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.
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