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Systemic endophytes of grasses provide ideal systems for testing ecological and evolutionary theory, as well as providing an important research platform for developing and improving pasture and turf grasses. Presently, most basic and applied research has been directed towards Neotyphodium-infected agronomic grasses. There is an urgent need to expand basic ecological and, especially, evolutionary studies to native grass systems and other systemic endophytes and the more ubiquitous, non-systemic endophytes. Little is understood about the effects of endophytes on host biology and reproduction, and even less about the complex effects of endophytes that change with host and endophyte genotype, host ontogeny, environment, and the presence of other interacting species. Long-term cost-benefit analyses across an array of varying biotic and abiotic factors seems like a prudent path of investigation. Studies of the coevolutionary dynamics of endophyte-host interactions are still in their infancy, yet endophyte-host interactions are ideal systems in which to test contemporary theories. There is still a lack of detailed knowledge of how the genetics of endophytes and their hosts alter interaction outcomes, especially in complex natural communities. Grass-endophyte symbioses offer tractable systems for addressing societal problems such as global environmental change, invasive species and emerging infectious diseases, restoration of degraded ecosystems, and food, fuel, and forage shortages.

Chapter 5 introduces an indigenous Peruvian ritual. The first part of the chapter is in the voice of an indigenous woman from a Highland Andean community. In her story she recounts why she rejected the science of agronomy she was taught at the university and why she formed an organization to revive rituals in her community. The second part of the chapter is a description of the festival of the water, Yarqa Aspiy, in her community where the people ritualistically clean the irrigation canals. The offerings and exchange of gifts among humans and between humans and other-than-humans exemplify the gift economy. The last part of the chapter raises the issue of restoring certainty in seventeenth-century Europe by focusing on Robert Boyle's experimental scientific method for establishing certainty, one established on totally new bases. This new experimental method created an anthropocentric dualist cosmology.

Chapter 6 investigates the reasons why the teaching of agronomy in Peruvian universities excludes native agriculture despite its contributions in the realm of agro-biodiversity. Peru is one of the nine world centers of biodiversity in cultivars. The chapter investigates why indigenous agriculture is regarded as pre-scientific, superseded by “scientific” agriculture. In the second part of the chapter, the pre-scientific status of native agriculture motivates a focus on the Church's doctrine of “supersessionism,” a view that all religions before the advent of Christ have been superseded by Christianity, a doctrine implicitly taken over by Science. The last part of the chapter focuses on a history of mathematics that reveals a crucial link between the rise of the market economy and the mechanization and disenchantment of nature.

This chapter discusses the story of the Georgics' reception by readers of the early Empire through a description of some of its more colorful encounters. It also shows that the features of the poem that drew the most notice, and sparked the most interesting intellectual and creative responses, were precisely the ones examined in previous chapters—the Georgics' fantasies about farm labor, its idealization of rural quietism, its protreptic to agronomy, and its poetic evocations of the passions. The texts considered in the chapter fall into two categories. Some deal with the environment of the poem's reception and are intended to shed light on its performance and circulation, the involvement of its readers in country life, or their reactions to similar works of agronomy or didactic verse. However, most of the texts come from ancient readers who were responding in various ways to the specific contents of the Georgics, and in particular to the four features here listed.

This chapter traces rice seeds as they circulated from the genetics laboratory through a vertically organized system for production and consumption onto the Spanish landscape. Rice production in Spain during the early years of Francoism offers an illuminating example of the links between agricultural research and state corporatism. Agronomists who were engaged in rice breeding placed themselves at the center of a vertically integrated system that attempted to unify state politics, capital and labor issues, and scientific research. The scientific laboratory was able to shape the system from within and to capitalize on it to obtain new seeds and distribute them throughout the Spanish territory. Seeds provide a new entry point into the actual functioning of the regime's vertical unions. They also explain the transformation of the Guadalquivir marshes into a rice producing landscape.

This chapter describes key technologies and social formations, which placed nineteenth-century agronomists at the center of the modern wage question. Agronomists viewed plants and animals as objects of economic management, whose needs could be measured in units of carbon and nitrogen. Agronomist-chemists Jean Baptiste Boussingault and Jean Baptiste Dumas adapted Antoine Lavoisier’s science of consumption into a science of needs. Dumas and Boussingault established chemical standards for human needs, in units of bread (carbon) and meat (nitrogen.) Their chemical-economic techniques came to characterize the modern science of wages. The problem of subsistence was seen as a fundamental challenge to the modern social order. Thus one could argue that these agronomists were among the most important political economists at work in the mid-nineteenth century.

Given the small number of free citizens, the dearth of local educational facilities and the crassly exploitative character of their societies, the Dutch islands were cultural wastelands like other early modern Caribbean societies. At the same time, ideas, technology and expertise circulated within a Dutch Atlantic world that transcended the narrow boundaries of the metropolis and its colonies and involved a quite extensive network across the wider Atlantic world. There is considerable evidence of scholarly research and its practical uses, ranging from geography and the natural sciences through medicine and agrarian expertise to ethnography. Dutch scholarly interest in the Atlantic colonies, if any, centered on Suriname, with its promising plantation sector and spectacular biodiversity.

