This paper discusses the place and significance of comparative trials in German agricultural writings around 1800. In the second half of the eighteenth century, practitioners of agriculture began to discuss the role and design of agricultural trials. The notion of comparative experimentation played a significant role in these discussions, but it could mean quite different things: comparative assessment of treatments in terms of yield, cost-effectiveness, and adequacy for an intended purpose; comparative input variations to explore the multitude of effects of certain causes; and the comparison of something treated with something untreated, to establish the effects of a treatment more securely. Some German agriculturists developed their methodologies explicitly in contrast to the laboratory experiment, as they conceived it. Others invoked systematic variations and practices of quality control that they imported from technological contexts. Yet others drew on philosophical discussions of cause-effect relations.
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