ABSTRACT
How could observations on agriculture, inherently specific to place, travel to other places and remain credible to often skeptical farmers? This chapter investigates the question of how agricultural knowledge moved using the example of late nineteenth-century research on animal feeding traveling from Germany to the United States and from scientists to farmers. This chapter argues that the rhetorical mechanisms and negotiation strategies employed to translate the “German feeding standard” were the same between geographical movement and movement from one group of experts to another. These translation processes did not change the knowledge but linked it to other pools of knowledge familiar to the farming audience to lend credibility to the new methods taught. For new knowledge to be used by farmers, the translation process reformulated scientists’ innovations to make them accessible, applicable, and innovative to farmers.
