The story of the pessimistic Edward Ruffin

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(1.d) The Story of Edmund Ruffin

One summer morning in 1865, Edmund Ruffin had a pleasant breakfast with his family, after which he went to his room, wrote in his diary, and then placed the barrel of a rifle in his mouth and blew his brains out. His suicide was a complete surprise to all, but there was no mystery as to why, for Ruffin had explained it in his last diary entry.

The North’s victory in the Civil War meant the end of the state of Virginia as he knew it—and as loved it. This is clear in his last journal entry, where he wrote, “And now, with my latest writing & utterance, & with what will be near to my last breath, I hereby repeat & would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all the political, social, & business connection with the Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.”^(M1)

(A.1) A dying soil

This would make it seem that Ruffin was a racist, and in many respects he certainly was. He owned slaves, indeed, and treated them like property, but he was also an abolitionist—just not the kind of abolitionist you are thinking of. Ruffin considered himself a speculative abolitionist, meaning he believed that slavery was evil and must eventually end, but he could not imagine any sort of scheme that would make that come about. He criticized his fellow southerners for their cruelty towards slaves, wishing slavery did not exist, but then shrugged his shoulders, as if saying, “But what are you gonna do?”

If Ruffin really was a speculative abolitionist, one would think he could take some solace in the South’s defeat, knowing the Emancipation Proclamation in addition to the North’s victory would finally free slaves—something he never thought could happen. This didn’t please Ruffin though, because he loved the Virginia soil more than he hated slavery, and believed that soil fertility required slave labor. Without slaves, the soils would lose their life-giving power, and Virginia would become desolate as its inhabitants moved west in search of new land. He did not want to live to see Virginia wither, so he took his life while the soil was still fertile.

Ruffin had devoted his life to the preservation of Virginia, especially its agricultural land. Back then, it was common for farmers to clear new land, grow tobacco for three years and maize for a few more, after which the soil was not worth tilling. The farmer then sought virgin land. People began to leave Virginia because the only thing virgin about it was the Queen it was named after (Elizabeth I). As farmers left their land they left behind ugly fields of weeds and dilapidated buildings. When a newcomer to Virginia surveyed the land in 1783 he described a, “scene of desolation that baffles description—farm after farm...worn out, washed and gullied, so that scarcely an acre could be found in a place fit for cultivation.”^(A1,M1,O1)

Figure 1—Edward Ruffin (1794-1865)

(A.2) The solution

But Ruffin deeply loved Virginia, so he sought means by which the soil fertility could be restored. He tried applying livestock manure to the fields but it didn’t work, so he then began reading the writings of British agricultural scientists. He made his discovery in Sir Humphrey Davy’s Elements of Chemistry, which suggested a soil could become too acidic if farmed for many years, and that a simple application of lime would bring the soil’s pH back to its proper level.

Looking around his property Ruffin realized that some parts contained large amounts of fossilized shells, something call marl, which was a blend of clay and lime. Could the marl be excavated and applied to land, restoring the soil fertility? Putting his many slaves to work experimenting with this idea proved it correct: yields rose by 40-200%!

Virginia could be saved, provided there was enough marl, and that seemed to be the case. The problem was that excavation and application of marl was highly labor-intensive. That is, preserving the fertility of Virginian soils would require lots of marl, and that would require lots of slaves. If the lives of these poor humans could not be exploited the labor costs would be too high. Ruffin disliked slavery but wanted to preserve Virginia. He could not do both, and so he choose to keep slavery so that he could save Virginia.

This is why the Confederate defeat affected him so. It seemed to him as if the freeing of the slaves cursed Virginia fields to mortalilty, and the state would become a ghost town as farmers struck out for virgin lands to the west.

^(A1,M1)

This is unfortunate, because Ruffin was wrong. He was right about marl, and his works would eventually convince the world that the right combination of marl and manure could preserve a soil’s fertility for centuries. He was wrong about slave labor though, as he could not foresee how mechanized agriculture would soon become—how technological innovation would make slavery unprofitable, and how farmers would be able to nurture their soil with very little labor.

(A.3) Who would have known?

Yet we can hardly blame Ruffin. Who could have forseen the explosion in technological innovation that would mark the twentieth century as truly remarkable? We can learn something from Ruffin’s erroneous pessimism of the future, for if he had read the work of economists he would have had reason for optimism.

