Sciences,chercheurs et agriculture

Can agriculture be summed up as the more or less rapid and more or less successful application of scientific precepts? How have the relations between research, farming practices and society changed over the past century? How can historians update the range of possible ways of "modernizing" agriculture at any given time, when many players had chosen a single concept of "progress"? This book sets out to answer these questions, by bringing together specialists in rural history and others in the history of science, around a new history of the knowledge generated by agricultural research. It looks at the ways in which scientific knowledge and technical innovations were produced, circulated and standardized, leading us from the food crises of the late 19th century to those of the late 20th century, from the "modernizing" politico-scientific concepts dreamt up by the Journal d'agriculture pratique under the French Second Republic to the productivism of the post-Second World War period, from the Institut des recherches agronomiques of 1921 to the INRA of 1946, and from Pasteur to GMOs.