Albrecht Thaer and the early assessment of nutritive values in Germany

K. D. Schwenke, Teltow

Albrecht Thaer , father of a scientifically based agriculture inGermany, was the first to replace the empiricism then prevailing by scientific knowledge and to evaluate the quality of agricultural produce by chemical analysis.

Thaer, who appreciated potatoes as a common food of high nutritional value, pleaded against widely held prejudices and non-scientific views of their nutritional value. Thaer’s coworker Heinrich Einhof (1777–1808) detected protein in potatoes; this was a strong argument for the nutritional value of these. After his chemical analysis of cereals and pulse he established a first relative nutritional scale for ‘agricultural produce’ on the bases of its protein and carbohydrate content.

As he was fully aware of the provisional nature of his scale in the absence of quality criteria, he suggested to express the nutritive value in terms of exact figures on the basis of digestive tests. Einhof’s analytical data supplied the basis for Thaer’s attempt, his ‘hay equivalent theory’, of comparing the nutritional value of different feed.

Keywords: Thaer, A. / nutritive values / assessment / Germany

Sie finden den Artikel in deutscher Sprache in Ernährungs-Umschau 03/05 ab Seite 99.