Messaging the Chemical: Extracting Food from the Soil in English Canada, 1950-2000

• In Event: Changing, Evolving, Engineered Landscapes

Abstract

This paper studies the messaging from industrial agricultural in-put firms between 1950 and 2000 in four Canadian places, two fruit-growing and two grain-growing communities-- Abottsford in the Lower Fraser Valley (British Columbia) and Leamington (southern Ontario) in the former category, and Rosthern (central Saskatchewan) and Altona (southern Manitoba) in the latter. The paper is based on an analysis of advertising in four newspapers, one from each of the communities, as well as oral history of industry-based agronomists tasked with selling artificial fertilizer and herbicides to farmers. The paper argues that the transition from an organic-based agriculture, emphasizing soil health, to a chemical-based agriculture, focused on extracting food from a purportedly benign soil required a specific paradigm shift (to employ Thomas Kuhn) and a 'homogeneous corpus of knowledge' (to employ Michael Foucault). To that end chemical input companies emphasized a new approach to soil, a neo-extraction model, not one that would 'mine the soil' as 19th century bonanza farms set out to, but one that considered the soil as the potential carrier of chemical enhancements that allowed food production without damaging the soil, in large measure because the industry was able to convince farmers that the soil was benign. The campaign to sell chemicals was profoundly successful in every region of Canada as it branded an organic-based agriculture as antiquarian and inadequate to the task of 'feeding the world' and romantically concerned about protecting the soil from an extractionist mindset. The research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and comprises a section of a larger project titled 'Transnational Flows of Agricultural Knowledge.'

Author

• Royden Loewen, University of Winnipeg