A01=Courtney Fullilove
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
agrarian
agriculture
american south
appropriation
Author_Courtney Fullilove
automatic-update
biodiversity
breeding
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=PST
Category=TV
circulation
collection
common use
COP=United States
cuttings
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
distribution
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_tech-engineering
family farms
farming
food sourcing
heirloom seeds
history
immigration
Language_English
loss
midwest
migrant workers
monocultures
nonfiction
nostalgia
PA=Available
plant diversity
politics
prairie
preservation
Price_€20 to €50
property rights
PS=Active
purple coneflower
softlaunch
sustainability
tea cultivation
us patent office
wheat yields
Product details
- ISBN 9780226454863
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 18 Apr 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past. The reality, as Courtney Fullilove shows, is that seeds are inherently political objects transformed by the ways they are gathered, preserved, distributed, regenerated, and improved. In The Profit of the Earth, Fullilove unearths the history of American agricultural development, and of seeds as tools and talismans put in its service. Organized into three thematic parts, The Profit of the Earth is a narrative history of the collection, circulation, and preservation of seeds. Fullilove begins with the political economy of agricultural improvement, recovering the efforts of the US Patent Office and the nascent US Department of Agriculture to import seeds and cuttings for free distribution to American farmers. She then turns to immigrant agricultural knowledge, exploring how public and private institutions attempting to boost Midwestern wheat yields drew on the resources of willing and unwilling settlers.
Last, she explores the impact of these cereal monocultures on biocultural diversity, chronicling a fin-de-siecle Ohio pharmacist's attempt to source Purple Coneflower from the diminishing prairie. Through these captivating narratives of improvisation, appropriation, and loss, Fullilove explores contradictions between ideologies of property rights and common use that persist in national and international development ultimately challenging readers to rethink fantasies of global agriculture's past and future.
Courtney Fullilove is assistant professor of history, environmental studies, and science in society at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut.
