What the Antebellum Farmer Knew and Why Anyone Cared: A Story for Today about the Moral Basis from Which Soil Science and Geology Were Born.

Soil science and geology had common historical origins in an “improvement” era of the early American Republic that sought both cultural and material progress. This talk will draw from county soil surveys and the first wave of state geological surveys to discuss the cultural and moral foundations of early soil science and geology within that era.  The historical relevance of the paper is to highlight the role agrarian actors played in the production of cultural credibility for nascent earth sciences. Those new sciences, put briefly, had to be understood as aiding the broader cause of moral and material improvement if they were to be understood as positive contributions to society. The paper also suggests that this historical view of farmers provides a means to understand how lived experience shapes acceptance and resistance to new technical practices. Although cultural authority for defining and working the land now rests within the scientific domain, we might still recognize the place lived experience holds when advocating new ways to work the land for those outside that scientific domain.