Hutton said that agriculture was “the study of his life” which he started early in his career when he moved to the Borders of Scotland and farmed two farms at Slighhouses and Nether Monynut. Through his work as a farmer, experimenting with lime to improve soil fertility, postulating how environment selects different crop traits to his ground-breaking work to understand soil formation and its loss leading to geology and geological time, James Hutton’s contribution transformed practice and thinking, and shaped a great deal of the knowledge that came after his death. He is even acknowledged as one of the first to describe the process of natural selection 80 years before Darwin’s amazing work on a Theory of Evolution. His discovery about the time needed for geological processes also enlightened how evolutionary processes could be accommodated in a concept of Deep Time.
The James Hutton Foundation seeks to work with and to support people, projects and ideas that have transformational potential and progress these areas of study.
As projects are added under this heading we will outline and feature them here.