ABSTRACT
As the Second World War hurtled headlong toward its twice-punctuated end, Time Magazine was already plotting the postwar practices of American agriculture, scheming of a near-future repatriation of the battlefield into the farmer's field. An article dated 19 February, 1945, "The War Against Weeds," forecasts a militarized agriculture that declares weeds its "No. 1 enemy" (67) and introduces to the public the possibility of employing incendiary and chemical weapons, flamethrowers and DDT, against pests of all kinds. And, while the suggestion of such an aggravated agriculture merely, almost ludicrously, participates in the combative rhetoric everywhere in vogue in the throes of war, this lingua belli, the language of war surrounding industrial monoculture sings particularly true, not only to the radical transformation of agricultural practice from the 1940s forward, culminating in and extending beyond the ineptly named Green Revolution, but also of a truth more insidious still about the inevitability of oppressive expansionist policies to industrial monoculture, an invasion agriculture.
