Every once in a while, a book comes along that changes the way in which a discipline thinks about a topic. Creating Abundance is one such book. In it, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode (Professors of Economics at the University of California, Davis and the University of Arizona) present a carefully argued, well-documented, and radically new reinterpretation of the history and development of American agriculture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The traditional story emphasizes the importance of labor-saving mechanical devices and the spread of an extensive agriculture onto hitherto largely uncultivated lands. Since the advent of the Cliometric Revolution, this argument has been associated with the work of William N. Parker and Judith Klein (“Productivity Growth in Grain Production in the United States, 1840–60 and 1900–10” in Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1966), although it long predates their analysis (see, for example, Leo Rogin, The Introduction of Farm Machinery in Relation to the Productivity of Labor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931; Fred Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1945; and Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, Boston: Ginn and Company, 1931). It is also repeated in the economic history texts, including my own. Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom turns out to be misleading at best. According to Olmstead and Rhode, the assiduous and early adoption of biological innovation and the application of scientific farming methods by a significant cadre of “improving” farmers who were to be found in all regions of the country had a profound effect on agricultural productivity. They were the individuals who corresponded with agricultural societies, the U.S. Patent Office and the Department of Agriculture; they entered state and county fair contests; and they served as role models and exemplars for their neighbors. The significance of their activities, however, has hitherto lain largely hiddenalbeit in plain sight.

Not everyone missed these changes. Fred Bateman, for example, in his 1962 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Master's thesis (“An Economic Analysis of American Dairy Agriculture During the Period of Westward Expansion”), written under Parker's direction and in a series of articles published in this Journal (in 1968 and 1969), documents the changes made in dairy practice and breeds. But no one before Olmstead and Rhode seems to have appreciated how widespread and pervasive such changes were. For example, the authors cite statistics which show that by the time of World War I, only about a quarter of the corn varieties then being grown had been around in 1840, while less than one-tenth of wheat acreage was sown to varieties predating 1840 (p. 389).

The basis for the conventional wisdom regarding the relative unimportance of early biological innovation and scientific farming lies in the general stasis of yields before hybridization and the Green Revolution-generated “hockey stick” yield curves beginning in the second third of the twentieth century. These dramatic upticks in yields in crop after crop, farm product after farm product, beginning about the mid 1930s, attract the viewer's eye, while simultaneously hidingor at least diminishingthe contributions of earlier generations of farmers and scientists. These predecessors, however, had to grapple with the enormous environmental challenges from pests and disease pathogens that became endemic in settled areas and from changing climatic zones and soils as settlement pushed westward onto new lands. One solution to these problems lay in the development and/or adoption of new breeds and plant varieties. Such changes, however, rarely involved uncomplicated straightforward substitutions. Rather, the adoption of new varieties and breeds required systematic experimentation to optimize the choice and myriad marginal “tweaks” plus more far-reaching changes to agricultural practice to adapt product to place very much in the spirit of the fuzzy boundary between technological change and technique described by Nathan Rosenberg (see, for example, Perspectives on Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). As a result, the American farmer is transformed from being largely passive or reactive and heavily dependent upon the mechanical products of an increasingly sophisticated manufacturing sector for productivity growth, into a proactive, adaptive, innovative improving agent who played a vital role in feeding the nation, supplying critical raw materials, and helping maintain the country's rapid pace of economic growth.

An underlying counterfactual thus runs throughout Creating Abundance, absent the changes they describe, yields for most crops and animal products would have fallen, in some cases disastrously, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This counterfactual, however, is only explicitly modeled with respect to wheat and is mentioned somewhat cursorily in the final chapter for other farm products (see Tables 13.1–3).

The authors make no effort to be encyclopedic in their coverage of crops and livestock in the manner, say, of Bidwell and Falconer (History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1925), but this allows them a much stronger storyline while still covering the waterfront. Parts of some of the chapters have already appeared as articles in this Journal and elsewhere, but the length of the book allows the authors to document how pervasive such changes were. Multiple chapters deal with the changes in cotton and among livestock and in animal husbandry. Individual chapters address similar changes in corn, tobacco, and wheat. Because of its unique challenges, California, now the nation's leading agricultural producer, is accorded its own chapter although the authors are quick to point out that, nevertheless, they barely scratch the surface of California's rich and multifaceted agricultural history (p. 258). Because it is not comprehensive, there is ample room for extension to other crops (such as rice, sugar, other small grains, fruits, and root vegetables to name just a few) as well as other geographic areas (see, for example, the discussion by Jeremy Atack, Peter Coclanis, and George Grantham from a SSHA session in 2008 that was published as “Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development, An Appreciation and Research Agenda.” Explorations in Economic History 46, 1 [January 2009]: 160–67). Other closely related work is also in progress by the authors (see, for example, Olmstead and Rhode's work on bovine TB in this Journal in 2004 and 2007 and their chapter, “Productivity Growth and the Regional Dynamics of Antebellum Southern Development” that is forthcoming in the festschrift honoring Gavin Wright). It remains to be seen if the follow-up and the follow-on work will create as big a splash as Creating Abundance. Certainly, though, I await it with baited breath. Meantime, I urge everyone to put Creating Abundance on their “must read” list. This book is eye-opening and will change your thinking and perspective on American agricultural history. It will become a “classic” in the fieldbut one that is read as well as used for reference.