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The introduction begins by exploring the culture of ‘agricultural giants,’ enormous, precisely-measured animals and plants. These giants were products of a massive, transatlantic culture of knowledge-making: “agricultural improvement.” The introduction traces improvement’s origins in Great Britain and its adoption by wealthy landholders in the U.S. as well as by colonial officials throughout the British Empire. It asserts the centrality of New York State to U.S. improvement, and outlines New Yorkers’ experience of rapid agricultural change in the decades after the opening of the Erie Canal. It describes improvements’ shift from an instrument of landlords’ developmentalism to a much broader community and set of practices. It points to the role of new commercial networks in this expansion, and shows how improving science increasingly created knowledge about goods. Finally the chapter sketches the features of improving science—its focus on the futures that its adherents hoped to create and saw as natural, its dependence on financially-interested experts, its borrowing of forms of credibility from the broader U.S. economy, and its profound questions about the nature of value. In improvement, science did not provide stability, but rather fueled competing stories of the future and volatile and uncertain systems of value.

Chapter 1 examines the first phase of improvement in New York: a project of New York’s class of large landlords and developers. It argues that, far from longing for a lost feudalism, landlords aspired to the status of British aristocratic agricultural modernizers whose status had been expanding across the 18th and into the early 19th century. The chapter traces New York landlords’ involvement in improvement, showing how they established new institutions of agricultural science, commissioning geological surveys, as part of a broader developmental move into seized Haudenosaunee lands. It then shows how, just as the institutions they had established took off, major landlords’ power collapsed in the face of failed speculations and tenant resistance in the Anti-Rent War. Radical tenants, participating in a tradition of British agrarian radicalism, used agricultural fairs as political opportunities and took up improving arguments in their own defense, breaking landlords’ hold over improving institutions.

Chapter 2 turns to the much broader world of improvement that emerged during the Panic of 1837 and Anti-Rent War as new journals and agricultural societies attracted a broader wave of adherents. The chapter challenges the idea that rural New York was split between elite and “ordinary” or “real” farmers. Instead New York had a complex rural hierarchy, within which many groups competed for the status of “real farmer” even as the definition of authenticity shifted. Improving institutions acted as stages upon which these claims to identity could be performed. Thus, wealthy urbanites attempted to occupy the cultural position of old landlords as they shifted into politics; they purchased improving goods as a form of conspicuous consumption and a demonstration of creditworthiness; and they sought further wealth through rural speculations. Middling farmers, a broad and varied group, used improvement and improving consumption to demonstrate rural refinement and obtain access to credit while also performing “conspicuous production,” visible acts of physical labor that asserted their claim to producerist authenticity. Finally, the chapter suggests that as some identities were publicized in improvement, others were hidden, particularly the labor and thought of paid and family laborers, an idea further addressed in Chapter 3.

The immediate post-Famine period was marked by profound optimism about the potential of Irish agricultural development. For some improvers, agricultural practice offered a fertile ground upon which to plant the seeds of modernisation to facilitate fuller Irish integration into an international capitalist market economy. This chapter suggests that post-Famine agriculturists promoted new understandings of how to productively harness biological agro-material found on Irish farms during and after the Famine. It examines post-Famine scientific readings of the biology and physiology of crops, plants and animals and their subsequent promotion as an aid to Irish food production. In the 1850s, agricultural science was institutionalised via a state-supported network of agricultural schools and model farms aimed at all social classes. Ultimately, however, small farmers exhibited resistance and apathy towards these educational schemes for an assortment of social, political and practical reasons, a factor that restricted the socio-economic effectiveness of agricultural schools. By exploring these themes, this chapter reveals further connections made between food and national improvement while demonstrating that food production, as with consumption, evolved into a site of deep contestation between different Irish social groups and, sometimes, between colonising and colonised powers.

By 1900, it seemed to many contemporaries that post-Famine Ireland was in an unremitting condition of physical, social and economic decline. Ireland's food economy remained hindered by an inability to modernise while the poor seemed chronically underfed. This chapter argues that turn-of-the-century educational reformers harnessed the Irish education system to ensure that teachers offered practical agricultural and domestic training, a step taken to address and resolve pressing post-Famine food concerns. Their intervention formed part of an ambitious social reform that promised to lay the foundations of a stable, prosperous Irish society. This chapter explores the reconfiguration of Irish agricultural and domestic education in 1900 and identifies the motivations that underpinned this radical overhaul. Reformers advocated adjustment in both agricultural and domestic instruction as they saw these as complementary and mutually reinforcing elements of the broader project of improving the nation. This mindset allowed reformers to focus on, and attempt to intervene in, two key decaying sites: the agricultural workplace and the home.

The introduction analyzes the competing visual cultures of agribusiness futurism and farm worker futurism in order to theorize what I call campesino modernity, a social formation based in the appropriation of visual technology to project alternate futures or even the possibility of the future as such for the poor and marginalized.

SDG2 recognizes that access to sufficient, nutritious and safe food is arguably the most fundamental necessity for a healthy and productive life. This chapter provides an overview of the many dimensions of hunger and malnutrition and how societies from ancient times—states, civil society, and private philanthropists—have gradually organized collectively to reduce the burden of hunger and malnutrition. The chapter begins with a discussion of famine, the most visible manifestation of hunger throughout history that was once a scourge in most societies but has now largely been eliminated in the twenty-first century. We then discuss how from the early twentieth century the goal of zero hunger became an international cause and a basic human right. The review then moves to the post-Second World War period when foreign assistance programs and countries focused on producing more staples to feed the world’s burgeoning population, narrowly measured in per capita calories supplied. In the 1980s, the focus turned from supply to access to food, and from around 1990 to the multiple dimensions of malnutrition, now including obesity. This has resulted in the move to multi-sectoral approaches including agriculture, the food industry, nutrition policy, public health, and the status of women. Finally, we conclude that although the world has registered impressive achievements on some measures of malnutrition, the continuing presence of hundreds of millions suffering chronic malnourishment in its various dimensions remains a huge challenge but one that with sufficient will and focus can be solved with available resources and knowledge.