ABSTRACT
The capital and chemical intensive 'Green Revolution' of the 1960s has been often earmarked as the beginning of scientific agrarian practices in India. The colonial official policy of agrarian reconstruction in the second half of 19th and early 20th-century India was marked by an increasing concern for institutional agricultural knowledge. In the later 19th century, scientific explanations on green manuring practices theorised that vegetation added to the content and altered the physical properties of the soil, as well as hastened the chemical decomposition of the soil. In the second half of the 19th century, farms set up in India as centres to disseminate agricultural knowledge formed an important area of the state's patronage over scientific agricultural improvement. The agricultural experiments that were carried out in the farm of Pusa in Bihar represented institutional responsibility for agricultural 'improvement' in the Bengal Presidency.
