Organic farming: ridicule, discussion, adoption

Organic Gardening and Farming, packed with practical advice about compost heaps, chicken manure, and earthworms, languished in the early years.  But by May 1971, its monthly print run reached one million copies.  Proponents of a new back-to-the-land movement made J.I. Rodale the international guru of a style of farming he called “organic.”  His magazine became a bible.  Both publisher and publication were magnets for criticism.  The Whole Earth Catalogue, tongue-in-cheek, called both of them “subversive.”

A serious Reader’s Digest article published in October, l952, called followers of organic farming “misguided,” their practices “superstitions about soils,” and their advocacy for healty food “fads about nutrition.”  The article concluded that organic agriculture was “dogma of an extreme form” and provable “bunk.”

Despite the derision, Rodale continued to turn out articles citing the joys of giant tomatoes and super-sweet melons and woes created by artificial fertilizers an chemical pesticides.  He was fond of quoting a favorite author, John Stuart Mill, who said that ideas go through three distinct phases: ridicule, discussion, and adoption.

Mill’s insight has proven to be correct.  From a seemingly minor magazine published by a man who often described himself as an oddball, Rodale’s ideas have gradually taken their place in the main stream.  Interest in organic products, infinitesimal in 1940, climbed to such heights in 1990 that the movement required federal regulation.

J.I. Rodale

Rodale stumbled upon Sir Howard’s book in 1941.  By 1942, Rodale had Organic Gardening and Farming up and running.  The new magazine held some appeal to a nation of backyard growers deeply involved in home-based wartime food production; they worked daily in their Victory Gardens.  But foreign-born gardeners, used to older ways, were the magazine’s main subscribers. Today, Organic Gardening has both print and on-line versions.

Rodale explains his motivation for launching the magazine in a interview with Eleanor Perenyi. 

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Rodale says. “For the first time, I realized that food affects health, and that chemical fertilizers are dangerous to people, animals, and the soil.  I felt I had to share this experience with the rest of the country.  It wouldn’t be fair to know this and say nothing about it.”

Rodale moved his business operation from New York City to Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where he purchased a derelict 300-acres farm and turned it into a farming research center.  Perenyi visited the site in the 1960s and describes her experience in Green Thoughts.

“I look back on my visit to his farm as one of the more inspiring events of my life.  The cattle were sleek; the chicken in their chicken houses organically fed and living over specially designated pits for compost.  The houses were free of the usual chicken-house stink, and the bird we roasted for supper was the nearest thing to a poulet de Bresse I’ve eaten in this country; the breakfast egg was of a quality I had forgotten.”

The Soil and Health

A second movement, organic agriculture, also has roots in the 1940s.  Instead of finding its beginning in repurposing army munitions, however, the American organic farming movement grew from a more peaceful source, the publication of a book.  Sir Albert Howard’s work, An Agricultural Testament, first appeared in England in 1940.  The book arrived during the London Blitz, an improbable addition to war-torn bookstores and libraries. A second book, The Soil and Health, appeared in 1945.

Sir Howard’s tomes teach a benign approach to food production modeled on ancient farming systems.  An agricultural researcher and advisor, Sir Howard sought to popularize theories he found, then further developed, in India.  Impressed with peasant farmers’ ability to maintain soil fruitfulness by intelligent crop rotation, he sought to build even greater fertility by recycling plant nutrients back to the soil.  In other words, he advocated various forms of composted.  Sir Howard was convinced that chemical fertilizers and artificial pesticides were the wrong approach to increasing crop yields.  

The main theme of both An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health is complexity.  The author stresses the necessity of maintaining the intricate web of relationships among plants, animals, and humans.  Sir Howard’s ideas might have been lost in the cacophony of World War II except for an American who amplified the message and delivered it unceasingly to the American public.  That man was J.I. Rodale, his broadcast platform a small magazine called Organic Gardening and Farming.

Nitrates for bombs become nitrates for industrial agriculture

In the United States today, two completely different agriculture systems exist side by side: industrial agriculture, typified by the almond orchards described earlier, and organic agriculture.  I find it ironic that these two very different methods of food production originated during the same time period, World War II and immediately thereafter. 

Modern industrial agriculture grew up on Army and Navy leftovers.  With the end of the was in 1945, large surpluses of two important war materials existed: nitrate of ammonium (used to make war-time explosives) and nerve gases (used to kill South Pacific mosquitoes and African lice.)

In 1947, the massive munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, converted to civilian use.  Instead of using its stock of ammonium nitrate to make explosives for bombs, the site began to use the war surplus to make fertilizers for farms.  The government briefly considered using the excess nitrates on forest to increase wood production.  The goal could be easily accomplished by dropping planeloads of the powdery stuff at treetop level.  But proponents of agriculture won out over forestry. 

Though artificial nitrogen fertilizer was first used in the 1920s, global economic and political setbacks kept its use and distribution dormant for the next twenty-five years.  Likewise, the early use of DDT, discovered by an entomologist in 1939, had been restricted to military use.  The products were now poised to find their way into a civilian commercial market.  At first, sales of both artificial fertilizer and pesticides just crept along.  Then, in the 1950s, sales and use exploded.  The end result plays out today in multi-mile almond orchards, vast cornfields, and up-dated nerve agents to control insects.