Johann Friedrich Mayer (agriculturist)

Johann Friedrich Georg Hartmann Mayer (September 21, 1719 – March 17, 1798) was a German Reformed pastor and agricultural reformer, who is considered one of the most important writers on agriculture of his time. He came to prominence through his efforts to promote agricultural reforms, especially with his 1769 publication with new regimes of crop rotation, and his 1773 textbook on rural householders and husbandry.

Mayer was born in Bad Mergentheim as son of an innkeeper and Schultheiß, the head of a municipality. His parents prepared him to become a minister at early age. He attended the Latin School in Weikersheim and the high school in Öhringen. From 1737 to 1740 he took his theological studies at the University of Jena, where he was influenced by the philosopher Christian Wolff and the Swiss anatomist, physiologist and naturalist Albrecht von Haller.

From 1741 to 1745 Mayer was Protestant pastor in Riedbach, which ended up in a legal dispute about defamation. In 1745 he moved to Kupferzell, near Crailsheim, where he was pastor until his death in 1798. There in the garden of his clergy house, Mayer conducted agricultural experiments and observed farm work on nearby farms. In 1768 he published his findings for the first time in his book, entitled Lehre vom Gyps als vorzueglich guten Dung zu allen Erd-Gewaechsen auf Aeckern und Wiesen, Hopfen- und Weinbergen (Doctrine of Gypsum exquisitely as good manure to all natural plants to the fields and meadows, hops and vineyards). In this work he promoted the use of crushed gypsum as fertilization of fields, which he had found in the nearby Waldenburg Hills. He further explained these operations in the 1774 publication M. Terentius Varro, von der Landwirtschaft. The agronomists of his time where so impressed by his work, that they granted him the title "Gipsapostel von Kupferzell" (Apostle of gypsum from Kupferzell).

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