Although he was a proud servant of the British Empire, Robert McCarrison (third from left, during a tour of his workshop in India in 1926) became convinced that Asian farming methods were superior to those in Europe. Credit 36
McCarrison’s research, published in 1921, was an early example of a new scientific genre: the study of poor people in isolated places who live long, vigorous lives. Missionaries on the Ogowe River in Gabon; anthropologists in the U.S. Southwest; gold-mine officials in South Africa; doctors in Inuit villages—all encountered groups in remote areas who rarely experienced cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and the other chronic conditions that have come to be called “diseases of civilization.” Despite poverty, poor sanitation, and lack of medical care, the Hunza were healthier than their British counterparts. The reason, McCarrison concluded, was that British working-class diets, with their tinned meat, sugary tea, and poofy white bread, were much poorer in vitamins than Hunza diets.
In the early 1920s McCarrison met two Indian agricultural chemists, Bhagavatula Viswanath and M. Suryanarayana. Based at a research institute in Coimbatore, in southern India, they had been comparing synthetic fertilizers and manure.*3 The former had been backed by the revered Liebig, whereas the latter had been used to replenish soil in South Asia for millennia. Liebig believed that grain produced with synthetic fertilizer and grain produced with manure should be identical, as long as the additives had the same nutrients. In practice, he thought, the synthetic should be better, because scientists could create mixes that targeted individual soils, giving the farmer more control. To test the great man’s ideas, Viswanath and Suryanarayana grew wheat and millet in identical plots with manure and synthetic fertilizer, then chemically analyzed the resultant grain.
Intrigued, McCarrison suggested that the real question was not the different grains’ chemical makeups, but their quality as food. Pushing his way into the enterprise, he commandeered a laboratory and fed the two men’s experimental wheat and millet to rats and pigeons. Animals fed on the manure version grew robustly; those given chemically fertilized wheat and millet suffered from malnourishment. There was something in the manure-fed humus, he concluded, a factor that Liebig hadn’t known about. McCarrison published this finding in 1926, assigning himself the byline and the lion’s share of the credit.
Then he went further—beyond the ideas of his reluctant collaborators, Viswanath and Suryanarayana. A logical next step could have been to pin down the identity of the special nutrients in manure, then add them to synthetic fertilizers. But instead McCarrison had a conversion experience: one of those aha! moments that transform lives. He decided that the underlying issue was Liebig’s reductionist view of the soil as a passive reservoir of chemical nutrients.
In a set of lectures in 1936, McCarrison laid out what would become the ideology of the counterforce. “Perfectly constituted food,” McCarrison said, was the single biggest determinant of good health. The most important part of this perfectly constituted food was plants: fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. In turn, he said, the nutritive qualities of those plants depended on how they were cultivated. And here Liebig was simply incorrect; chemistry was not the whole story. To grow the best, most nutritious crops, farmers needed (to put it in modern terms) to view their land not as a store of chemicals to be managed efficiently but as a complexly interacting living system to be cherished and maintained. Every part of the system contributed to the whole, but one predominated: the soil.
Impoverishment of the soil leads to a whole train of evils: pasture of poor quality; poor quality of the [live]stock raised upon it; poor quality of the foodstuffs they provide for man; poor quality of the vegetable foods that he cultivates for himself; and, faulty nutrition with resultant disease in both man and beast. Out of the earth are we and the plants and animals that feed us created, and to the earth we must return the things whereof we and they are made if it is to yield again foods of a quality suited to our needs.
The soil! The soil! When fed by plant remains and animal excrement, it became a vibrant, circulatory network that nourished the plants and animals which fed it. Rather than trying to replicate this system in the laboratory—an attempt doomed to fail—farmers should simply let the soil ecosystem create it naturally from humus, as Asian farmers had for millennia.
McCarrison’s ideas overlapped with those of Albert Howard, another expatriate Briton in India. Born in 1873, Howard grew up on a farm on the western edge of England. Early experiences with plow and scythe led to unyielding skepticism of the microscope-wielding lab dwellers who never had dirt beneath their nails. At the same time Howard himself had impeccable academic credentials: a first-class degree in chemistry at the Royal College of Science, top of his class in agricultural science at Cambridge.
