultural improvement societies. These documents will provide evidence of changes in numerical and farming practices, for example in the form of recorded feeding and fertilizer experiments, altered accounting and mensuration practices, use of agricultural maps and surveys and discussions of economic conditions and land values. Intellectual Merit. This project will illuminate the spread of quantified ways of knowing nature, connecting them to economic modes of calculation. As such, it will contribute to a growing literature in the history of science that describes the rise of quantification and quantifying practices during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While scholars like Theodore Porter and Mary Poovey have focused primarily on urban experts such as economists, actuaries, and accountants, this project will extend to the rural population of improving farmers. Looking at those who worked to manage living organisms and make them profitable, it will increase our understanding of the connection between sciences and changing modes of production, and of the development of a managerial approach to natural processes. Further, by exploring the mix of expert and lay interests that made up agricultural improvement, and analyzing the different ways in which chemical and geological theories were strategically deployed, the project will add a new dimension to the literature on popular science. Broader Impacts. The results of this project will be presented at the conferences of several disciplinary groups: historians of science, environmental historians, and agricultural historians. It will also form the basis of articles to be sent to professional journals and will ultimately be incorporated into a monograph. The results will also be integrated into the researcher's teaching, as part of classes in environmental history and the history of science. The success of books like "The Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation" indicates powerful public interest in the cycles of nutrition that end in the food on their plates. The processes of industrialization that fascinate modern readers began with the commoditization of the farm ecosystem. Through this research we will better understand how the ecologies of modern farming have come to be economically organized.