December 13, 2004
Perhaps farmers are the most closed-minded people in the world...
Perhaps farmers are the most closed-minded people in the world.
Secrets of how to sow, cultivate and harvest plants are propagable from father to son.
Researchers know that it is not enough to invent and ground a new and more efficient agricultural tool or process. Considerable explanatory activities are needed to persuade each farmer that the novelty is really useful. Only then one can expect that the new technology will come into use after a while.
The demonstrative example of this problem is the struggle of the researchers and Government of the United States with the mould-board plough. Storms of crushed soil in the sky, the featured book by Edward Faulkner “Ploughman's Folly” and, finally, the statutory bar to use the plough in black earth regions allowed breaking the tenacity of farmers and introducing subsurface cultivation of soil.
Such a useful thing as fertilizers was also met coldly.
In 1748, Benjamin Franklin invented an excellent method for demonstrating the effectiveness and necessity of lime fertilizers. He applied them not on the entire field but in strips so that after plants have come up, one could easily read the phase “This portion of the field has been fertilized”. On that portion of the field seedlings emerged much earlier and developed into higher and better plants. All farmers going by the field read the phrase, became interested, and assimilated the advanced idea.
That was a kind of ideal advertising. Plants themselves without additional elements demonstrated the value of fertilizers.