Kultivierung und Zerstörung lebender Organismen. Der bäuerliche Umgang mit chemisch-synthetischen Hilfsstoffen in der Übergangszeit von der agrarisch-industriellen zur industriell-agrarischen Wissensgesellschaft (1945-1975)

For a long time, economic historians have depicted farmers using artificial fertilisers and pesticides as innovative entrepreneurs who made an important contribution to the growth of the economy. However, with the rise of environmental history, pesticide-using farmers became a symbol for endangering the environment as well as the health of consumers. Based on primary sources, this contribution asks how the farmers themselves perceived the availability and application of synthetic pesticides. It further analyses the constraints and options the actors in this field were faced with in the three decades after World War II. Unlike the highly specialised scientists who were either vehemently for or against the application of pesticides in agriculture, farmers, functioning in a sense as applied scientists, developed a decidedly pragmatic approach towards the new pesticides. These products they treated hardly differently from other auxiliary material they had access to. Apart from a few organic growers who refused completely to apply pesticides, almost all farmers who survived the fierce survival struggle within agriculture made use of pesticides on their farms. Pesticides proved to be an adequate medium for replacing increasingly scarce and expensive labour as well as of meeting new quality standards defined exclusively by the needs of the supermarkets and the demands of consumers. While farmers had to decide whether or not to use pesticides on their farms, they had little options not to apply them if they wanted to survive as farmers in a society which increasingly perceived living organisms as uniform phenomena.