"The older, thinner, and less productive grass lands, however, frequently can be made to produce much larger yields of feed in corn than if left, as they are, in unproductive grass"
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A sentence like this is policy dressed up as agronomy: calm, technical, and quietly coercive. Houston, a politician-administrator in the early 20th-century U.S. state, frames land not as habitat or heritage but as an input that must justify itself. The phrase "older, thinner, and less productive" doesn’t just describe soil; it moralizes it. Land is sorted into the worthy and the wasteful, then offered a single redemption arc: conversion to corn.
The intent is practical - boost yields, stabilize feed supplies, make farms pencil out - but the rhetoric is doing extra work. "Frequently can be made" signals managerial optimism, the Progressive Era faith that expertise and intervention can discipline nature into efficiency. "Much larger yields" is the real noun in the sentence; everything else is scaffolding. Even "unproductive grass" reads like an accusation: leaving land in pasture is not a neutral choice but a failure to extract value.
Context matters. Houston served at the center of an expanding federal agricultural apparatus, when the U.S. was professionalizing farm science and pushing modernization: extension services, crop rotation strategies, and a growing belief that national strength ran through productivity. Corn, as a feed crop, also points to a larger system - intensified livestock production and market integration - where farms shift from diversified resilience to commodity logic.
The subtext is that stewardship equals output. It’s a tidy argument that suppresses the tradeoffs: soil exhaustion, erosion risk, biodiversity loss, and the long-term costs of turning marginal grasslands into row crops. In a single breath, the sentence normalizes a new baseline: land exists to yield, and if it doesn’t, it should be remade until it does.
The intent is practical - boost yields, stabilize feed supplies, make farms pencil out - but the rhetoric is doing extra work. "Frequently can be made" signals managerial optimism, the Progressive Era faith that expertise and intervention can discipline nature into efficiency. "Much larger yields" is the real noun in the sentence; everything else is scaffolding. Even "unproductive grass" reads like an accusation: leaving land in pasture is not a neutral choice but a failure to extract value.
Context matters. Houston served at the center of an expanding federal agricultural apparatus, when the U.S. was professionalizing farm science and pushing modernization: extension services, crop rotation strategies, and a growing belief that national strength ran through productivity. Corn, as a feed crop, also points to a larger system - intensified livestock production and market integration - where farms shift from diversified resilience to commodity logic.
The subtext is that stewardship equals output. It’s a tidy argument that suppresses the tradeoffs: soil exhaustion, erosion risk, biodiversity loss, and the long-term costs of turning marginal grasslands into row crops. In a single breath, the sentence normalizes a new baseline: land exists to yield, and if it doesn’t, it should be remade until it does.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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