With the failure of tree planting and irrigation, Russians turned to agronomy. Over the nineteenth century, Russian agronomists and other scientists realised that relying on agricultural sciences from western Europe was not appropriate for the very different conditions in the steppe region, and that they needed to devise techniques appropriate to the environment, in particular, cultivating the land in ways that conserved scarce moisture in the soil. Dokuchaev, among other scientists, advocated sustainable farming techniques based on scientific study of the steppe environment. The pioneers, again, were Mennonites, as well as specialist agronomists. Attention in the chapter focuses on crop rotations and types of crops, ploughing techniques, fallowing, in particular ‘black fallow’. Taken together, these techniques were a system of dry farming. The final section of the chapter considers the extent to which agronomists backed by the authorities succeeded in spreading the word of these techniques, for example through agricultural extension services. Many farmers preferred to plough up as much land as possible and take a chance on the rains coming.

Even savants without biological children could practice sentimental paternalism. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier invested time and money into his experimental farm at Fréchines. The estate provided him with a place where he could practice his ideas about agronomy, physiocracy, and sentimental estate management. By investing in agricultural reform, working to kickstart France’s economy, and looking after his neighbors, Lavoisier fashioned himself as a patriotic, paternalistic, and innovating landlord. His efforts illuminate philosophes’ efforts to reshape their world by working from within society.

This chapter narrates the histories of nineteenth-century German Mennonite immigrants from Southern Russia in the American Midwest, arguing that postbelllum Kansas was made safe for capitalized homesteading in ways quite similar to the southwestern steppe annexed by Catherine II in the context of the Russo-Turkish wars. Mennonites were colonizers, the shock troops of a free labor economy, agents of imperial expansion on the North American continent as they had been in Russia a century before. Russian and American journalists studying the Midwestern farm economy documented the abandonment of communal land tenure for private property holding and the economies of scale supported by the latter.

This chapter reviews the policy commitments and governing styles of the several national regimes led by Getúlio Vargas from 1930 to 1945, and it demonstrates how approaches to drought aid in the northeast were impacted by these changes. It focuses on the leadership of José Américo de Almeida as Minister of Transportation and Public Works (in charge of the department for Works to Combat Drought, among others) and discusses his eventual rift with Vargas in relation to Vargas’s unfulfilled promises to the northeast region. The devastating circumstances of the 1931-1932 drought are emphasized. Under Luiz Vieira’s direction, the drought works agency added an agronomy division in 1932 that grew in importance over subsequent decades but was often in conflict with the agency’s engineers over funding and priorities, particularly the construction of dams vs. irrigation networks.

Although there is good evidence that irrigation played an important role in Roman agriculture, it has so far received too little attention. This paper seeks to address the subject of its funding at different scales. Among the different choices landholders had to make, investments in hydraulic infrastructure were guided by their particular needs for cultivation and breeding, the environmental context, and the management of a natural and sometimes limited resource. The attention is here turned towards the financial, human, and material nature of the investment required. The cross-reading of archaeological sources with literary and legal texts shows that the costs of irrigation in single estates varied according to the technical constraints (length and construction of the conduit, necessity to store water, etc.), but the efforts made to invest also reflect the profits expected. A key element concerning investments towards irrigation, in any case, lies in the access to water. In that respect, Roman law played an essential role through servitude rights.

This chapter sets the scene in a Europe which is coming to terms with the debt burden and in some regions the physical devastation left in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). It depicts agriculture, industry, and commerce as activities that were still closely connected. The new economic discourses that start to take shape around 1750 are identified and analysed: physiocracy, cameralism, political economy, and agronomy. The role of the movement of ideas known as the Enlightenment in the crystallization of these discourses and their dissemination in Europe is outlined. So, too, is the role of the State which made use of, and even adopted, the new discourses in order to buttress the economic policy objectives pursued by ancien régime rulers and their bureaucracies.

One of the central aims of colonial rule was the ‘development’ of Europe’s overseas territories. The key focal point was agriculture, which was the fundamental basis of most tropical economies. Yet how best to ‘improve’ tropical agriculture was a matter of debate. Whereas the initial emphasis was on export crops, colonial agriculture departments gradually began to study indigenous farming systems as well. Over time, field researchers acquired an appreciation of indigenous farming skill, and sought to build on rather than replace existing systems. This chapter explores the various aims, methods, and effects of colonial agricultural development and how they evolved over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It first focuses on the expansion of croplands and the intensification of farming techniques in tropical Asia, before turning to sub-Saharan Africa and the increasingly determined efforts to conserve agricultural resources from the threat of overexploitation.