In 1905 Howard was lured to the new Agricultural Research Institute in Pusa, in northeast India. Accompanying Albert was his new wife, Gabrielle, a Cambridge-educated plant physiologist. The Howards became partners in the laboratory as in life, though he received more recognition—inevitable, one assumes, given the time. Individually and together, they bred new varieties of wheat and tobacco, studied root distribution, developed novel types of plow, and tested the results of providing oxen with a super-healthy diet and living quarters but not vaccinating them against disease. From the beginning, Gabrielle had urged Albert to think holistically, to see connections between different fields of inquiry. By 1918 their ideas were clear: “the health of the soil, plant, and animal were linked to each other, that fertile soil held the key to increased crop yield, and that manure was the key to soil fertility.” (I am quoting Conford, the University of Leicester historian, whose work I am following here.)
On a practical level, the Howards’ most important contribution may have been developing what is called the Indore process of composting, Indore being the region of central India where their work took place. McCarrison had focused on soil additives, especially manure; the Howards looked at composting, in which bacteria and fungi break down agricultural and household waste, fixing its nitrogen into usable ammonia and nitrates. In the Indore process, waste was inoculated with bacteria and fungi and mixed with ash in a five-to-one ratio; the material was periodically turned to expose it to oxygen, maximizing nitrogen fixation. The Howards’ methods, slightly modified, remain in use today for large-scale composting.
Others had previously focused on composting, including, famously, the celebrated French novelist Victor Hugo. Violating every rule of narrative, Hugo interrupts the climax of his great novel Les Misérables (1862) to hector the reader for fifteen pages about the Parisian sewer system. The city’s sewers discharged vast quantities of excrement into rivers, which carried it to the sea. That excrement, Hugo proclaimed, should instead be applied to farmers’ fields: “the most fertilizing and effective of manures is that of man.” The guano trade—shipping bags of fertilizer across the ocean!—was an intercontinental folly.
We fit out convoys of ships, at great expense, to gather up at the south pole the droppings of petrels and penguins [Hugo wrote, inexactly], and the incalculable element of wealth which we have under our own hand, we send to sea….To employ the city to enrich the plain would be a sure success. If our gold is filth, our filth is gold.
Hugo’s call for greater use of compost and manure was echoed by later writers, though none with his rhetorical exuberance. But neither Hugo nor his successors had much effect—the sewers kept flushing golden filth into the water. And Howard’s work might have received equally little notice if his wife, Gabrielle, had not died unexpectedly in 1930.
Bereft, Howard resigned and returned to Britain to putter sadly about his garden. He believed his career was over. Instead it entered an active new phase. Soon after coming to England, he married Gabrielle’s equally remarkable younger sister Louise, a Cambridge-educated pacifist and suffragist who had taught classics, become a character in a Virginia Woolf novel (in life, she had been an editorial assistant to Woolf’s husband, Leonard), and chaired th
e agricultural division of the International Labor Organization in Switzerland. Louise did not want Howard to abandon her sister’s work. Howard found himself traveling the world, promulgating the Indore process—and more.
“The basis of all Nature’s farming,” he said, was the Law of Return: “the faithful return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal, and human wastes.” When bacteria, bugs, and birds die, their bodies return to the soil and provide nutrition for other life. The same occurs for their wastes. Humans, too, must return the residues of their existence to the earth. Civilizations fall because societies forget this simple rule. We depend on plants, plants depend on soil, soil depends on us. The Law of Return embodies an insight: everything affects everything else.
