Ecological Agriculture

Organic agriculture is a powerful social movement that has challenged, for over a century, the expansion of industrial capitalist agriculture, first in the US and Europe and then in the whole world.  In its current form, organic agriculture originated 75 years ago in Europe with the Demeter or Biodynamic movement, inspired by the German philosopher, Rudolf Steiner .  In the US, it has additional roots, beginning some 20 years later.  Only recently has organic agriculture entered the awareness of the general public, especially outside the US and Europe , but it has represented a critique and an alternative to what has become conventional practice in food production since before World War II.

During the early decades of the 20th Century, the US govenment began a policy of supporting comercial, “scientific” agriculture. In what has been called a ‘ productivist ’ orientation, policies were developed to maximize food production of “cheap food at any cost” to subsidize low wages for urban industrial workers.  With the pretext of a national emergency created by World War I, the government controlled inputs and equipment and obligated farmers to increase production and expand cultivated area in the name of national security.  In May of 1920, with the armistice signed, farm prices descended back to their pre-war levels, leaving farmers bankrupt, in debt and poorer than ever.  In this situation, farmers in danger of loosing their lands or forced to become renters on their own forfeited land, saw no alternative but to continue in the productivist, indusrial model that sunk them further into the swamp of debt and low prices.

In the 1930s, in the heart of the grain belt, nature also foreclosed on her debt against human abuse of the semi-arid prairie lands with a catastrophic drought that devastated thousand of acres brought under plow in previous decades--the " dust bowl ".  The magnitud of the disaster was such, displacing thousands of farm families and provoking massive emigration, that it could not be ignored.  In 1936, Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Allotment Act, as proposed by the progressive Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace .  Several distinguished members of American civil society participated in the effort initiated by this bill, conducting a 20 year national discussion about the most appropriate technologies for the health of soils and American agriculture.  It was in this context that the US organic movement, who found its spokeman in J.I. Rodale who, in 1942, found Organic Farming and Gardening, apparently the first use of the term “organic” with that meaning. The magazine documented and promoted the organic movement during the next 50 years (Wheeler & Esainko 1997).

The inspiration for Rodale and other in organic agriculture was the British agricultural scientist Albert Howard .  Perhaps the founding text of the organic movement was his 1905 An Agricultural Testament, where Howard reported his observations of traditional agricultural practices in India and elsewhere. His research had convinced him that the key to soil fertility lie in crop diversity and the recycling of organic matter.  Hre reported on his experiments with large-scale compost production, the use of green manures. He affirmed that pests and plant diseases were merely the symptoms of a poorly managed soil. He argued that chemical inputs poisoned soil life necessary to plant nutrition. Although trained as a research scientist he was highly critical of research divorced from agricultural practice and he condemned the big commercial, “scientific” agriculture of his time.

The distinguished citizens who participated in the National Conservation Service did not promote the organic model of agiculture.  On the contrary, especially the scientists, ridiculed farmers like Rodale as well as any scientist who pretended to evaluate organic techniques. The large agribusiness corporations already exerted influence on the research agenda of the principal universities.  From the 1940s on, the research establishment inveighed against those who criticized the use of synthetic fertilizers and agricultural toxins, with greater vehemence when the point to possible alternative based on organic techniques.  Rather than present scientific arguments, however, these researchers preferred to personal slander those colleagues who defended organic agricultures, characterizing them as “extremists”, “nature-lovers”, etc., and organic techniques as a religious sect, “that ridiculous dogma”.  They frequently rehearsed the now familiar argument that, without agrochemicals, “we could not feed the world.”  This visceral hostility of agricultural scientists to organics continues to this day, as indicated by the reaction to the landmark publication on alternative agriculture by the National Research Council in 1989.

The opinion control and the social and institutional pressure against organic agriculture was so strong that several important experiences, demonstating the viability of organic methods, had passed by without serious evaluation by ag scientists.  For example, 1972 the Spray family of Ohio decides to convert their 730 acre farm to organic production. During the next 25 year they demonstrated that organic farms not only can prosper, but equal or surpass conventional levels of productivity, once an diverse and stable agroecosystem is established.  The Spray farm is an enduring example for all who doubt that organic agriculture “ can feed the world .”  Finally, in 1989 the result of this experiment were scientifically evaluated by the authors of the Alternative Agriculture study.  As mentioned above, this study was not well received by the ag research establishment and their corporate friends and especially, the government, confirmed by the subsequent treatment of the people involved in the publication, who lost their jobs, and by the dissolution of the agency that carried out the study (Wheeler & Esainko 1997).

However, even as the scientists and bureaucrats began to talk about “sustainable agriculture”, ignoring the organic movement, farmer in the US and Europe, and soon in other regions of the world as well, continued developing organic techniques, recovering or inventing methods without chemical toxins, exchanging information among themselves and earning a reputation for commitment and quality among consumers.  In spite of decades of effort to discredit them, organic famers have increased market share along with growing worries by consumers over the environmental damage caused by conventional agriculture and the impact on their health of increasingly lower quality industrial food. For many years now. The organic market in the US has been growing at the rate of 20 to 25% per year, thus becoming the most dynamic branch of the food economy.  Some 24 million hectares of land is cultivated using organic methods throughout the world . 

 

 

Wheeler, V. y P. Esainko

1997  Purity and danger: Regulating organic farming. En B.R. Johnston Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the End of the Millennium, pág. 151-172. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

 

 While some people are still questioning the viability of organic and sustainable techniques, others have begun to document the impact of the adoption of these techiques by farmers all over the world:

Low-tech, sustainable agriculture is increasing crop yields on poor farms across the world, often by 70 percent or more. This has been achieved by replacing synthetic chemicals with natural pest control and natural fertilizers.    Professor Jules Pretty, director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex, wrote, “Recent evidence from 20 countries has found more than 2 million families farming sustainably on more than 4-5 million hectares. This is no longer marginal. It cannot be ignored. What is remarkable is not so much the numbers, but that most of this has happened in the past 5-10 years. Moreover, many of the improvements are occurring in remote and resource-poor areas that had been assumed to be incapable of producing food surpluses.”