Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold by Shepherd W. McKinley

Starting in this interwar period (1919-1939), U.S. This toxic arsenal took off quickly, inspiring and integrating violent military logic into industrial agriculture to better control cotton pests, plantations, and surrounding communities. cotton planters set the stage for a new battle to protect cotton at home. With raw white arsenic mined in Canada, Mexico, and the American West, and military planes returning from war in Europe, U.S.

After the abolition of slavery, southern cotton planters, no longer able to count on the comparative advantage of enslaved labor, looked to technologies to maintain a profitable position during the global expansion of cotton.įew technologies were more critical than arsenical insecticides and airplanes. This practice soon became common throughout the plantation South. In August 1922, the United States Department of Agriculture repurposed two military biplanes to spread tons of calcium arsenate over the fields of Shirley and Hermione Plantations in Tallulah, Louisiana.

Anti-Blackness shaped the formulation of this harmful agrarian calculus, and cotton, white supremacy and other poisons served as an important antecedent to the subsequent development of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. South, cotton plantations served as an early laboratory for the toxic development and mass application of agrochemicals. By Brian Williams and Jayson Maurice Porter.

Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold by Shepherd W. McKinley