Creating Abundance

by Alan L. Olmstead

This book demonstrates that American agricultural development was far more dynamic than generally portrayed. In the two centuries before World War II, a stream of biological innovations revolutionized the crop and livestock sectors, increasing both land and labor productivity. Biological innovations were essential for the movement of agriculture onto new lands with more extreme climates, for maintaining production in the face of evolving threats from pests, and for the creation of the modern livestock sector. These innovations established the foundation for the subsequent Green and Genetic Revolutions. The book challenges the misconceptions that, before the advent of hybrid corn, American farmers single-mindedly invested in laborsaving mechanical technologies and that biological technologies were static.

Genres: Nonfiction

488 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2008

Reviews

[Robert Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

The theme of the book is that biological and institutional innovations were as important as mechanical inventions in making American agriculture so productive. Improvements in wheat, corn, cotton, tobacco, vegetables and fruit trees plus new breeds of livestock and dairy cows enabled individual farmers to fight off insects, diseases, and weeds in the original colonies and gradually expand production into challenging new climates and conditions in the South, Midwest, the plains and the far west. After the Civil War, the new agricultural colleges and efforts by the USDA increasingly contributed to the development and adoption of new seeds, breeds and techniques. Collectively these long forgotten accomplishments were as significant as the much better know machines—cotton gin, mechanical reaper and tractor—in creating agricultural abundance.
This impressive and provocative book will likely have a profound and far-reaching impact on scholarship. By revealing the incompleteness of the prevailing narrative of agricultural development through mechanization, Creating Abundance offers a new paradigm for examining the history of agriculture in the U.S. The book convincingly demonstrating that new varieties of crops and farm animals were crucial for maintaining productivity in settled areas and expanding production to new geographic areas. Written not by historians, but by economists, the book also reveals flaws in some basic economic concepts and ironically this may prompt changes in the field of economics!