'Enquiries on Plaister of Paris': a material history of early agrochemical knowledge in the United States of America, 1785-1812.

Key figures in the founding years of the United States of America were part of the first American learned agricultural society, known as the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (PSPA). Its members were georgic farmers who set out to describe, explore and explain agricultural processes by practical experiences, observations, and theories written in British books. Those theories, however, did not provide any reason for the widespread agricultural practice in Pennsylvania of using plaster as fertilizer, which was German in origin. Although imports were heavily tariffed and later even banned, plaster became, and remained, a top commodity in America. In order to keep agricultural businesses and investments afloat, several members of the PSPA began to scientifically justify the application of plaster fertilization. In so doing, they incorporated chemical theories and methods to both their agricultural practices and investigations. Thus, I argue, they acquired and developed an agrochemical knowledge that was mainly determined by a material history of plaster. Their knowledge was new, unique and more practicable in comparison to the British knowledge in this sector. Eventually, it was through the newly developed knowledge by PSPA members that contributed to the formation of agricultural chemistry as a science in its own respect.

Synthetic approaches to the 2010-2014 new agrochemicals.

In this review, the synthesis of 30 agrochemicals that received an international standardization organization (ISO) name during the last five years (January 2010 to December 2014) is described. The aim is to showcase the range and scope of chemistries used to discover or produce the latest active ingredients addressing the crop protection industry's needs.

Silent Spring after 50 years.

As Silent Spring passed the half-century mark, historians have continued to reflect on its significance. For this issue of Endeavour, we drew together six articles that explore a few of the many legacies of this remarkable book. Given the impressive scope and breadth of the papers in this issue, it is clear that Silent Spring, and the shock waves surrounding its publication, continue to provide rich fodder for historical analysis.

From coal to DDT: the history of the development of the pesticide DDT from synthetic dyes till Silent Spring.

The controversial pesticide DDT arose out of a number of practical and conceptual developments in science and industry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here we trace its story back to experiments involving the industrial by-product coal tar, proceed to the development of modern organic chemistry and the establishment of an advanced dye industry, and go on to chart the attempt to identify and synthesize chemicals capable of killing the insects involved in human and crop diseases. This paper argues that work on the chemistry of coal tar played a significant role in the history of DDT because it helped bring about the scientific ideas and the practical objectives that led chemists to embark on the search for pesticides. It concludes by examining the Swiss-German DDT production industry in the early 1940s and the subsequent condemnation of DDT by an environmental movement epitomized by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

Carson in cartoon: a new window onto the noisy reception to Silent Spring.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring generated a firestorm of controversy following its publication in 1962. While numerous scholars have relied on written sources to gage how industry representatives, scientists, government officials, and the public responded to this bestselling book, they have paid much less attention to how visual sources might further our understanding of the context in which Carson wrote, the message she sought to convey, and the impact of her work. This article analyzes sixteen editorial cartoons that appeared in the wake of Carson's book, images that reveal an emerging set of shared understandings about how modern technology presented potential dangers to both humans and the natural world. Using culturally resonant words and images, the cartoonists who editorialized about Carson and her book demonstrate the extent to which her frightening vision of bodily and ecological vulnerability began to permeate society, spawning a counternarrative to the still dominant discourse that linked technological progress, economic development, and the common good. These cartoons thus provide a useful window onto the reception of Silent Spring, the times in which it was published, and the birth of the modern environmental movement.

The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba: social process methodology in the construction of sustainable peasant agriculture and food sovereignty.

Agroecology has played a key role in helping Cuba survive the crisis caused by the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe and the tightening of the US trade embargo. Cuban peasants have been able to boost food production without scarce and expensive imported agricultural chemicals by first substituting more ecological inputs for the no longer available imports, and then by making a transition to more agroecologically integrated and diverse farming systems. This was possible not so much because appropriate alternatives were made available, but rather because of the Campesino-a-Campesino (CAC) social process methodology that the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) used to build a grassroots agroecology movement. This paper was produced in a 'self-study' process spearheaded by ANAP and La Via Campesina, the international agrarian movement of which ANAP is a member. In it we document and analyze the history of the Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement (MACAC), and the significantly increased contribution of peasants to national food production in Cuba that was brought about, at least in part, due to this movement. Our key findings are (i) the spread of agroecology was rapid and successful largely due to the social process methodology and social movement dynamics, (ii) farming practices evolved over time and contributed to significantly increased relative and absolute production by the peasant sector, and (iii) those practices resulted in additional benefits including resilience to climate change.

The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change: editors' introduction.

This introduction frames key questions on biofuels, land and agrarian change within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. It identifies and explains big questions that provide the starting point for the contributions to this collection. We lay out some of the emerging themes which define the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change revolving around global (re)configurations; agro-ecological visions; conflicts, resistances and diverse outcomes; state, capital and society relations; mobilising opposition, creating alternatives; and change and continuity. An engaged agrarian political economy combined with global political economy, international relations and social movement theory provides an important framework for analysis and critique of the conditions, dynamics, contradictions, impacts and possibilities of the emerging global biofuels complex. Our hope is that this collection demonstrates the significance of a political economy of biofuels in capturing the complexity of the "biofuels revolution" and at the same time opening up questions about its sustainability in social and environmental terms that provide pathways towards alternatives.

Agrofuels capitalism: a view from political economy.

