J. Russell Smith
Tree Crops (1929) — the argument that trees, not the plough, are the permanent agriculture of hill land.
The record
- Standing
- foundational work
- Based
- Columbia University
- Also published as
- John Russell Smith
- Post
- Professor of Economic Geography at Columbia University.
- The book
- Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, copyrighted 1929 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, and still in print.
- Supported by
- The University of Pennsylvania Tree Crops Exploration Committee, formed under the leadership of J. Levering Jones.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Tree Crops is a classic critique of farming with the plough, written by an economic geographer who had watched hill country in three continents go to gullies under it.
His proposal was not to abandon staple production but to move it into the canopy: chestnut, oak, honey locust, mulberry, carob and persimmon as crops of flour, oil and stock feed, on ground too steep to till without destroying it. He wanted the species bred and selected for yield the way maize had been, and he spent years hunting superior wild trees to make the case.
Almost every idea in the modern tree-crop and agroforestry literature is downstream of this book, which is why it keeps being reissued. It is grouped with Howard, Albrecht and Price among the founding works of sustainable agriculture.
Where to read them
- Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture (1929) — full text, PDF Scanned in full by the Soil and Health Library.
- Tree Crops: a permanent agriculture — Soil and Health Library record
Sources for this record
Corrections
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