Growing Wild: Visions of Wildlife Management as Agricultural Science in American Forests and Fields

Faced with dwindling wildlife populations and new regulatory regimes, some American farmers turned to game farming in the early twentieth century. Private boosters and government agencies envisioned game farming as a replacement for market hunting and as a new agricultural frontier, one that might further blur the boundaries between wild and cultivated nature. Farm and institutional infrastructures developed around such species as white-tailed deer and ring-necked pheasants, only to fade by the end of the interwar period. Game farming’s lack of success ultimately stemmed from cultural, legal, and institutional challenges and epitomized the thoroughgoing separation of agricultural and wildlife sciences that firmed after World War II.