Uncle Sam’s Proving Grounds: The Beltsville National Farm, Scientized Agriculture, and Experimentation as Logics of American Empire

• In Event: Edible Imperialisms: Food, Capitalism, and Late-Stage American Empire?

Abstract

‘Proving grounds’ discourse occupies a curious place within American histories of science, militarism, and imperialism. Defined as a place where military technology and weapons are prototyped, proving grounds yoke together the relationships between experimentation, land, and expanding empire. Critical scholarship written on historical examples include Cold War era nuclear experimentation at the Nevada Proving Grounds (Kirk and Purcell 2017); the Marshall Islands and the Pacific (Bahng 2020; Hurley 2022); and the history of Project Plowshare, which focused on experimenting with the possibility of using nuclear explosions for so-called “peaceful” purposes (Kirsch 2005). Proving grounds become synonymous with a military-inclined laboratory, evoking justifications that land is enticing and useful because it is considered remote, empty, and isolated – tactics of settler colonialism that imagine land as empty, with no prior Indigenous Peoples living there before and currently, and devoid of relations with surrounding animals, plants, and landscapes (Henni 2022). Proving grounds and their entwined histories with imperial and colonial military endeavors transmute entire livelihoods, lands, cultures, and peoples into laboratorial costs associated with testing military weapons and technologies, such as, but not exclusive to, the case with Palestine under Israeli occupation (Loewenstein 2023).

This paper is borne, in part, out of a curiosity about the partial genealogies of proving grounds as it relates to American imperialism. Proving grounds as not just a descriptor, but a material orientation, is an apt connector between studies of American imperialism with that of scientific – and, often, militaristic – projects. Yet while proving grounds are essentially synonymous with military facilities, my case study on the Beltsville Experimental Farm represents one possibility of connecting food and agricultural history with histories of American imperialism.

Formerly established in 1910, the Beltsville National Farm was the USDA’s experimental farm, later earning the moniker of “Uncle Sam’s Proving Ground.” Although there were experiment stations attached to land-grab universities across the settler United States (Lee and Ahtone 2020; Palmer 2023), Beltsville was the only nationalized experimental farm. At its height, Beltsville expanded to well over 14,000 acres and was the research home for multiple federal bureaus, such as the those affiliated with the dairy industry, entomology and plant quarantine, biological surveys, zoology, soil conservation, forest services, commerce, human health, and more

This paper investigates the relationships between scientized agriculture with American imperialism, particularly in the early- to mid-twentieth century. While not explicitly related to militarism and state formation, agricultural experimentation – particularly projects that attempted to make agriculture, food, and feeding “American” – is a bedrock of American expansion. I take as generative starting point Beltsville’s history and grapple with agricultural experimentation as constitutive of American empire. Drawing together critical food studies, critical science and technology studies, and the history of science, this paper considers the history of (agricultural and food) experimentation vis-à-vis “Uncle Sam’s Proving Grounds” and its relationship with contemporary food politics in the context of late stage (?) American empire.

Authors

• Maggie Mang, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo

• Ella R Colby, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo