From Prophecy to Forecasting? The USDA’s Crop and Weather Predictions in the Gilded Age

By the 1890s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture presided over a vast environmental forecasting network that linked thousands of weather observers and hundreds of thousands of crop reporters into a nationwide effort to produce short-term weather forecasts and estimates of crop acreage and condition (and by extension, yield).  Weather forecasting and crop reporting commanded significant financial resources and a veritable army of meteorologists, statisticians, clerks, and volunteers, and the USDA’s bureaucratic machinery produced and circulated forecasts in far greater volume than those of the numerous private forecasters that challenged the USDA’s claims to predictive authority.  As the national weather service and the USDA’s crop reporting service professionalized in the late nineteenth century, both organizations sought to define their work in contrast to ideas about prophecy and traditional practices of prediction.

But defining modern scientific forecasting was not simple, given the USDA’s reluctance to engage in the kind of long-range weather forecasting and quantitative yield forecasting that the public and markets demanded.  This paper traces these interrelated trends: the professionalization of environmental forecasting within the federal government, and the USDA’s institutional conservatism regarding forecasting practices.  In order to turn prophecy into forecasting, the federal government’s weather forecasters and crop statisticians carefully constructed professional scientific authority, educated the public about not only the value but also the limitations of government forecasting, and policed the private forecasters who consistently undermined their credibility.  In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the USDA’s environmental forecasters responded to market demand and entered into arenas of long-range and quantitative forecasting that they had previously rejected as inherently uncertain.  This paper argues that the USDA’s early-twentieth-century weather and crop forecasting was directly shaped by the persistence of late-nineteenth-century “weather prophets” and “cotton prophets,” forecasters whose predictive labors the USDA had previously sought to discredit as fraudulent.