Klima als Wille und Vorstellung. Perspektiven einer Klima- geschichte der Landwirtschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

The article argues that an agrarian climate history needs to pursue a different approach when it comes to the modern era. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, farmers gained a growing array of cognitive and technological tools to react to shifting weather conditions, making them actors of climate history, rather than the helpless victims of the premodern era. The article discusses weather prognosis, irrigation, frost protection, hedgerows, phenology, the control of plant diseases, fertilizer use, seed selection, and animal production, describing in each case how and when tools and methods evolved, and at what cost. In conclusion, the article asserts that in spite of these growing abilities, farmers stuck to a notion of weather dependency, thus explicitly denying their growing role as managers of climate and weather.