ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth century, the increasing specialisation of agriculture created pressure to innovate and thus drew sharp lines around who was allowed to produce credible, “modern” agricultural knowledge in rural contexts. Through specific examples of reformers in two agriculturally peripheral regions of the Euro-American world – Maine in the United States and the Hochsauerland in Westphalia – this chapter explores similarities and differences between the activities of farmers and scientists involved in the modernisation of agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that, in both Maine and the Hochsauerland, farmers’ and scientists’ practical and theoretical approaches toward innovation shared the aim of creating agricultural knowledge through experimentation. In both cases, power differentials between farmers and scientists were rooted not exclusively in whether their innovations “worked” or not, but also in the size, scope, and location of the networks of ideas and people that farmers and scientists could enrol to support their improvement arguments. Farmers drew primarily from practical methods generated from the immediate rural world around them, while agronomists relied on the theories of other agricultural scientists across the Atlantic. Both groups resisted the world of the other, yet their struggles eventually led to exclusion on the one side and bi-directional adaptation on the other.
