a ppearanCe oF n egative C onsequenCes

The intensification and industrialization of agriculture led some to conclude that the new practices were ultimately self-defeating. Fertilizers and pesticides caused pollution as they escaped from their place of application. Pesticides were especially damaging, as they were by design toxic to living organisms. Machinery, too, despite the miracle of freeing people from hard drudgery, left its scars in depopulated rural towns and villages. People were not needed anymore, and they became redundant in the countryside.

Increasingly, studies showed that heavy reliance on pesticides created instabil-ity through pollution, development of resistance in target species, and destruc-tion of nontarget organisms. Fertilizer runoff created intense algal blooms in fresh and marine waters, killing desirable species. Chemical changes leading to nitrous oxide created a greenhouse gas that threatened climate. All these problems left many wondering if the benefits of modern, intensive agriculture were really worth it once all the costs were totaled. That the whole enterprise might have the stability

of a house of cards led critics to charge that modern agriculture was, in a word, unsustainable.

The technological transformation of American agriculture had enormous social consequences as well (Lobao and Meyer, 2001). Where more than one-third of the population lived on farms in 1900, by 2000 the proportion was less than 2%. Farming for most Americans had ceased to be a “household livelihood strategy.” At the national or macro level, the changes were swiftest after 1945. Many white farmers left, and almost all African American farmers departed. Large, well-capitalized farm and nonfarm firms ended up dominating the food system. These macro-level changes had counterparts at the community and individual levels. Today one can drive through the Midwest and see small towns devoid of the vitality they once held.

Multiple reform efforts blossomed in contentious disputes about agricultural technology and the rapid changes affecting communities and individuals. Organic agriculture was one of the more prominent agricultural reform movements, and it asserted the ability to provide high-quality food without many of the pollution prob-lems of the fertilizers and pesticides of modern agriculture. The early forms of the

“organic movement” were also deeply agrarian: advocates cared about the fate of rural communities, social justice, and alienation of consumers from farm produc-ers. Put in the context of the current volume, organic farming came to represent the most important form of conversion from conventional agriculture to more sustain-able alternatives.

3.3 BeGiNNiNGs of orGaNiC farmiNG

To understand organic agriculture as a social movement—a phenomenon with tech-nical, scientific, social, economic, political, and philosophical components—it must be examined in light of the history narrated above. In this context, organic agricul-ture arose as an alternative to what had become the taken-for-granted method of growing food. It had origins, early advocates and promoters, and a period of growth during which it penetrated into the mainstream.

The organic food movement united those concerned with environmental health with those focused on human health; it challenged corporations dependent on sales of chemical pesticides and fertilizers; it contested the idea that humans could control natural systems; and it instigated one of the fastest-growing markets of the late twen-tieth century, the market for organic food products.

3.3.1 philosophiCal r^oots

The roots of U.S. organic agriculture lie in the advocacy of a small group of people, mostly from the United Kingdom, who in the late 1930s and early 1940s began to recognize the connections among farming practices and the health of soil, people, and the environment. The British organic movement was part of the larger social turmoil that rocked the United Kingdom during the years between World War I and World War II. British advocates of organic practices fell across a wide spectrum of political thought, from socialist to fascist to conservative nationalist to deeply Christian (Conford, 2001).

Although he did not use the word organic to describe the farming methods he explored, Englishman Sir Albert Howard is often credited with the first articula-tion of the biological principles underlying organic producarticula-tion. Howard attended Cambridge University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in natural science. In 1903, after time with the British Colonial Service in the Caribbean, he attended the Wye College of Agriculture in England (Perkins, 1997). On assignment in Pusa, India, as an economic botanist with the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute of Britain, Howard conducted research on methods of obtaining higher-yielding wheat varieties. After retirement from Imperial service, he moved to the Institute for Plant Industry at Indore in central India.

Before he went to India, Howard saw science as an effort to bring the perspec-tives of genetic and taxonomic theory from the laboratory to the field. Truth lay in performing studies that were interpretable within the basic science framework he had learned at Cambridge. During his time in India, and especially after he went to Indore, Howard reoriented his science to accommodate the knowledge of peasant farmers, time-tested field results, and the constraints of markets. He realized the importance of producing results that real farmers could use under their conditions and for their markets (Gieryn, 1999).

