Preliminary Programme

In agricultural systems, the cultivation of crops and animals for human consumption on the one hand and the maintenance of soil nutrients on the other always turns out to be problematic, as harvesting results in the extraction of nutrients from the soil and the opening of nutrient cycles by consequence. In pre-modern society, one of the major challenges of agriculture was to replenish the essential elements for plant growth stimulation. Besides the meticulous collection of farmyard manure, cultivation of green manures and composting all kinds of on-farm organic residues, agronomists of the past and environmental historians alike perceived another widespread solution to the chronic lack of fertiliser: applying urban manure and industrial waste on arable land.
The agro-system of Inland Flanders, the heartland of the very intensive Flemish Husbandry and a region of dense urbanisation, seemed to be an area par excellence for this kind of environmental symbiosis between town and countryside, as widely observed by contemporary agronomists and travellers. The Flemish Husbandry model is, however, characterised by small-scale farming, ‘massive labour input’-based intensification and the combination of activities (proto-industry), but largely without capital intensification. The purchase of urban waste – the allocation of which involved certain amounts of transaction costs and value creation – is exactly an example of capital investment. This finding raises the following questions which will be addressed in the paper: how did manuring practices differ between smallholding peasants and large farmers with regard to the application of urban and industrial waste products? Did these off-farm manures ended up on the Flemish micro-farms in the first place? – and if so, were these peasant households able to afford substantial amounts of urban and industrial wastes in quantities that fundamentally affected productivity? In this paper, I will adopt a micro-perspective on the level of the individual farm, which enables to assess the impact of social relations on the recycling of urban waste as fertiliser in the countryside. (Show less)

In the second half of the 19th century Vienna found itself in the middle of a socio-ecological transition from an agrarian to an industrial city. In this time period Vienna experienced rapid growth in population numbers, which not only caused a fast rising demand for food, energy and other resources but also changing requirements for the disposal of growing amounts of wastes, waste water and excrements. The disposal system in existence was questioned. Urban authorities, engineers, economists and city physicians discussed different options for a new one. On the one hand, systems in which excrements and organic waste get collected and reused for agricultural purposes were proposed. On the other hand, the installation of a city-wide water born sewage system was discussed. After years of debate, the second option was implemented. This paper takes a quantitative perspective on urban outflows, in particular the nitrogen contained in human and animal excrements. Answers to the following questions will be given: How much of the organic matter and nitrogen excreted by humans and their livestock was discharged into the waterscape? Was it a relevant amount of nitrogen that was “lost” for agriculture in Vienna’s waterscape? How did this change during this period of industrial transformation and urban growth? Why did urban authorities decide against using urban excrements as fertilizer? (Show less)

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the City of Berlin constructed an extensive sewer system that transferred urban human waste to giant Rieselfelder located in agricultural lands, far outside the city limits. My current research project is an environmental history of two Brandenburg villages, one of which is Steglitz, located 10 kilometers south of the center of Berlin. By the nineteenth century, Steglitz was transforming itself from an agricultural community to a rapidly urbanizing suburb. In 1885, Steglitz had a population of 8,500 and massive “drainage” problems. Steglitz constructed its own Rieselfeld in the 1890s. The community purchased the agricultural estate of Klein Ziethen, 15 kilometers southeast, to use as a Rieselfeld and created an elaborate system of pumps, drainage canals, settling ponds, and filtering processes. The goal was to return nitrogen-rich material to the earth and enhance agriculture while improving the sanitation of Steglitz. Viewed another way, Steglitz (like Berlin) was colonizing agricultural lands to use as a depository for unsanitary, health-threatening waste.
The new owners of Klein Ziethen (the governing council of Steglitz) discovered that fields of the estate were too wet for the traditional grain crops, rye and barley, as well as for common root crops including turnips and potatoes. Grasses generally flourished, and cut grass, carted into Berlin to sell as fodder for horses became a lucrative part of the estate’s transformed agricultural business. The grass, however, had to be sold green; it contained too much moisture to dry as hay. Fruit trees seemed to thrive. The Klein-Ziethen proprietors built a large dairy barn and purchased a heard of 100 cows, which produced 1,100 liters of milk a day, also sold in the city, giving it a reputation as an economic success, after the initial years of recouping an initial large capital outlay. The agriculture on this land was therefore completely transformed, but not in the ways originally envisioned.
Unintended consequences included a raised water table, which threatened the structures of buildings on the estate, a crust of dried muck on the soil that prevented seeds from sprouting, and pollution in the so-called “cleansed” water that drained into the Teltow Canal. I have examined these issues up to the date when Steglitz was incorporated into the city of Berlin, 1920.
For the purpose of the proposed paper, I will extend my investigation to include a much wider expanse of the Berlin Rieselfelder. I will also broaden the chronological coverage into the second half of the twentieth century. Some of the Rieselfelder continued to be in operation after the Second World War, with the result that not only East Berlin, but also West Berlin, sent its sewage into the landscape of the German Democratic Republic. I am especially interested in the ways in which the Rieselfelder transformed landscapes and, hence, ecosystems.
(Show less)

Environmental history and rural history are two fields of research that are very difficult to connect in French historiography. Environmental history, which is an emergent field of research, is mainly focused on hygiene in towns, and the growth of industrial activities during the nineteenth century (Massard-Guilbaud and Le Roux). For rural history, the environment is more a history of landscape than a history of ecologic systems. From another point of view, in rural history, the link between towns and countryside is more or less reduces to a dependence of the latter to the former. Beyond this dependence, scholars do not ignore the fact that towns provided manure for the farmers, but French historiography has not studied a lot this topic. During the nineteenth century, with the growth of scale of towns, and especially Paris, the problems of recycling waste became crucial. One way to do it was to provide a huge amount of manure to the farmer. This paper intends to assess the size of enterprises which recycled the waste of Paris and provided manure to the farmers of the countryside in the middle of the nineteenth century. To realise this work I use an archives from the Archives Nationales which describe “la Société anonyme de vidanges et d’engrais” located in Paris and some probates of Farmer dead in the countryside during the same period. (Show less)