Reaction to Cronon Prompt

This week’s prompt asks us to compare “Cronon’s rhetoric to Prescott and Bloch in terms of land usage in history.”  For me, what came to mind was Cronon’s application of Liebig’s Law (41), which was developed in 1828.  I find it interesting to think that both Bloch and Prescott wrote after this principle had been developed, so it is possible that they would have been aware of it.  However, as Cronon points out in his preface, a work such as this requires the tools “of an ecologist as well as those of a historian to be properly understood” (xv).  This leaves me wondering about the boundaries between different fields, such as history/biology, history/ecology, history/economics, etc.  What sort of lag time is there when it comes to information flowing between different fields?  While it seems possible that Prescott had heard of Liebig’s Law, would he have been adequately familiar with it to apply it to his own work?  If not, would this have been because this information had not yet found its way from agricultural science into the realm of history, or perhaps because Bloch did not have a strong foundation in agricultural science?  This also leaves me wondering what modern historians do when they are confronted with problems that might be more easily dealt with by scholars of other fields.  Do modern historians often collaborate with, say, ecologists when they are interested in a particular aspect of a period in history that they are studying, or are scholars in a particular field more often simply left to their own devices?  While I realize that we may not have time to cover these questions in class, I hope to soon learn more about interdisciplinary practices in the field of history now that these questions have come to mind.