ABSTRACT
It is an irony of modern life that the production of one of life’s necessities — food — is considered not a ‘basic,’ but an applied, science. The term agricultural science, in this sense, is considered not a disciplinary distinction, but a description of the sorts of problems other scientific areas are pointed towards. Agricultural chemistry is chemistry directed toward agricultural problems, agricultural economics is industrial economics turned to farm production, and so forth. But in the twentieth century the farm and agricultural laboratory have often themselves been the sites of knowledge production, as in the case of genetics, and have generated fundamental knowledge both within and without the context of production problems. Furthermore, such contexts arguably contribute to the character of scientific knowledge, serving not simply as empty receptacles but rather as participants in an ongoing discourse about nature’s demands. To use a mathematical metaphor, agricultural sciences are not types or subsets of ordinary sciences, but rather venn diagrams that join ordinary scientific knowledge with circumstances, quite literally, in the field.
