ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Economic Entomology and the Construction of Crop Loss

• In Event: Shaping Nature 2: Insects 20thC

English Abstract

For all the attention historians of science have paid to pest control and agricultural statistics, little work has engaged with estimates of crop loss. Most scholarship takes at face value reports that a pest destroyed a certain amount of yield or profit. This paper examines crop loss reports as historical artifacts in their own right, drawing on state entomologists’ pest reports and the proceedings of the American Association of Economic Entomologists. I argue that during the early twentieth century, economic entomologists in the United States could scarcely agree on what crop loss was, much less how it should be measured. By the 1930s, the federal entomologists working to improve pest reporting systems came to doubt whether accurate loss assessment was actually possible, even as they urged field agents to continue producing their (potentially useless) reports. Tracing these debates over crop loss assessment reveals how entomologists grappled with the messy realities of ecological fieldwork and questioned the nature of agricultural productivity.

Author

• Erinn Campbell, University of Cambridge