This article considers the global expansion of agrofuels feedstock production from a political economy perspective. It considers and dismisses the environmental and pro-poor developmental justifications attached to agrofuels. To local populations and direct producers, the specific destination of the crop as fuel, food, cosmetics or other final uses in faraway places is probably of less interest than the forms of (direct or indirect) appropriation of their land and the forms of their insertion or exclusion as producers in global commodity chains. Global demand for both agrofuels and food is stimulating new forms (or the resurgence of old forms) of corporate land grabbing and expropriation, and of incorporation of smallholders in contracted production. Drawing both on recent studies on agrofuels expansion and on the political economy literature on agrarian transition and capitalism in agriculture, this article raises the question whether "agrofuels capitalism" is in any way essentially different from other forms of capitalist agrarian monocrop production, and in turn whether the agrarian transitions involved require new tools of analysis.

Sociopolitical crisis and the reconstruction of sustainable periurban agriculture in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

This article examines the effects of the post-2002 sociopolitical crisis in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, on urban and peri-urban agriculture. Based on the case study of Abidjan, it argues for a conceptualization of sustainability that includes social as well as environmental dimensions and focuses on coping strategies of producers and merchants. In Abidjan, these strategies included internal migration within the city and its periphery, the use of organic fertilizers, and changes in market structure. The study illustrates how such strategies allowed producers to continue to supply produce to the market, despite the difficulties of war.

Guatemala's green revolution: synthetic fertilizer, public health, and economic autonomy in the Mayan highland.

Despite extensive literature both supporting and critiquing the Green Revolution, surprisingly little attention has been paid to synthetic fertilizers' health and environmental effects or indigenous farmers' perspectives. The introduction of agrochemicals in the mid-twentieth century was a watershed event for many Mayan farmers in Guatemala. While some Maya hailed synthetic fertilizers' immediate effectiveness as a relief from famines and migrant labor, other lamented the long-term deterioration of their public health, soil quality, and economic autonomy. Since the rising cost of agrochemicals compelled Maya to return to plantation labor in the 1970s, synthetic fertilizers simply shifted, rather than alleviated, Mayan dependency on the cash economy. By highlighting Mayan farmers' historical narratives and delineating the relationship between agricultural science and postwar geopolitics, the constraints on agriculturists' agency become clear. In the end, politics, more than technology or agricultural performance, influenced guatemala's shift toward the Green Revolution.

Chemical food safety issues in the United States: past, present, and future.

Considerable advances have been made over the past century in the understanding of the chemical hazards in food and ways for assessing and managing these risks. At the turn of the 20th century, many Americans were exposed to foods adulterated with toxic compounds. In the 1920s the increasing use of insecticides led to concerns of chronic ingestion of heavy metals such as lead and arsenic from residues remaining on crops. By the 1930s, a variety of agrochemicals were commonly used, and food additives were becoming common in processed foods. During the 1940s and 1950s advances were made in toxicology, and more systematic approaches were adopted for evaluating the safety of chemical contaminants in food. Modern gas chromatography and liquid chromatography, both invented in the 1950s and 1960s, were responsible for progress in detecting, quantifying, and assessing the risk of food contaminants and adulterants. In recent decades, chemical food safety issues that have been the center of media attention include the presence of natural toxins, processing-produced toxins (e.g., acrylamide, heterocyclic aromatic amines, and furan), food allergens, heavy metals (e.g., lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium), industrial chemicals (e.g., benzene, perchlorate), contaminants from packaging materials, and unconventional contaminants (melamine) in food and feed. Due to the global nature of the food supply and advances in analytical capabilities, chemical contaminants will continue to be an area of concern for regulatory agencies, the food industry, and consumers in the future.

[Biochemistry for the benefit of humanity (practical achievements of my scientific work)].

Science unites theory and practice, but theory is always in advance. Even our works (mentioned above) which are also important for practice and were awarded the State prizes could not be made without preliminary theoretical investigations. It should be said that our works with elaborated methods of therapy and drugs to treat chronic alcoholism, drug addiction, leucosis are rather of theoretical than of practical importance. Some our works which proved that carbon dioxide is the basis of life are also of especially great theoretical value. The paper deals with the investigations devoted to the problems of biochemistry in cattle breeding (the raising of fat content in milk; elaboration of the efficient method of fodder ensilage; raising of milk yield using the drug "Karboxilin"; development of the methods of isolation of crystalline glucose-oxidase and catalase used for clarifying blood) as well as to the problems of biochemistry in medicine (creation of the drug "Microcid", antileucosis drug "Corectin", drugs "Medichronal" and "Medicit" for treating alcoholism and drug addiction, drug "Namacit" for hindering the organism aging). Great attention is given to the problem of relations between the theoretical conception concerning the importance of CO2 in vital activity of human and animal organism and production of new drugs.

A field of great promise: soil bacteriology in America, 1900-1925.

In the first decades of the 20th century, soil bacteriologists promised to revolutionize farming practice, much in the same way that medical bacteriologists, in the previous century, had transformed pathology, public health and sanitary engineering. Following the isolation of the microorganisms responsible for nitrification and nitrogen fixation, American soil scientists anticipated the time when farmers could 'seed' their crops and lands with these beneficial bacteria. Soil bacteriologists, during the early 20th century, never fulfilled the promise of supplying a biological source of unending soil fertility. However, in their search for productive microbes, these same researchers directed attention to the underappreciated dimensions of bacterial metabolism and microbial ecology.

Plant hormones in war and peace. Science, industry, and government in the development of herbicides in 1940s America.

This essay describes the emergence of "hormone" herbicides from academic plant physiology research in America in the late 1930s and 1940s, attending especially to the role of interactions between university scientists, industrial concerns, and government (particularly agricultural) agencies. The importance of an intellectual shift among the physiologists to viewing hormones as plant toxins rather than growth stimulators, spurred by wartime events, is discussed. The essay concludes by exploring the postwar marketing of these hormones as agrichemicals and as lawn treatments for suburban consumers, placing these in the economic and ecological context of other contemporary developments in farming technique.