“I was painfully distressed at the ruin and desolation of the home of Washington, and the thought passed through my mind: Why was it that the women of his country did not try to keep it in repair, if the men could not do it? It does seem such a blot on our country.”—Louisa Bird Cunningham George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate was a working farm where the man who would become our first president devoted himself to the science of agriculture. Believing that America should become “a granary to the world,” Washington devoted himself to improving methodology in farming. Employing crop rotation, fertilization, and the cultivation of new crops, he was not unlike other Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who saw their lands as a place to develop a new agriculture for a new world. He even sought to improve the processing of grain by developing …