Agricultural Experiment Stations

Agricultural Experiment Stations. By the 1880s, industrialization and urbanization in America were generating increasing demands for farm products, while the plains and western states were producing surpluses for a developing international market. At the same time, farmers were targeting the nation's railroads, banks, and capitalists as sources of economic destabilization and proposing a range of moderate to radical actions. The Hatch Act (1887) was part of the government's response to that challenge. This measure allotted funds, initially fifteen thousand dollars annually, to establish agricultural research stations in every state addressing the needs of growers. An Office of Experiment Stations within the U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinated this decentralized system.

Expectations concerning the role of the agricultural stations generated tensions, since their constituency included such diverse groups as farmers, agricultural businesses, and state and federal legislators. Moreover, the close geographical and structural relationship many of them had with the land‐grant colleges placed strong educational demands on station personnel. The most effective late nineteenth‐century agricultural experiment station administrators, such as William A. Henry of Wisconsin, Eugene Davenport of Illinois, and Liberty Hyde Bailey of New York, balanced these potentially conflicting demands while strengthening their states' agricultural economies and allocating some resources for scientific work. The 1906 Adams Act, for which these leading agricultural administrators strongly lobbied, provided each state with additional funds exclusively to support fundamental agricultural research. The Smith‐Lever Extension Act (1914) provided funds to each state to pay county extension agents who would bring farmers the fruits of station work, while simultaneously strengthening the stations as sites of basic research by freeing station researchers from time‐consuming extension work.

Most station research was directed toward increasing U.S. agricultural productivity. Plant pathology and economic entomology focused on reducing production losses to diseases and pests, while research on culture methods, fertilizers, and breeding sought to improve production directly by increasing yield. Chemistry, nutrition, genetics, and agricultural technologies were prominent research areas as well.

Over the years, station research revealed close links between basic and applied research and between science and industry. For example, concern for the dairy industry in the 1880s inspired chemist Stephen M. Babcock's research into the butterfat content of milk at the Wisconsin experiment station, resulting in a butterfat test that enabled producers to provide a richer, more standardized product. The discovery of vitamin A by Elmer V. McCollum at the Wisconsin station and by T.B. Osborne and L.B. Mendel at the Connecticut station originated in research on livestock nutrition. The genetics of corn was studied as both a basic and applied science at various stations beginning in the 1910s. At the New York station in the 1920s, geneticist Rollins A. Emerson trained future Nobelists George W. Beadle and Barbara McClintock. At the Illinois station the development of hybrid corn, perhaps the single most important contribution of the experiment stations to American agriculture, bettered the yield and uniformity of the corn crop while increasing growers' dependence on the seed companies that had collaborated closely with the experiment station on the development of hybrids. Later technological innovations—such as the mechanical tomato picker and cotton picker, developed cooperatively among experiment stations and manufacturers—fostered more efficient cultivation and harvesting by the larger producers while throwing many farm laborers out of work.

From the mid–twentieth century on, critics of the agricultural research system, pointing to such developments, argued that experiment‐station research had come to serve corporate needs more than those of American farmers. Such criticism, in turn, provoked many station scientists and government administrators to defend the station system's contributions to world agricultural production.
See also Agricultural Education and Extension; Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920); Agriculture: Since 1920; Cotton Industry; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Livestock Industry.

Bibliography

Lawrence Bush and and William B. Lacy , Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Research, 1983.
Charles E. Rosenberg , No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, rev. ed., 1997.

Barbara A. Kimmelman