The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture by Courtney Fullilove

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture by Courtney Fullilove Rebecca Egli (bio) The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture. By Courtney Fullilove. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp 288. $38.00 cloth; $31.20 ebook) In The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture, Courtney Fullilove offers an instrumental history of American agriculture through its arguably most fundamental and complex unit—the mighty seed. She demonstrates that seeds are anything but static. Indeed, through their distribution, preservation, and improvement, seeds reveal themselves to be both practical and political artifacts of [End Page 542] central importance to human history. Dividing her analysis into three parts, she documents the collection, migration, and preservation of seeds bound for the United States in the nineteenth century. In "Collection," Fullilove begins with the history of seed collection and distribution by the U.S. Patent Office. Not only did the office serve as a storehouse for seeds gathered on expeditions, it dispensed seeds—with little reference to their origins or methods of cultivation—with the hope of improving the nation's farms. "Migration" examines German Mennonites and their efforts to grow a variety of Turkish wheat on Kansas prairies. She looks critically at the wealth and land ownership that allowed these immigrants to successfully cultivate the iconic "amber waves of grain" on Midwestern plains. A final section on "Preservation" surveys the impact of changing patterns of land use. Following a pharmacist's efforts to obtain and market the native purple coneflower (Echinacea) for its medicinal benefits, she considers the impact of vast monocultures on biological diversity. Between each of these parts Fullilove has included "Field Notes" from her travels with plant genetic resource specialists in the North and South Caucasus. These sections reorient readers to the global nature of environmental knowledge and the far-flung origins of most American crops. As readers follow Fullilove on unexpected paths across time and international borders, she demonstrates the need for more global histories of plants and the knowledge that has shaped their cultivation. The Profit of the Earth resists dominant narratives about modern biological innovation that emphasize American creativity and rapid progress, revealing instead the "incremental and checkered legacies of improvement" (p. 12). Seeds, she argues "are always in a state of becoming, never fixable" (p. 211). Fullilove invites us to reconsider seeds as artifacts of prolonged human effort, deep-time technologies that contain complex social and ecological relations within. Yet the global movement of seeds has often obscured these relations. By moving a resource from its point of origin for the sake of improvement or preservation, plant collectors separated them from their human [End Page 543] histories "rendering non-Western and indigenous progenitors invisible" as stewards of knowledge (p. 65). Stripping seeds of their context paved the way for new proprietary claims. Fullilove's analysis raises valuable questions about the foundations of America's agricultural development and opens new fields of inquiry into the history of crop biodiversity and preservation. Agricultural innovation, she explains, is not only a process of creation but also one of destruction and loss. While the introduction of new and exotic varieties into the United States might ostensibly have contributed to greater agricultural diversity, modern plant breeders often eschewed those possibilities for the production of pest resistant, high-yielding monocultures. In light of modern-day concerns over input-intensive forms of production, single-crop agriculture, and biodiversity, Fullilove reminds us that for all of our knowledge, we are not masters of nature, not even those environments we create for ourselves. Instructively drawing together histories of agriculture, environment, and science, this narrative history will certainly appeal to a wide range of scholars and students, alike. Rebecca Egli REBECCA EGLI is a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Davis. She is currently writing a dissertation about American plant explorers and their impact on agricultural science in the twentieth century. Copyright © 2018 Kentucky Historical Society