My introductory post on organic farming (Organic Agriculture: Its Origins, and Evolution Over Time) highlighted Sir Albert Howard’s role in describing its fundamental practices and principles. Seeing Nature as the most efficient and enduring of all farmers, Howard portrayed organic agriculture as a holistic endeavor inseparable from a farm’s environmental conditions. In Howard’s view, an organic farm worked as a self-contained system comprised of resources both native, such as soil, and those externally introduced, such as seed and livestock. Farming organically meant to cycle solar energy and nutrients through the system by replicating natural processes by composting, cover cropping and rotational grazing. Howard stressed that organic farmers must continuously improve their production practices to bring their systems into closer harmony with nature.
However insightful it was, the organic vision that Howard and his peers, notably Lady Eve Balfour in England and J.I. Rodale
in America, had outlined by 1950 was incompatible with the changes then
transforming commercial agriculture. The components of this
transformation were not all that new – chemically derived fertilizers
and pesticides were introduced in the nineteenth century and hybrid
seeds and mechanized tractors became commercially available during the
1920s. The agricultural intelligentsia at the publicly funded,
university based research and extension system was solidly committed to
this more industrialized approach to farming before the Great
Depression and Second World War impeded the transition. The conditions
during the 1920s that precipitated the Dust Bowl – mono-cultural
commodity production (wheat) dependent on mechanization (tractors to
plant, plow and harvest) for foreign markets (Europe) pointed to
agriculture’s future come peace time. After 1945, the United States had
the scientific, educational and industrial capacity and the economic
incentive to replace traditional solar and animal powered agriculture
with an industrial model driven by fossil fuels.
Commercial agriculture was part of a broader cultural transformation
after the Second World War as the marriage between the industrial
revolution of the nineteenth century and the scientific discoveries of
the twentieth became synonymous with progress. Faith in human mastery
of the environment – reflected in the ability to decode DNA or travel
to outer space – pushed technology to the realm of religion. The new
and improved way of doing things characteristically involved synthetic
compounds that interrupted rather than complimented natural processes.
For example, the recently synthesized insecticide DDT seemed capable of
eradicating pest populations that posed grave risks to human health and
agricultural production. Under constant pressure to operate profitably,
American farmers embraced the brave new world of industrial agriculture
that academic, commercial and governmental authorities enthusiastically
endorsed. Excluding the great many that subsequently left farming and
the relatively few who have found a viable alternative, American
farmers are making that same choice today.
