John Beale Bordley and the Science of Farming

In the early seventeen nineties, a Maryland-born lawyer and planter named John Beale Bordley purchased land just north of here and called it Como Farm. He was done with the courtroom. His new subject was the soil.

Bordley spent his final years running systematic experiments in crop rotation and soil fertility at a time when American agriculture was largely guesswork. He experimented with farming methods and wrote extensively about what he observed. His books on crop rotation and on husbandry and rural affairs circulated widely in the young republic, giving working farmers practical knowledge grounded in actual trial and error. When he died in eighteen oh four, Bordley left behind not a famous battle or a political speech, but something quieter and just as consequential: a body of agricultural science that helped American farmers feed a growing nation.