When we think of maize, we usually think of the little yellow kernels that will liven up a salad or of popcorn at the cinema. But human food is only a tiny part of what maize is used for. In Europe today, over 80% of maize is grown for animal feed. As such, maize is the cornerstone of our modern Western diet, where animal products are more important than ever. Because it is a high-yielding crop per hectare, grows on a variety of soil types and concentrates high energy inputs, maize has been the key to Europe’s nutritional transition in the second half of the 20th century. It is a key that fully crystallises the environmental problems of modern intensive agriculture, whether one thinks of conflicts over water use, pollution linked to pesticides, imports of soya and rapeseed from deforestation to supplement maize rations, or animal welfare and the hyperspecialisation of farm animals.

Maize is not a plant native to Europe, but to Central America. Although it was gradually acclimatised from America to Europe in the early modern era, maize cultivation remained limited to the south of the continent until the 20th century: Portugal, Spain, the south of France, Italy, the Balkan countries, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. After the Second World War, a veritable “blonde revolution” occurred in European agriculture, particularly in the north of the continent (as the massive and rapid arrival of maize as fodder in the 1960s and 1970s is known in France) In just a few decades, maize has come to occupy a very important place in European rural soils, now accounting for more than 20% of ploughed land in Germany and the Netherlands.

This impressive transition is not unrelated to extra-European influences and projects (American, as part of the Marshall Plan and later the “Green Revolution”, or Soviet, with Khrushchev's “maize crusade”). It is this major change in European agricultural production, in its environmental, economic, social and geopolitical dimensions, that I propose to study in this research project.

Frame of the project

The analysed period runs from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s. These years saw a leap in terms of area cultivated with maize in France, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. And, in fact, the period coincides with the chronological limits of the Cold War.

At the time, Europe appeared to be caught between two spheres of influence. On the one hand, the United States, historically a leader in hybrid maize cultivation: the Marshall Plan delivered tonnes of hybrid maize for food aid in Germany, American seeds were sent to Europe to develop suitable varieties. A second route to Europe was via the Soviet Union, where Nikita Khrushchev launched his “maize crusade” in 1954.

The study of circulation within Europe will therefore remain largely open to exchanges with the United States and the Soviet Union. While connections and mobility within the two blocs are expected, one of the aims of the project is to reconsider the impermeable nature of the “Iron Curtain”, using hybrid maize cultivation as a focal point.

Moreover, agriculture is a productive activity with eminently local dimensions. In order to understand the environmental, technical, socio-economic and geopolitical dimensions of the subject, I want to combine and cross-reference different scales of analysis, from the continental to the most local. The idea is to adopt a transnational focus on north-western Europe (France, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic) coupled with regional case studies, anchored in specific socio-environmental frameworks and from which the interviewees will be drawn: Béarn in the south of France, two livestock farming areas in western France in Brittany and Normandy, the region around Bremen, and an agricultural region of the former GDR (yet to be determined).

The project is based on the analysis of archival (public and of private companies of the agro-industry) and printed sources, supplemented by interviews (notably with former maize growers). This diversity of sources provides access to distinct areas of knowledge production on maize. I am thinking here of academic knowledge, scientific knowledge produced by agro-industrial firms, knowledge produced by farming practices on farms and administrative knowledge. A recurring problem in rural history is the difficulty of gaining access to changes on farms, and the interviews can, to some extent, overcome a gap in public archives, where farmers are often absent or silent.

Research axes

The research project lies at the intersection of environmental history, the history of knowledge and the political and economic history of contemporary Europe and is structured around three axes. In the first axe, “Circulations and recompositions of knowledge in the advent of a new ‘fodder paradigm‘”, I want to propose a transnational history of silage techniques (conservation by fermentation) and rational feeding, paying attention to the new role of maize, but also to the circulation of knowledge between different geographical areas and inside the agricultural value chain (farm, factory, universities, administration, etc.). The second theme, “Maize as a pillar of agricultural intensification in Europe during the Cold War”, proposes to re-read the history of Europe during the Cold War through the prism of maize, on the one hand by analysing the various national strategies (between cooperation and competition) for the varietal selection of hybrid maize, on the other hand by re-examining the European negotiations around the CAP and by questioning the political semantics carried by maize on both sides of the continent. The final theme, “Reconfiguring rural ecosystems and farming practices”, looks at the environmental impact of the arrival of maize on farms in terms of pollution (pesticides, fertilisers, potential disruption of water cycles), changes to landscapes and changes to the daily work on farms and their architecture.