More on Agricultural Adaptation: Johnny Appleseed
4 June 2008 at 10:08 am Dick Langlois 1 comment
| Dick Langlois |
The abstract of a new paper called “Alertness, Local Knowledge, and Johnny Appleseed” recently crossed my computer screen. By a grad student at George Mason called David Skarbek, the paper applies a Kirznerian account of entrepreneurship to the case of Johnny Appleseed, aka John Chapman (1774-1845). The entrepreneurial part will no doubt be of interest to many readers, including my estimable co-bloggers. But I’m more interested in the historical and institutional angle.
Skarbek points out that, contrary to the Disney-fueled myth, Johnny Appleseed didn’t scatter apple seeds randomly throughout Appalachia and the midwestern frontier. He planted clearly defined apple groves, totaling some 1,200 acres by the time of his death. This turned out to be crucial for homesteading, since under American state law the planting of fruit trees was one way to create a property right (in Lockean fashion) out of unowned land. Chapman was thus an institutional entrepreneur.
What Skarbek doens’t say, however, is something I learned at the NBER conference I wrote about earlier. In addition to having what we would nowadays call mental health issues, Chapman was also an evangelical Swedenborgian who shared with Thoreau the view that apples should aways be grown from seeds. (For documentation, see for example here.) In fact, apple trees grown from seeds are good for only one thing — cider — and, indeed, the Johnny Appleseed legend got a boost in Appalachia during Prohibition as the fruits (as it were) of his efforts were used for hard cider. Apple cultivation normally requires grafting, a form of hybridization known for centuries and practiced in Appleseed’s lifetime by the likes of Thomas Jefferson. The point is that Chapman saw hybridization as unnatural and immoral, and his quest was animated as much or more by this religious view as by environmentalist zeal or entrepreneurial insight. As the mention of Thoreau suggests, however, distaste for “unnatural” breeding methods is not exclusive to religious fundamentalists, and indeed today it is followers of Thoreau not (generally) Christian evangelicals who object to genetically modified organisms.
Entry filed under: - Langlois -, Entrepreneurship, Food and Agriculture, Institutions, Law and Economics, Myths and Realities.
Organizations and Markets 
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REW | 5 June 2008 at 3:17 pm
I find the Skarbek piece to tell a more compelling story about property rights in an opening frontier than alertness. Both are easier in an emerging environment than after ownership and opportunity are more thoroughly exhausted.
The process of grafting, which is distinct from hybridization (genes are not combined/exchanged), has been known since before 323 BC, when Theophrastos wrote that it is necessary to improve on wild types. Many of Chapman’s trees produced little or no fruit, unfit even for cider. For a lengthy, but well-written and amusing, treatment of apples and Appleseed, see Michael Pollan’s extraordinary book, The Botany of Desire (http://www.npr.org/programs/talkingplants/radio/010604.pollan.html).