Con los pies en el surco: Instituciones estatales y actores de la ciencia agropecuaria en La Pampa (1958–1983) [With feet in the furrow: State institutions and actors of agricultural science in La Pampa (1958–1983)] by Federico Martocci (review)

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• Con los pies en el surco: Instituciones estatales y actores de la ciencia agropecuaria en La Pampa (1958–1983) [With feet in the furrow: State institutions and actors of agricultural science in La Pampa (1958–1983)] by Federico Martocci
• María Cecilia Zuleta (bio)

Con los pies en el surco: Instituciones estatales y actores de la ciencia agropecuaria en La Pampa (1958–1983) [With feet in the furrow: State institutions and actors of agricultural science in La Pampa (1958–1983)] By Federico Martocci. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2021. Pp. 277.

Con los pies en el surco, which originated as Federico Martocci's Ph.D. dissertation, is a refreshing contribution that successfully intersects the history of science and technology, environmental history, and agricultural history. This investigation breaks new ground by focusing on the Dry Pampas, an ecoregion of temperate plains (llanura pampeana) much less studied than the Humid Pampas. These biomes coexist in the Southern Cone's center plains, at the River Plate basin.

In the mid-twentieth century, an environmental and productive crisis occurred in the Dry Pampas, caused by water stress and the wind erosion of soils and native flora. In response to these crises, during the Cold War a singular state-based socio-techno-scientific landscape was constructed in the province of La Pampa. Three well-documented chapters explain in chronological and analytical sequence the genesis of the seedbeds of public agricultural science and innovation during political instability and military dictatorships, precisely while the "Green Revolution" was expanding across the Global South.

Three principal analytical axes run through this book. The first concerns forming a cluster of new institutions that accompanied the fodder-livestock expansion in new lands on the west side of La Pampa. The Anguil Experiment Station (Estación Experimental de Anguil), with the new University of La Pampa and a bunch of local agronomic stations, joined efforts to pioneer this regional network for human intervention in arid and semiarid environments. Martocci's book demonstrates that, in this part of the Southern Cone during the Cold War, local agricultural science flourished in state-funded public institutions, rather than on resources from philanthropic nongovernmental agencies or international cooperation agreements.

The second axis carefully sheds light on the core of agricultural innovation produced in situ in La Pampa's plains. Martocci demonstrates the diverse interactions developed between state agencies, agriculture scientists and technicians, and local agricultural entrepreneurs and cattle ranchers, resulting in a complex process of two-way agricultural knowledge hybridization, [End Page 679] produced in laboratories and grounded in practice. As a result, biological innovations could settle in La Pampa. One example was the adoption of perennial "weeping love grass" (Eragrostis curvula, native to Africa), a forage that helps against soil erosion. Other technological innovations were water management, new soil tillage practices with agricultural machinery adapted to arid soils, and surface sowing, the precursor of direct (zero) tillage, currently accompanying the soybean boom in the La Plata Plateau.

The third axis focuses on the reconstruction of professional trajectories of agricultural and veterinary scientists, university researchers, and technicians; this is one of the greatest strengths of Martocci's book. In these trajectories, local and transnational knowledge achievements converged, from the River Plate area and the United States, Europe, Russia, and South Africa. The author could have delved deeper into the topic of these techno-scientific confluences. Since the mid-1970s, due to the dictatorship and state terrorism, this public techno-scientific network began to decline. At the end of the Cold War, a new agri-food business complex emerged in the Pampas: public agricultural science and rural people's empirical knowledge lost centrality.

One main achievement of Martocci's work—with a local perspective and a global mindset—is to shed light on the scientific and technological agricultural change in a food-exporting country of the Southern Cone during the Cold War. In the province of La Pampa, virtuous convergence and hybridization emerged from multiple and complex social interactions around rural practices, technologies, and agronomic and veterinary knowledge, produced and shared in situ, not simply transferred. The agricultural innovations, says Martocci, "entered through the eyes" and "were contagious." Despite this outstanding analysis, greater attention to markets, which...