Agriculture

Case Steel Built Threshing Machines; Universal Favorites for Eighty Years
J.I. Case Threshing
Machine Company
(Racine, 1922?)

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As the library for the first institution of higher learning in the United States to teach scientific agriculture, Special Collections holds important early agricultural printed works, as well as strong collections in gardening, forestry, landscape architecture, and agricultural equipment catalogs.

The Ray Stannard Baker Apiculture Collection is an outstanding collection of bee books from as early as the sixteenth century.

Learn More: English Agricultural History

Online Resources

• A Catalog of Early Works in the Ray Stannard Baker Bee Collection - Catalogs some of the holdings in our apiculture collection.
• Agricultural Equipment Catalogs in the Libraries of Michigan State University - Firms represented by five pieces or more with the years of coverage and the number of pieces

Learn More

• English Agricultural History

Did You Know ...

• The first printed book in the MSU Libraries is Scriptores Rei Rusticae, a collection of agricultural treatises by such classical writers as Cato, Varro, and Columella. The book was printed in 1472 in Venice by Nicholas Jenson and is part of the Agriculture Materials found in Special Collections.
• Sir Humphry Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a Course of Lectures for the Board of Agriculture (London, 1813), is the first edition of the work which virtually introduced the era of scientific farming in Great Britain. Part of the Agriculture Materials in SpC.