Economists have learned that it is impossible to predict the future course of an economy, or the innovations that will make the world a better place. Ruffin did not foresee mechanization, the ancient Roman farmer (as he plowed fields slowly behind his slow-walking ox) did not expect the horse collar, the 1960s did not expect the personal computer to become a reality, and in the1990s we did not foresee the advent of smartphones. Doctors in the past never expected to be able to peer inside a living human body as we can with MRIs, or develop medicines to let diabetics live a normal life. No one really anticipated antibiotics. Once we discovered crops’ need for nitrogen we never expected to be able to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and feed it to crops.

In hindsight, we know that these solutions often take a long time. We should not expect to pass a government policy and expect to get by without fossil fuels in only ten years, nor should we be able learn how to raise sows without gestation stalls in only a year. If Ruffin had the training of an economist, he would know that his solution for restoring soil fertility would never be adopted immediately, and perhaps not even in his lifetime. But so long as people need food there will need to be fertile soils. As soils lose productivity food becomes scarce and food prices rise, giving people like Ruffin the extra money needed to pay for the labor-intensive act of excavating and applying maul, and giving entrepreneurs the incentive to develop alternatives means of reducing the acidity of the soil. If Ruffin had the training of an economist, he would have the optimism to believe his dear Virginia soils would come back to life, as they did in the twentieth century.

(B) Farms and food of the future

Ruffin is not the only person to try and imagine the future of farm and food, and it is worth considering what some of these predictions look like.

When Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote his dystopia sci-fi We in 1924 he imagined food being developed straight from petroleum—he wasn't far off the mark. Our food supply is reliant on fossil fuels, but in more ways than you likely imagine. In addition to fueling the tractors that plow the field, fossil fuels power machinery that digs deep into the earth for phosphorus and potassium. What is more interesting is how we use natural gas to pull nitrogen right out of the atmosphere and place it in a solid or liquid form plants can consume (though almost 80% of the atmosphere is nitrogen it is not accessible to plants).

Quotation 1—Stranger than fiction?

I refer to the great Two Hundred Years’ War, the war between the city and the land. Probably on account of religious prejudices, the primitive peasants stubbornly held onto their “bread.” In the thirty-fifth year before the foundation of the One State our contemporary pertroleum food was invented.
—Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1924. We. Momentum: Australia.

What Zamyatin probably imagined was a technology that could produce food directly from petroleum, without having to grow foods or animals first. At first it might seem like we are approaching this, but we haven't been able to remove plants and animals when converting sunlight to food. There are 3D printers being developed that "print" with incredible precisions a wide variety of foods, but it still uses mostly ingredients taken from plants and animals.^(F1)

Figure 2—A 3-D Food printer at Cornell University^(P1)

Have you heard of the meat grown in a laboratory, where you first start with a few live cells and then culture it so that it multiplies over and over. Those cultures must be grown in some medium, and for now that medium is made from calf blood.^(F2)

Since We was a novel, perhaps we shouldn't say that Zamyatin "predicted" such a food, but there were some people who did. A chemist in 1894 predicted that flour and similar foods would be made in the laboratory, eliminating the need for grains and other plants. And when did the chemist predict this would happen? By the year 2000! If you think that prediction was both precise and bold, you haven't seen anything yet.

When James B. Billard wrote an article for the National Geographic magazine in 1970 about farms of the future he didn't just jot down vague, wild speculations. He worked with specialists at the USDA and even drew a picture of agriculture would look like. This picture is below, with notes that I added. Knowing that livestock were increasingly being fed grain and held in cramped, confined spaces, he imagined a multi-story feedlot—like a parking garage, but with cattle, and machines to automatically haul away the manure for use as fertilizer. There are no tractors on the wheat field. Instead, automated machines perform the tilling, planting, and harvesting of grain. These machines don't spray pesticides; the remote-controlled helicopter is for that. Some of the grain will be delivered to the feedmills for cattle feed, and the rest will be transported to the distant city in pneumatic tubes. Off in the distance are domes, which are really greenhouses, where the high quality fruits and vegetables are grown.

The author was more prescient than it may at first seem. True, we still use tractors for growing grains, but many of these drive themselves. Pesticides are still applied with plane or tractor, but drones are already being used by the government to kill enemies and scout for polluting farms, and some ranchers use drones to locate cattle—the remote control helicopter depicted in the figure may be only years away. Moreover, livestock really are fed grain for a large portion of their lives, and though they do not live in ten-story buildings cattle are crammed into small lots. Moreover, at egg farms layers really are housed in multi-story buildings.

