The changing paradigm of agricultural knowledge: The policy, memory, and culture of the Maryland tobacco buyout

This study examines southern Maryland's twenty-first century cultural landscape during a period of agricultural diversification prompted by Maryland's tobacco buyout. Looking principally at St. Mary's County, a jurisdiction in Southern Maryland that has been growing tobacco for over 370 years, this interdisciplinary inquiry probes the changing currents of agricultural knowledge and policy, cultural memory as well as landscape amidst the buyout program. Thomas Kuhn's notion of a "paradigm shift" provides an epistemological framework for considering the Buyout as a shift in the cultural paradigms of policymakers and farmers alike towards a more "sustainable" model. It is argued that the implications of this shift not only express themselves within the Buyout's development and implementation, but also the physical landscape and cultural memory of the farming community as well.; To probe the respective paradigm shifts, this work examines the nineteenth and twentieth century historical and agricultural policy contexts that preceded the buyout. These contexts reveal an incremental pattern of social, economic, and cultural change within both the policymaking and agricultural communities. Arising out of these communities, the buyout's polices are examined to understand the organizational planning behind agricultural restructuring and how these efforts have destabilized tobacco culture. A "reading" of the county's cultural landscape through a study of tobacco barns and oral histories provides the methodological basis for exploring the traditional elaborations behind agricultural knowledge.; This case study analyzes the interwoven relationships between land use, agricultural knowledge and policy, cultural landscape change, as well as memory and identity to anticipate how tobacco growing communities in states such as Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky may respond to the recently implemented federal buyout program. On a broader scale, the study contemplates the role of traditional knowledge in modern agricultural practice in the United States and how the traditional understandings behind tobacco production are being conserved in community memory and on the landscape of St. Mary's County.