Agricultural science ignores the landscape history it depends on

Evidence

The State College tells farmers that Chinese elms do not clog screens, and hence are preferable to cottonwoods. It likewise pontificates on cherry preserves, Bang’s disease, hybrid corn, and beautifying the farm home. The only thing it does not know about farms is where they came from. Its job is to make Illinois safe for soybeans. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 418

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly serves the Grafting & Growth piece’s theme of trees as underused infrastructure: the cottonwood as living historical library destroyed for screen-clogging, and institutional agriculture’s blindness to where farms came from.
• XREF: Connects to ch.6 claim that formal schooling does not teach people to see living evidence, and ch.9’s parting between botanical education and living sight. — connects to: Floristic richness survives best where economic ‘progress’ has been slowest — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 172