By Lucy Apthorp Leske
(Oct. 12, 2023) Gardeners are gluttons for new ideas. They will keep trying against failure after failure to achieve the ideal harvest. In their quest, they have always been hungry for reliable information to increase crop yield, battle rodents, grow tastier tomatoes or get flowers to bloom more predictably.
To supplement neighborly advice or tips, gardeners seek the latest and greatest news. What new technology or sightings of disease or groundbreaking cultivars will change their fate and guarantee success. Home horticulture and commercial agriculture both rely on the latest news for success.
A few hundred years ago, the field of agricultural and horticultural journalism was born to fill this need. Here in the United States, the first agricultural literature aimed at farmers and gardeners began to appear in the late 18th century.
In the article “American Agriculturist: Art and Agriculture in the United States’ First Illustrated Farming Journal, 1842-78” (Nineteenth- Century Art Worldwide, Autumn 2021), author Stephen Mandravelis writes, “At that time, the country’s agricultural system was in a state of stagnation, as the American Revolutionary War had decimated both farmland and a generation of its farmers, and exacerbated the already depleted soils and dwindling harvests resulting from years of inefficient farming practices.”
The country needed to invigorate its farming practices and introduce new agricultural models to a broad population. Agricultural literature developed to communicate the way forward.
While many periodicals were launched at the time, they were aimed at literate, well-educated people who could make sense out of the dense agricultural scientific information generated by learned societies.
Eventually, mainstream newspapers introduced columns where writers (my august predecessors) would simplify scientific results and modern methods and offer their advice to a more general audience.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac is a classic example of mainstream communication of common husbandry.
First published in 1792, the Almanac continues to include “everything under the sun and moon” for “fishermen, travelers, sailors, bookkeepers, beekeepers, gardeners, prognosticators, pollsters, politicians, cooks and really anyone who walks this Earth, including farmers.”
The Old Farmer’s Almanac and others at the time, however, freely mixed science and astrology, fact and fiction. Many rank and file farmers were suspicious of books telling them what they ought to do instead of utilizing tried and true methods they had learned over generations.
Some of the new-fangled methods promoted by columnists and writers seemed risky and costly.
“For much of the 19th century, it was less expensive to buy new property when a farm’s soil was exhausted than to preemptively invest in these farmyard improvements,” Mandravelis writes.
Here is where the publication American Agriculturist stepped in. Compared to a number of other periodicals launched at the time, American Agriculturist was one of the most successful with circulation at its peak exceeding a number of popular general interest periodicals like Harper’s Weekly.
It included plain-spoken instructions, proven facts to refute fiction and beautiful illustrative engravings. After a bumpy first decade under its initial editors, the Agriculturist changed hands, merged with The Plow, and then was relaunched on a road to success in 1856 under editor Orange Judd, a Yale graduate with a degree in chemistry.
Judd’s vision for the American Agriculturist was to be both an educational tool and a work of art, and indeed it was. According to Mandravelis, the extensive and intricate engravings in the Agriculturist “depicted life in the United States as one idyllically brimming with patriotic optimism, familial harmony, imbued with the majesty of the American wilderness, and playful yet moralized adventure. A statistical breakdown of the Agriculturist’s pictorial engravings demonstrates the consistency of these themes. The greatest percentages of these scenes – just under 44 percent (or 176 of the 402 pictorial engravings) – highlighted the animals, human adventures and restorative joys found within the uncultivated setting of the wilderness.”
In Volume 23, Number 8, March 1864, there is no mention of politics or the Civil War raging at the time but, rather, instructions for how to prepare for the coming season.
A list of chores for the “Farm, Barn and Stock Yard” ranges from keeping the barn doors secured during the gale season to readying the equipment for plowing as soon as the soil is well drained. Farmers are instructed to sow clover, repair fences, rub sprouts from potato seed and “plant on very early ground, if the season be favorable.”
A wonderful, nearly fullpage engraving on page 56 depicts “The Fisherman’s Return” – a weathered man is bouncing a baby in the air while an older child and loyal dog look on. On the opposite page are columns of commercial notices advertising everything from garden seeds to strawberies (sic), grapes and “Rare and Beautiful Flowers.”
The advice was aimed at a balance of readers from the average home grower to fullscale farmers.
Still active today, the publication has evolved. Each table of contents tells a story of the country and how our society was changing. A May 1893 volume, still edited by Orange Judd, lists featured articles entitled “Hop Culture in Central New York,” “Farming in Trinidad,” “Swans in Parks and Lawns,” “Broom Corn Culture in Kansas” and many more.
Well into the early 20th century, the American Agriculturist was more about a way of life and its alignment with a rural if not still wild America. The average home farmer still found a place in its pages.
Through the years, the Agriculturist absorbed a number of other journals like the Genesee Farmer and Connecticut Homestead. By 1960 the periodical had moved to Poughkeepsie, introduced colored ink and black and white photos, rebranded itself as “The Farm Paper of the Northeast” and was heavy on pictures of tractors, instructions for effective, safe use of insecticides and other chemicals, the business of farming, U.S. net farm income, prices, legislation and the benefit of organizations that could lobby for better markets for U.S. crops.
In 1975 we have a full-color magazine published in Ithaca, N.Y. called American Agriculturist and the Rural New Yorker. Today, the American Agriculturist is a fully-digitized periodical focused exclusively on commercial farming, published by FarmProgress, an Illinois-based publisher of 22 farming and ranching magazines including Prairie Farmer, founded in 1841 and the oldest known continuously- published magazine of any genre.
Here on Nantucket, it is probable that farmers and gardeners in the 19th century would have had access to the American Agriculturist which was the top of the field at the time as a trustworthy source of information for people trying to eke a living out of the soil.
Frankly, the advice and tips in the 19th century issues of the American Agriculturist are more timely and relevant today for the average gardener than what the current magazine has to offer.
After all, for its first hundred years, plastics, modern chemicals and inorganic fertilizers were unknown, and large-scale commercial agriculture was in its infancy.
The advice, in other words, is all organic and is as good today as it was then.
Nantucket has always been a farming community since people first washed ashore here, so it is likely that the original American Agriculturist was instrumental in their success. There is great advice buried in those pages, worth excavating to be sure.
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