J. Russell Smith

Smith was born in the Piedmont region of Virginia and raised in a Quaker household that focused on farming. He attended the Wharton School for his bachelor's degree, but had an extended degree period lasting for five years from 1893 to 1898 due to him having to teach on the side in order to pay for his university attendance. His graduate degree studies afterward were conducted under Emory Richard Johnson and he was assigned in 1899 to work with the Isthmian Canal Commission in order to research how the canal would impact commercial enterprises across the new Central American shipping route. He spent later parts of his education looking into the importance of geographical research, which was not offered as a main course of study at the time in schools. A year abroad in Germany and time spent researching the country's port cities alongside Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Sapper allowed him to further understand that more than physical geography was required for general student understanding of such topics. Not long after, he completed his Ph.D. defense in 1903 with his thesis titled "The Organization of Ocean Commerce".[3]

After graduating, Smith was given an instructor position at the Wharton School and this resulted in him having to develop his own textbooks for the courses he taught, leading to many of his literary releases on a variety of industries. His official and main college text was titled Industrial and Commercial Geography, which was the first US collegiate text on the subject of economic geography, and it was through the success of this text that he was able to formally organize the Geography and Industry Department at the university.[4] By 1919, the failure of the Wharton School to properly pay the salaries of his ten assistant students led to Smith resigning from his position and taking up a new job as the head of the economic geography department that was formed at the new Columbia School of Business.[5] During that same year, Smith removed himself from direct academic research so he could work on his upcoming book, Influence of the Great War Upon Shipping, as requested and funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He also took a trip to Russia alongside Herbert Hoover in order to assist the American Relief Administration in their efforts to manage and combat the Russian famine of 1921–22. Afterward, he continued traveling around the world throughout the 1920s in order to continue gathering materials for future books.[3] He retired from his head departmental position at Columbia University in April 1940.[6]

In 1929, he released his book Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, which would serve as one of the earliest sources and motivators for the field of agroforestry, though it would not be made into a true scientific field until the 1960s.[7] The impetus for the book came about from his global travels whereby he saw the negative impacts of soil erosion in multiple countries. So he focused his book on the idea of tree breeding and the development of genetically superior cultivars that could be grown in poor, often mountainous, soils so as to improve them. He also suggested the creation of many national branches of a "Institute of Mountain Agriculture" in order to maintain upkeep of these endeavors.[8] Smith discussed his research on general agricultural improvement at the seventeenth international congress of the International Geographical Union in 1952 and presented hypothetical ideas on future technologies, including methods for removing the salt from ocean water and using solar power to help in the irrigation of deserts and arid lands by pumping river water from mountainous regions.[9]

Smith had a nursery and orchard outside Round Hill, Virginia where he propagated trees he deemed useful.[15] The final decades of his life involved him attempting to defeat chestnut blight and he developed 20 varietals of the Chinese chestnut alongside the USDA in order to create a blight resistant chestnut tree.[14]

Smith collected several types of persimmon near the Great Wall of China in 1925. Some of the trees may still survive in his orchard.[16]