I’d like to posit that the thing you should be most grateful for this Thanksgiving is how little time it took you to prepare your meal. Hear me out, Mr. or Ms. I-brined-this-bitch-for-hours. At this time in history even Rachel Ray spends minuscule amounts of time planting, cultivating, transporting and preparing their food.
Since the beginning of time, war, famine, drought, and everything from the black plague to ebola have done their damndest to obliterate the world’s population. But every decade, like weeds and cockroaches, there are more people to every acre of arable land. For nearly as long, people have been freaking out about the day when the land can no longer support the people who need food and water from it. Instead, people actually spend less time, money, and energy on average every year feeding themselves. What keeps happening?
Hungry, profit-driven farmers, that’s what. As you chew your bird, give thanks for a few examples of three agricultural innovations and the crafty farmers who first gave them a whirl.
Conservation Tillage
Life was good for Midwestern wheat farmers at the beginning of the 20th century. Wheat was in demand, prices were high, and the land was producing. But when the rain stopped, and the wind didn’t, what had been acres of arable land became dry dust in the air, so thick a mother couldn’t see the child in her lap.
Many farmers gave up, leaving their land and their farms for other parts of the country. Not Oklahoma farmer Fred W. Hoeme. This dude looked the dust in the face, told it to go fuck itself, and invented “the plow to save the Plains.”
Hoeme noticed that the tools road workers were using to break up soil created larger clods than the tillers farmers used. Large clumps of soil don’t get picked up by wind, so the soil doesn’t erode as much.
“Dad noticed that these scarifiers could rip up large clods capable of stopping wind erosion,” Fred’s son, Roland Hoeme said.
He fashioned a prototype by braising truck springs together. “It didn’t look very attractive, but it proved the idea,” Roland Hoeme said. The resulting crop was beautiful, and soon Fred was working with his friend and partner Herndon Noel, along with his two oldest sons, Roland and Leonard to build and sell approximately 2,000 of the plows from their homestead near Hooker. Further innovations and widespread adoption followed, and eventually Hoeme made it into the Agricultural Hall of Fame, which is not a thing I knew existed.
Integrated Pest Management
As pretentious as their food is, it probably should surprise no one that the French would name their food production problems with flair. In the 19th century Frenchmen and women battled the Great French Wine Blight and downy mildew, brought over to Europe from America.
Botany professor Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet of the University of Bordeaux got on the case. While studying disease in vineyards of the Bordeaux region, he noticed the vines near the road looked better than the ones further away. Turns out they’d been sprayed with CuSO4 and lime (delish) because deer found it bitter and wouldn’t eat the grapes that had that color on them.
Dude whipped up some batches of his own, and suddenly Frenchies could actually defeat something American.
Crop Rotation
Charles “Turnip” Townshend didn’t invent crop rotation. That was Middle Eastern farmers in 6000 BC who’d switch out legumes and cereals. But he did popularize it. Which is definitely the best thing he did.
Townshend started out in British politics, where he was, by all accounts and unsurprisingly, a major douche. In June and July of 1767 his eponymous resolutions passed, heavily taxing shit that American colonialist really needed and threatening their ability to self-govern. Then he left (thank God) and started farming.
His adding turnips and clover to the traditional crop rotation meant farmers didn’t need to let the soil lie fallow. Soon the other tyrannical English landlords were figuring out that turnips and clover are more profitable than nothing. A revolution was born.
After some other agricultural experiments, I’m assuming involving turnips, people started calling him Turnip Townshend. He was also, apparently, obsessed with them. Alexander Pope in Imitations of Horace, Epistle II claims his favorite phrase was “that kind of rural improvement which arises from turnips.”
He also conformed to farmer stereotype by having a massive crush on his step-daughter.
You might not be thinking of these fine young farmers and badasses of botany when you’re eating the delicious, easy, cheap food they innovated their asses off to bring you. But if you’re going to give thanks to anyone or anything, make sure they’re included.
