The original plan for the trip was to drop the students we were chauffeuring at their leadership conference, and then switch from the kid-hauling van to a rented sports car and hit the beach for a few days. But an unfortunate incident involving scalding sand and bare feet caused us to look beyond the hot beach for leisure activities. Naturally, we ended up driving several hours to tour a historic farm.

We had already visited the farm of President Dwight Eisenhower near Gettysburg, Pa., and President George Washington’s Mount Vernon outside Washington, D.C., in Virginia, so we decided to explore one more president’s agricultural endeavors — those of President Thomas Jefferson’s at Monticello, also in Virginia. Of course, we saw all their houses, too, but the farms made a bigger impression.

Eisenhower’s farm proved that even a president can get carried away with accommodations for show cattle. He built a separate barn with a heated washroom for the show cattle, which received a daily brushing and a weekly bath. He won hundreds of cattle shows in Pennsylvania and across the country in the 1950s and ’60s, although he usually entered the cattle under the names of his farming partners to avoid favorable treatment. I don’t doubt that his cattle deserved the awards, but in my experience, everybody at a cattle show knows who’s who, even if the name on the entry is unfamiliar.

Besides pampering his Angus show cattle, Eisenhower considered it a challenge to improve the depleted soil of his farm. He consulted with agricultural Extension agents and the Soil Conservation Service to take soil samples, which they used to develop fertility plans and crop rotations. Using a phase familiar to conservation-minded farmers everywhere, Eisenhower declared, “I shall leave the place better than I found it.” No wonder people liked Ike.

At Mount Vernon, we found many reconstructed outbuildings, including one called a stercorary or dung repository. It is considered to be the first building in America designed for manure composting. The roofed structure with knee-high sidewalls and a stone floor looks a lot like the larger manure storage facilities modern farmers have been putting up using EQIP funding. Washington liked to experiment with various mixtures of manure and plant material to create fertilizer for the depleted soils on his plantation. Not only was he the father of our country, he was also apparently the father of manure nutrient management.

Washington also experimented with other farming practices that could be considered, well, revolutionary. He designed and built a 16-sided treading barn that had a slatted floor so wheat would fall through the cracks when horses tromped over the stalks. He also started a rye whiskey distillery that produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey in 1799. It was by far the largest distillery in the country at the time.

Unfortunately, Mount Vernon also illustrates a problem still common in agriculture today. At its peak, the plantation included 7,600 acres, but after Washington’s death, his heirs gradually sold off most of the land. Now the former farmland is built up with housing developments.

Washington’s fellow founding father, Jefferson, was an agricultural innovator as well. He demonstrated the use of crops from around the world, expanding on the familiar European crops known to most colonial farmers. However, knowledge of those crops might not extend to those tending the Monticello gardens now. I spotted a row of caster beans clearly labeled as kale, which could give an unsuspecting salad-eater an unpleasant surprise.

While many of Washington’s and Jefferson’s ideas about agriculture were ahead of their time, they both followed the convention of their day by keeping people as slaves to tend their plantations. That’s a difficult truth to explain, but both Mount Vernon and Monticello have exhibits and programs giving some long-overdue recognition to the people who actually did the work. After all, George wasn’t the one out there hauling nutrients to the stercorary.