The Life and Work of Arthur T. Mosher

About the Book

Arthur T. Mosher (1910-1992) set out for India at the age of 22, for what was intended to be a lifetime of teaching at a missionary-supported agricultural college on the Ganges Plain. After several years as a young instructor, during which time he also traveled India from the Rajputana Desert to the Himalayan mountains to the Indus Valley , he embarked on two years of “study leave” which included one year in an Indian village where he lived and farmed by prevailing native methods. Throughout his life he continued this pattern of teaching and study, as reflected in his many speeches and books examining problems ranging from the relationship between religious and secular missionary activities to the practical techniques required for Getting Agriculture Moving (the title of his most widely published book).

Dr. Mosher’s career spanned the pioneering years of worldwide agricultural development, the final decades of the “missionary era,” the end of colonialism in India and elsewhere following World War II, and the growing international development efforts sponsored by universities and by large private organizations after the war. From 1948 - 1952 he served as the last American principal of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, then left India to conduct a Ford Foundation-funded study of Technical Cooperation in Latin American Agriculture during the mid-1950s, then to teach briefly at Cornell University before serving for two decades as Executive Director and later President of the Agricultural Development Council, a private philanthropical organization sponsored by John D. Rockefeller 3rd.

About the Author