McCarrison had been promulgating much the same message, but Howard had a knack for coining a phrase and a willingness to promote his views with a kind of cheerful, over-the-top viciousness—“amiable brutality,” Louise Howard called it. His An Agricultural Testament, published in 1943, is often called the founding document of the organic movement. In its pages Howard didn’t just extol composting, he took after “the NPK mentality”—named after the chemical symbols for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the key ingredients in synthetic fertilizer. He didn’t simply criticize the scientist who rarely ventured into fields, he called out this wretched specimen as a “laboratory hermit,” “all intent on learning more and more about less and less” in the bowels of an “obsolete research organization.” He didn’t merely limit himself to decrying the overuse of synthetic fertilizers, he contended that they were actively toxic: “The slow poisoning of the life of the soil by artificial manures is one of the greatest calamities which has befallen agriculture and mankind.”
Organic pioneers (from left) Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour, and Lord Northbourne Credit 37, Credit 38, Credit 39
Howard became the nucleus of a small but influential movement, the influence due partly to the fact that many of its members were aristocratic Christians who saw industrial agriculture as a threat to both the social and divine orders. Boldfaced names like Lord Bledisloe (governor of New Zealand), the Duke of Bedford (founder of the humus-promoting, anti-Semitic British People’s Party), and Lord Northbourne (author of Look to the Land) were among its most prominent exponents. Howard himself was knighted in 1934. Indeed, toffs were so heavily represented in the Soil Association, Britain’s leading farm-reform organization, that its early meetings were like house parties at Downton Abbey, except that the discussions over sherry were about manure and earthworms.
Exemplary in these respects was Howard’s leading convert, Soil Association founder and president Lady Eve Balfour, author of The Living Soil (1943). Balfour’s background was a mix of money, power, and mysticism: one of her grandfathers was viceroy of India; the other, a socially prominent occultist and writer. Her father was the chief secretary of Ireland at the same time that her uncle was the British prime minister. Inspired by a deep but idiosyncratic Christian faith, Lady Balfour sought a “spiritual and moral revival” in which taking care of the land would play a central part. Through “service to our God, service to the soil, service to each other,” she said, poor humankind would ascend into “the next evolutionary stage,” creating “the Kingdom of God on Earth.”
Across the Atlantic sprang up a similar movement. It, too, owed inspiration to Howard and McCarrison and had many adherents who were inspired by Christianity. But it was in no way aristocratic. Instead, its central figure was Jerome I. Rodale, a hardscrabble entrepreneur, publisher, playwright, gardening theorist, food experimenter, and anti-vaccine advocate. Born in a Jewish ghetto in New York City in 1898, Rodale was a sickly youth, prone to headaches and colds; his family was plagued by congenital heart problems. After working as an accountant and tax auditor, he launched a successful electrical-equipment firm with his brother. When the Depression hit, the Rodale siblings cut costs by moving the plant to rural Pennsylvania. Once relocated in the quiet countryside, Jerome had time on his hands. Almost as a hobby, he set up a publishing company, issuing pamphlets about manners, humor, and health.
In 1941 he read a magazine article about Howard. Rodale was still beset by headaches and colds and feared he had a weak heart. Diet, maybe, was the answer. Scientists might scoff, but the idea made sense to him. Intrigued, he read An Agricultural Testament. He had been primed, years earlier, by hearing McCarrison speak. Now Howard’s book went through his eyes to his heart and burned there like a flame. He contacted Howard. He bought a sixty-acre farm nearby and began working it according to the Law of Return. He read more of Howard and Howard’s circle, like Lady Balfour, Lord Northbourne, Lionel Picton (editor of The Compost News Letter), and McCarrison. Indeed, Rodale liked McCarrison’s writing so much that Rodale, too, wrote a boosterish book about the Hunza Valley even though he had never set foot outside the United States. The Healthy Hunza was published by Rodale Press in April 1948, four months before Road to Survival. By that time Rodale was hailing his bumper crops and his improved health.
Rodale died in 1971—bizarrely, on a television talk show, suffering a heart attack minutes after declaring “I never felt better in my life!” and offering the host his special asparagus boiled in urine. Naturally, this attracted ridicule. But he left a mighty legacy—and he lived twenty years longer than his siblings, all of whom, like him, had heart conditions.