In 1943 Howard authored An Agricultural Testament, which formally introduced the Indore process to Western audiences. In time, the Indore process became known as composting, which today is one of the fundamental practices allowing organic farmers to return organic matter and its attendant nutrients to the soil.*

Howard was wary of the long-term effects of monocrop, chemical-intensive agri-culture on soil fertility in industrialized countries. “The capital of nations which is real, permanent, and independent of everything except a market for the products of farming, is soil” (Howard, 1943, p. 219). After studying Indian methods of farming, Howard suggested that in order to maintain the integrity of the soil, farmers must engage in composting, cover cropping, and crop rotations—elements central to con-temporary organic agriculture. He formulated the law of return, which codified his view that farming should be seen as an integrated system that generated no waste. Soil required the decaying parts of plants and animals to generate humus, without which neither plants nor animals nor people could hope to enjoy health (Heckman, 2006).

The United States was not without its proponents of biologically based agriculture at this time. Concurrent with Howard’s work, William Albrecht, professor of soils at the University of Missouri, argued that soil was one of America’s most valuable natu-ral resources. He encouraged farmers “to restore fertility by the use of lime and fertil-izer … to put some lands permanently into sod crops … and to use sod more regularly in rotations on tillable cropped lands … and use … such farm wastes as crop residues and manures” (Albrecht, 1938, p. 21). His recommendations would ultimately become central to organic farming practices. Albrecht also began to raise questions related to the connection between agricultural practices and human health, an issue that would later become a major driver in the growth of the organic food movement.

* Composting is “the product of a managed process through which microorganisms break down plant and animal materials into more available forms suitable for application to the soil” (Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, 2008, 7 CFR 205.2).

U.S. farmers were offered a “road out of this impasse” by entrepreneur and pub-lisher J. I. Rodale. Rodale began his career as an electric equipment manager and founder of numerous how-to and health care magazines, including Prevention. He lived in rural Pennsylvania in the late 1930s and became interested in agricultural practices that retained soil health.

Rodale, like Howard and Albrecht, contended that soil health was paramount in long-term agricultural success and supported farming practices that maintained and built soil fertility. He, too, perceived human health as intrinsically tied to agricultural practices.

His interest in farming practices and human and environmental health prompted him to publish the magazine Organic Gardening and Farming, which provided instruction to farmers on how to integrate biological principles into food production on all scales.

The publication also served as a bridge between the agricultural community and the American consumer, planting the seed for the concept that the manner in which food was produced can have significant impacts on individual health.

Interest in his work grew and he founded the Soil and Health Foundation, now known as the Rodale Institute. The institute, today, continues to publish books, edu-cate farmers, promote organic agriculture, and conduct research on organic and other chemical-free farming practices.

The term organic farming was coined by Lord Northbourne (born Walter Earnest Christopher James) in his 1940 book Look to the Land. The term organic came from his conception of “the farm as organism.” He described a holistic, ecologically balanced approach to farming. The term organic, as a description of the practices advocated by Northbourne, Rodale, Albrecht, and Howard, took hold and today con-tinues to describe a way of farming that supports the health of soil, plants, and people (Jamison, 2003; Heckman, 2006).

Howard, Northbourne, Albrecht, and Rodale provided organic agriculture with a solid scientific and philosophical foundation. They saw the imperative for respect-ing nature with science, not simply dominatrespect-ing and controllrespect-ing it instrumentally. To make this point forcefully, Howard used the metaphor of war in his most outspoken work, The War in the Soil (1946). Here he railed against what he saw as a simplis-tic mindset derived from the German chemist Otto Von Liebig: just put the right mineral nutrients near a plant, and the plant will thrive. Howard and the others saw instead that soil was a kind of living entity and that using the soil for human pur-poses required a subtle partnership with nature. The law of return summarized his deeply held belief that waste must return to the soil for health. This co-equal status of science and nature philosophy continues to drive much of the critical thinking about organic agriculture to this day.