Accounting with the Fields: Chemistry and Value in Nutriment in American Agricultural Improvement, 1835–1860

During the 1840s, a coalition of agricultural chemists and improving agriculturists came to promote plant, animal and soil analyses as a way of identifying monetary value in the material transactions of the farm. They were motivated in part by the broadening practice of accounting with the land, a modification of existing accounting practices, through which some farmers came to treat their relationship with the fields and animals of the farm landscape as a series of transactions between debtors and creditors. New forms of chemical analysis added a further dimension to this accounting, casting the growth of soil, animals, and plants and the exchange of materials between them as a series of transactions, and linking value in nutriment to value in money. Interactions between forms of food and monetary value on the nineteenth-century farm, as well as new forms of work that this interaction created, grew into a system of natural accounting. This system of valuation, emerging not from state power but from local engagement with individual farms and individual markets, continues to shape the industrial farm landscape.