Comment: The Great Subject

IN 1964 MY WIFE TANYA AND I BOUGHT a craggy and neglected little farm upon which we intended to be augmented as much of our possess food as we could. My editor at the time was Dan Wickenden who was an organic gardener and whose father, Leonard Wickenden, had written a practical and inspiring volume Gardening with Nature, which I bought and read. Tanya and I wanted to raise our possess food because we liked the idea of being independent to that expansion and because we did not like the toxicity, expensiveness, and wastefulness of "modern" sustenance production. Gardening with Nature was written for tribe like us, and it helped us to diocese that what we wanted to do was possible. I asked Dan where his father's ideas had advance from, and he gave me the name of Sir Albert Howard. My reading of Howard, which began at that time, has at no time stopped, for I have go [i]or[/i] come backed again and again to his work and his meditation I have been aware of his influence in virtually everything I have done, and I don't await to graduate from it. That is because his way of dealing with the subdue of agriculture is also a way of dealing with the subdue of life in this world. His contemplation is systematic, coherent, and inexhaustible.

Sir Albert Howard published several volumes and also many articles in journals of agricultural science. The sum of two units of his books that are best known were addressed the one and the other to general readers and to his associate scientists: An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health. He was born in 1873 to a farming family in Shropshire, and he died in 1947

An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health are cropss of Howard's many years as a conduct scientist in India, during which he conceived, and plant upon a sound scientific footing, the kind of agriculture to which his followers have applied the boundary "organic." But by 1940, when the first of these works was published, the industrialization of agriculture had already begun. by the agency of 1947, when The Soil and Health was published, World War II had prov the effectiveness of the mechanical and chemical technology that in the coming decades would radically alter one as well as the other the practice of agriculture and its underlying assumptions.

This "revolution" marginalized Howard's work and the kind of agriculture he advocated. So-called organic agriculture survived single on the margin. It was practiced by dint of some farmers of admirable independence and profitable sense and also by more [i]or[/i] less authentic nuts. In the hands of the better practitioners, it was proven to be a healthful, productive, and economical way of farming. on the contrary while millions of their clients wearied themselves into bankruptcy on industrial supplies, the evangelists of industrial agriculture in rule and the universities ignored the example of the felicitous organic farmers, just as they ignored the equally prosperous example of Amish farming.

Meanwhile, Howard's meditation as manifested by the "organic movement" was seriously oversimplified. As it was understood and prescribed, organic agriculture improved the health of harvests by building humus in the soil, and it abstained from the use of toxic chemicals. There is nothing objectionable about this kind of agriculture in the way that far as it goes, on the contrary it does not go far enough. It does not conceive of farms in limits of their biological and economic manner of making because it does not join farming with its ecological and social adjoining matters Under the current and now official definition of organic farming, it is possible to have a vast "organic" farm that grows solitary one or two crops, has no animals or pastures, is entirely hanging on industrial technology and economics, and imports all its fertility and activity It was precisely this sort of specialization and oversimplification that Sir Albert Howard worked and wrote against all his life.

At at hand this movement-if we can still apply that boundary to an effort that is many-branched, multi-centered, and always in flux-in at least a certain quantity of of its manifestations appears to be working decisively against of that kind oversimplification and the industrial gigantism that oversimplification allows. more [i]or[/i] less food companies as well as a certain number of consumers now understand that single the smaller family farms, similar as those of the Amish, permit the diversity and the careful attention that Howard's standards require.

Howard's fundamental assumption was that the processe of agriculture, if they are to sustain have to be analogous to the processe of nature. If single is farming in a place previously forested, then the farm must be a systematic analogue of the forest, and the farmer must be a scholar of the forest. Howard stated his premise as a little allegory:

The main characteristic of Nature's farming can be summed up in a not many words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to defend the soil and to obstruct erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are changeed into humus; there is no waste; the processe of growing and the processes of decay balance individual another; ample provision is made to maintain large keeps of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; the two plants and animals are left to harbor themselves against disease.