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

环境因素，如天气条件、虫害和水资源的可获得性，对农业的成败有重大影响。在这些环境因素中，天气的主要相关性是毋庸置疑的。为此，在二十世纪上半叶，建立了一门新的科学学科--农业气象学，以调查天气对作物生长和牲畜生产性能的影响。农业气象学是一个被历史学家忽视的学科，如果我们想要了解天气条件如何影响粮食生产和农业可持续发展，农业气象学的发展反而具有高度相关性，因为气候变化正日益引起人们的担忧。该项目将从全球和地方两个角度调查二十世纪上半叶农业气象学的机构历史和物质文化。它将概述国际组织(世界气象组织和国际农业研究所)对该学科发展的贡献，并分析选定国家(美国、英国、德国、法国、意大利)的农业气象学发展。此外，该项目还将深入开展一项当地案例研究：英国农业气象学的历史，农业和渔业部在那里建立了关于天气和作物的长期观测和实验计划。通过将全球和地方视角联系起来，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了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历史记述将引起几个研究领域的兴趣：农业科学史、农村史、应用气象学史、不断增长的科学数据文献、田野科学史，当然还有环境历史和政策。

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.