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An Introduction to George Waring's Agricultural Features of the Census of the United States for 1850
In his influential Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the United States, U.S. economist Henry Carey (1858) quoted at length from a talk by an "eminent agriculturist" who had provided rough calculations for the whole United States of the loss of soil nutrients resulting from the failure to recycle organic matter. In that statement, as quoted by Carey, the dire, longterm ecological consequences of the shipment of food and fiber in a one-way movement from country to town were raised:
What with our earth-butchery and prodigality, we are each year losing the intrinsic essence of our vitality . The question of the economy should be, not how much do we annually produce, but how much of our annual production is saved to the soil. Labor employed in robbing the earth of its capital stock of fertilizing matter, is worse than labor thrown away. In the latter case, it is a loss to the present generation-in the former it becomes an inheritance of poverty for our successors. Man is but a tenant of the soil and he is guilty of a crime when he reduces its value for other tenants who are to come after him. (quoted in Carey, 1858, pp. 54-55)
In 1859, the great German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig (1859, pp. 175178, 183, 220) requoted Carey's "eminent agriculturist" in full, in an argument in his Letters on Modern Agriculture that was to mark the beginning of a major campaign by Liebig to address the ecological degradation associated with the robbing of the soil of its nutrients. Such robbery occurred not simply under what Liebig called the "spoliation system" of agriculture, identified in particular with the "open robbery" characteristic of American farming, but also under the "rational agriculture" of the British high farming model, which was ostensibly based on restitution of soil nutrients but in reality was nothing but "a more refined species of spoliation." Liebig grounded his critique in the empirical estimates of Carey's "eminent agriculturist" and reinforced this with Carey's argument on the effect of long-distance trade in disrupting what Marx (1976) was later to call the "metabolic interaction between...