The point of this is not to mock individuals who try to predict the future of agriculture and food. Most people make their speculations partly for fun, knowing they will be wrong in many aspects. The point is to not take these predictions too seriously. No government should attempt to dictate by policy where agriculture "should" go, and one certainly should not end their life based on a conjecture about the future.

Figure 3—Farm of the Future (taken from 1970 issue of National Geographic)

What are the latest, wildest speculations about future farming? That prize goes to NASA, who is actively developing ways astronauts can grow gardens on the moon. They even plan to deliver a greenhouse to the moon by 2015. It is even developing plans for astronauts to do their own cooking—using those 3D food printers mentioned earlier.^(G1)

(C) The optimism of economics

Economics began in 1776 with the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, where he attempted to describe why some nations are wealthier than others. We continue that tradition in this class, though focus more on food. But this is the same topic of interest to Ruffin.

Ruffin did not completely solve the puzzle of how to fertilize soils with little labor, but he was on the right track. Likewise, economists cannot tell other countries exactly what they should do to achieve our level of prosperity, but we can get them on the right track. We know that great leaps in prosperity were being made in Ruffin’s time in both Britain and the U.S. because both nations protected private property, issued patents to reward inventors, encouraged trade both within and across its borders, and considered the pursuit of honest profits a dignified endeavor. These are the traits of a nation that will make us greater even still, and these are the traits that developing countries attempt to mimic (if they are wise).

Although Ruffin spent most of his life spreading the word about marl’s ability to restore soil fertility, it took a long time before people accepted it. He died believing his efforts were in vain. The reason is that farmers were stubborn, lacked entrepreneurial zeal, showed little respect to science, and were unwilling to experiment. This taught economists the importance of educating the populace about science, and spending tax money on both research and education of the public.

We study economics so that we do not fall into Ruffin’s trap, the trap that caused him to take his own life. We study economics so we can discard the notion that we must be able to predict the future to be optimistic about it. Our generations face unique challenges. We must feed a much larger population, and we must do it while also decreasing the pollution caused by chemical fertilizers. We must learn to raise food while emitting less carbon. We must learn how to produce pork and eggs while treating the animals humanely.

No one knows exactly how we will do this. I certainly don’t. What we do know is how to create the right environment for these solutions to emerge from the minds of eager, creative individuals.

That, essentially, is what economics is about. It is about optimism. Not a naive optimism, but an optimism that under the right conditions—conditions we can control—we can find solutions to all of our problems, even if we don’t know what those solutions will be or when they will develop.

Economics gives ample reasons to be optimistic about the future. In economics we learn that wealth is not like manna from heaven that all the world’s citizens must fight over. Wealth is created by humans, and so we are not engaged in a zero-sum game with our fellow man, where our gain is someone else’s loss. Our economy does not “compete” with China for wealth any more than you compete with your neighbor. We trade with China, and with Kansas, and with each other, and the more prosperous one person or country becomes the more others can benefit from trading with us. Isn’t that a nice thought? To know that we can all become wealthier at the same time?

So long as we live under a government that protects property, does not interfere with trade, educates the population, and encourages innovation, the future is worth living for even if we don’t know exactly what that future will be. Ruffin’s fate will not be our own. Economics is no dismal science. Economics is one of the few sciences to give us realistic expectations—but no guarantees—that each subsequent generation will be happier and live a more meaningful life than the generation before.

What subject could be more worthy of study?

References

(A1) Allitt, Patrick N. American Identity [lectures]. “Edmund Ruffin—The Champion of Slavery.” The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

(B1) Billard, Jules B. February 1970. “The Revolution In American Agriculture.” National Geographic.

Freakonomics [blog]. March 1, 2013. "Would You Eat Steak From a Printer?" Accessed November 27 2013 at http://freakonomics.com/2013/03/01/would-you-eat-steak-from-a-printer/

(F2) Fox, Maggie. August 5, 2013. "Lab-grown meat is here—but will vegetarians eat it?" NBC News. Accessed November 27, 2013 at http://www.nbcnews.com/health/lab-grown-meat-here-will-vegetarians-eat-it-6C10830536

(G1) November 27, 2013. "Tossed in space: NASA plans to farm greens on the moon" [web article]. Grist Accessed November 27, 2013 at Tossed in space: NASA plans to farm greens on the moon.

(M1) Mitchell, Betty L. 1981. Edmund Ruffin: a biography. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, Indiana.

(O1) Ogle, Maureen. 2013. In Meat We Trust. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: NY, NY.

(P1) Picture taken from PC Magazine on November 27, 2013 at http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,3253,l=289174&a=289174&po=5,00.asp