Thomas Jefferson was a Shitty Farmer

I enjoyed writing that headline way too much. 

Thomas Jefferson. Third President. Democratic-Republican. Bringer of "the Revolution of 1800." Guy obsessed with turning the US into an agrarian wonderland. Also, a pretty shitty farmer. 

Thomas Jefferson was a lot of things, and he really wanted to be a really good farmer. He tried really hard. I mean, as President he tried to get a lot of land for farming and stuff (the Louisiana Purchase like, what? Doubled the size of the country?), and he wasn't a big fan of factories and industry in general. As far as he was concerned, every family should be able to grow or make whatever the hell they needed. Basically, he loved farming. He was a rough and tough country boy through and through. (There's also the weird stuff he did with his slaves, but we'll chock that up to "the times.")

The story of Jefferson's many failed forays into farming begins in the late 1700s. Exporting rice out of Italy was forbidden at the time, by penalty of death. But Thomas really wanted to grow Italian rice at his own home, so, of course, he snuck his grains out of Lombardy in a tea canister.

Jefferson was on a mission to bring upland rice to the American south. (This is an odd, very specific mission to have, but I guess you could call it "noble.") Grown in dry soil, it could supersede, he hoped, the lowland rice that Georgia and the Carolinas depended on. “A plant,” he wrote, “which sows life and death with almost equal hand,” because the crop’s wetland habitat also bred lots of diseases, like, malaria, for example. Bad stuff. 

But, and this is where Tommy's misfortunes begin, his Italian rice didn’t take. 

But did he give up? No. He tried again, this time with rice from Timor, by way of the disgraced Captain William Bligh (who brought it back from his infamously mutinous voyage on the Bounty). 

Jefferson failed again. 

He tried African red rice. 

It never thrived. After just a few harvests over at Monticello, he soon abandoned his efforts.

His neighbors called him the worst farmer in Virginia. And yet Jefferson dedicated himself to agrarian exploration with a devotion akin to worship. -Source 

One of the most terribly designed
book covers ever. Of all time. 

Yes indeed, Mr. Jefferson failed a lot. He tried 330 varieties of 89 species of vegetables and herbs in his terraced garden on Monticello’s mountainside, plus 170 varieties of fruit in his orchards and vineyards. He meticulously recorded their growth, or lack thereof, in his "Garden Book," from 1766 to 1824, and the crop ledger is littered with the words “failed,” “failed nearly” and “killed by bug.”

There was a lot of experimenting going on at that time in the world (no, that wasn't a lame sexual joke, you idiot, it was a legitimate phrase). No one knew if or how Italian olives, French grapes or African sesame could grow in the New World. 

Jefferson, bless his heart, struggled, and mostly failed, with them all.

The olive trees couldn't handle the southern humidity, the European grapevines withered at the root, and he only managed to press a single gallon of sesame oil after three years of trying.

So overall, not incredibly successful. He was, however, organic. 

When his daughter, Martha, sent a distressed letter to Philadelphia that the vegetable garden at Monticello was laid siege by bugs, Jefferson calmly advised her to let it go:

   “We will try this winter to cover our garden with a heavy coat of manure. When earth is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance and of the best quality. I suspect that the insects which have harassed you have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants, and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil. We will attack them another year with joint efforts.”

I like his use of the word "attack." It's very spirited.

As further evidence of just how much this guy really liked farming, consider this: While reflecting on his greatest public services, he included the introduction of upland rice and olives right along with writing the Declaration of Independence, saying “the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” So yeah, it's great and all to write a declaration that would alter the entire future of the planet, indirectly changing the way governments were run all over the world, but if you really want to do good, find some new, useful plant. 

So while he failed a lot, you have to give him props for trying. And hey, if he didn't try, we'd never know whether or not that stuff would work here. So really, he did us all a favor. 

Thank you Mr. Jefferson. Thank you for failing. Failing for us.