Soon after reading Howard’s book, Rodale had repackaged his ideas in an article—“Present Day Crops Unfit for Human Consumption!”—in his small magazine, Fact Digest. It caused such a stir that Rodale shuttered Fact Digest and opened a new magazine, Organic Farming and Gardening. Later he realized that the number of people who might buy organic food was much greater than the number who would be interested in growing it themselves. In 1950 he launched Prevention magazine to “build the organic movement stronger and stronger” by promoting organic food to consumers. Lord Northbourne had coined the term “organic farming” in 1940, almost as an aside. By splashing “organic” on a magazine cover, Rodale transformed it from a neutral word that meant relating to or derived from living creatures to a special label for the “life-giving” food that came from abjuring factory-made chemicals. It was a cudgel with which to beat industrial agriculture. In 1948 Organic Farming and Gardening had ninety thousand paid subscribers. By the time of Rodale’s death the number had grown to half a million. Prevention had more than a million. Despite basing himself in the middle of nowhere and refusing most mainstream advertising, Rodale had built up an empire of belief.*4
J. I. Rodale Credit 40
“Muck and Magic”
Such effusions naturally generated a pushback of their own. Agriculture officials, farming associations, chemical companies, and university researchers denounced Howard and Rodale for decades. “Half truths, pseudo science, and emotion,” said the dean of a Kansas farm school in a widely cited attack. Rodale’s followers were a “cult of misguided people” who had turned their backs on science. “Alarmists,” sneered a California farm official about the organic movement. “Are chemical fertilizers harmful? The answer is no!” Nor would the industry allow pesticides to be deprecated. “A Poison for Every Bug,” proclaimed The Country Gentleman, the biggest U.S. agricultural magazine. Food faddist! Charlatan! Crackpot!—Rodale and his followers received every insult in the thesaurus. “I was touching off a powder keg,” he said, proudly.
Some of the criticism was justified. Laboratory-hermit researchers reproached Howard, often accurately, for overstating his case. When Howard asserted that “artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women”—well, ordinary scientists rolled their eyes. Inevitably? Howard had proof? And what, exactly, are “artificial animals” and “artificial men and women”?
Compounding the sin, in critics’ eyes, the organic movement blithely ignored costs. To make food for millions with compost, wrote the fertilizer chemist Donald Hopkins, would requi
re “a truly colossal effort in terms of labor, transport, and planning.” The outlays would drive up the price of food—terrible for people with limited incomes. Maybe food produced by “the disciples of Liebig” was somehow “artificial,” but it made life easier for the vulnerable poor.
Most of all, opponents charged that Howard and his followers based their ideas on spirituality, rather than science; ideology, rather than empirical data. In their eyes, Howard’s “extremist views” were bringing back the long-discredited, flat-Earth belief that humus was imbued with a special life-force. The purported agricultural reform, critics scoffed, was little more than a species of right-wing mysticism—“muck and magic,” they called it.
Again, some of the criticism was merited. Lady Balfour indeed approached Aristotle and pneuma when she talked about “the living principle in nature…the ingredient of life itself, which permeates each individual cell of all the countless millions that go to make up the plant or animal’s body.” And it was hard for secular researchers to contain themselves when Howard rhapsodized over decaying plant and animal matter (“glorious forest humus”) and called it “the very beginning of vegetable life and therefore of plant life and of our own being.”
In other ways, though, the conflict seems absurd. Howard was inspired by a religious faith in a natural order with limits that could not be exceeded with impunity. But when he lauded the living nature of humus, he was referring to the community of soil organisms, the dynamic relations between plant roots and the earth around them, and the physical structure of humus (humus stickily binds together soil particles into airy crumbs that hold water instead of letting it run through)—all of which were very real, and all of which were unknown when Justus von Liebig formed the basic ideas behind chemical agriculture. Howard’s argument that the industrialization of farming was depopulating the countryside and disrupting an older way of life was accurate, too, though his opponents disagreed with him about whether this was a bad thing. And his fears about soil seem prescient—a landmark study from the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization concluded in 2011 that up to a third of the world’s cropland is degraded.
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