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. 

Bees work a longer season

Modern industrial beekeepers keep their charges hard at work pollinating and discourage honey production.  As a substitute for honey, an artificial food is supplied to the bees: high fructose corn syrup.  The same sweetener used in soft drinks is now fed to bees.  The super sweetener, combined with sucrose and protein supplements, arrives in tanker trucks at the temporary installations of migrants bees.  The bees do not appreciate the stand-in and frequently refuse it thus compromising their nutrition.  

In the 21st century, bees work a longer season, have less time off in the winter, travel thousands of miles from their home territory, and eat a modern diet based on corn syrup.  All of these condition weaken the species.  Worker bees become more susceptible to mite infestation.  Queen bees live shorter lives. A bee expert from Pennsylvania reports an exhaustion of sorts, “a strong immune suppression” which he compares to "the AIDS of the bee industry.”

Cross-country travel and an artificial diet are not healthy for bees.  Nor is the constant contact with insecticides and pesticides used in industrial-sized orchards and fields.  One insecticide, whose use continues to rise in the United States, has been banned in some European countries because it is a contributing factor to the decline of the bee population.  

If you have a pet, you probably have the chemical in your home.  It is the active ingredient in a popular flea treatments for dogs and cats.  To prevent fleas, just squeeze a dose of the clear liquid between the animal’s shoulder blades.  Used once a month, the neurotoxin collects in the oils of your pet’s skin and fur and is released over time to kill unwanted insects.  Since it is not soluble in water, the “medication” stays in the pet’s fur, even after swimming.  According to the package instruction, fleas and ticks are killed by “affecting the parasite’s nervous system, causing paralysis and death.”

Too busy to care

As Interstate 5 passes through almond orchards near Bakersfield, I watch carefully for hive-boxes.  I easily spot the squat white forms, about two-feet square, positioned at intervals along the dirt road that skirts the orchard and runs parallel to the freeway.

Five hundred feet separate one cluster of 20 or so of hives from the next. Each group is arranged haphazardly, the boxes not quite squared off into neat neighborhoods.  The bee quarters look like long, low, flat-roofed slums.  Even at 70 mph, I see bare gray wood on the two-storied hives where paint has chipped off.  The disheveled arrangement speaks of keepers in a hurry, too busy to care.

These are no bee mansions.  In other words, hives have not been equipped with extra stories where foraging bees store newly made honey.  Pollination is the game here.  Honey production is kept to the bare minimum.

Industrial agriculture prizes bees only as pollinators.  According to bee expert, Stephan Buchmann, only 25 percent of bees fly solely to collect pollen.  The other 75 percent primarily gather nectar; collecting pollen is only a side job.  Obviously, in an industrialized bee culture, there is a desire to reverse these percentages.  Genetic manipulation has proved somewhat successful in converting more members of the hive to work exclusively on pollination.

Honeybees, when allowed, still produce their own perfect food.  An intensely sweet viscous substance, honey contains 80 percent sugar and 20 percent water.  Made from nectar gathered from flowers, honey represents much hard work and flight time.  The contents of a 16-once jar of honey represents the efforts of tens of thousands of bees flying over 100,000 miles to gather nectar from more than four million flowers.  

Bees turn almond flowers into nuts

Almond trees require an insect intermediary to pollinate its flowers. An almond flower is only an inch and a half across.  Only a bee can turn each flower into a nut.  The flower is self-incompatible; that is, it cannot create a nut using its own pollen.  The flower depends on bees to bring it pollen from a different almond cultivar planted nearby.  To further complicate the process, an almond flower is more receptive to pollination on its opening day.  Pollination must be complete by day four or the flower will not set fruit.

Factory-sized fields require an industrial-sized pollination operation.  This is too big a job for wild gypsy bees or feral bees escaped from local hives. It involves hiring the services of more than a million hives, providing temporary employment to more than 20 billion bees.  And, therein lies the problem.

In Roman times, the beekeeper tended the bees and the bees tended his crops.  But industrial farming rearranges the formula.  Almond farmers have no time to care for bee hives, even though the insect residents are essential to the almond crop.  Instead, industrial orchardists leave bee tending to industrial beekeepers.  In the process, each farmer becomes a specialized monocropper: one with almonds, one with bees. 

National and local newscasts carry reports of strange, unexplained disappearances of bees in the Central Vally.  Thousands of worker bees leave in the morning and simply don’t return at night.  Other strange bee behavior also occurs.  The queen remains active in the hive.  The brood remains safe in capped wax cells.  Adequate food for the hive is present.  Why would the workers abandon all this abundance?