Thinking about the Land: A Personal Perspective on the Origin of Organic Farming
Almost a hundred years ago “on a misty Boxing Day [26th December] in 1926, a dozen young men assembled at a hamlet in Wiltshire [in southwest England] for their annual midwinter hike across the Wessex Downs . . . [They] were fired by an urge for spiritual regeneration . . . [Their leader] Rolf Gardiner recalled:
we were to subdue ourselves to the dark masterhood of midwinter . . . and yield to the inherent forces of the spirit incarnate in the earth.”
When some years ago I read this introduction to historian Frank Trentmann’s “Civilization and Its Discontents: Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Western Culture” (1994), I thought “I met Rolf Gardiner once. I had no idea that he thought like that.”
More recently, as I have been reading about origins of organic farming in particular and environmentalism more generally, I find Gardiner’s name cropping up time and again. In 1941, Rolf Gardiner (1902-71) founded a group called Kinship in Husbandry. Five years later The Soil Association was instituted, with four members of the Kinship on the Board and others as founder members.
Most histories of the environmental movement depict the Kinship and the Soil Association as bold pioneers bringing light into the the darkness. But the darkness of what? Taking for granted what the Kinship and the Soil Association asserted about the state of British farming, environmental historians have done little to explore what farmers were actually thinking and doing during the Depression and World War II.
To be fair, this is not the fault of the environmental historians. Like most historians, they are trying to extract a comprehensible story, not present the past in all its complexity. They are also faced with the fact that for all the outpouring of writing on the history of British farming by agricultural, economic, and rural historians (yes, these are different groups with different agendas), there is, as many commentators have pointed out, almost nothing on the farmers themselves.
I’d like to add the perspective of the farmers, or my memory of the perspective of the farmers, supplemented by wide if casual reading in the history of British agriculture. Rolf Gardiner ran a farm on the western border of the Wiltshire down land, just at the junction with the Blackmore Vale. My family farmed in the area that stretched about 30 miles east of his land and 15 miles north and south, the chalk down land of southwest Wiltshire. Together these make up the Wessex in the introductory quotation, the area of an Anglo-Saxon Kingdom from about 500-900 AD. ( If you’ve ever read Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope, or perhaps the rather less well known Richard Jefferies or W.H. Hudson, this is their world).
This is thus a tiny personal story told from the perspective of the farmers for whom I have great sympathy. I hope not uncritically so, though. As an ambitious young woman for whom my parents had provided an excellent education, I left when I was 18 and returned only periodically since I did not see a future in farming that I wanted as a woman. My memories are fifty years old and if anyone from that area or time wants to correct them, gently I hope, please do.
It does, I hope, reinforce two points that are becoming increasingly clear about the history of organic farming.
First, that the debate about organic farming in the first half of the 20th century was about far more than avoiding the use of synthetic fertilizers and farm machinery. What was at stake was who owned land, who did the work of farming, what were the relations between cities and countryside, and what the health of the soil had to do with broader social issues.
Second, that the debate thus had roots going back to the changes in agriculture that began no later than the mid eighteenth century and that played out across northern Europe, and across its settlement and former settlement colonies including the United States, and even today into ideas about development in other parts of the world.
In short, although a perspective from one tiny pinhole, it has a much wider resonance.
I anticipate four more posts. On meeting Rolf Gardiner on a perfect summer evening; the farmer’s foot; Rolf Gardiner’s vision; is there anything to Arcadia, the elite dream of happiness?
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The literature on the history of organic farming and on Rolf Gardiner is growing rapidly. Just a few items.
Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (2001) and The Development of the Organic Network: Linking People and Themes, 1945-95 (2011).
Gregory A. Barton, The Global History of Organic Farming (Oxford, 2018).
Mainly focused on Howard and, more important, his wives. Excellent for this and for Japan. Perhaps the full global story has yet to be told though.
Charles Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet ( Knopf, 2018).
The connection with the American movement (and much else) told with Mann’s usual flair.
Hi Rachel, I will be fascinated to read what you have to say on this subject, and in part because, by happenstance, I am currently living near several bio-dynamic farms and, curiously and marvelously, from my desk, I have a view of the immense cement edifice known as the Goetheanum. So! I would be especially interested to learn of any English connections with Rudolf Steiner, et al.
I wasn’t going to address that in particular but since you are interested will try to do so at least in passing. And now to google the Goetheanum!
Until the industrial revolution, fertilizers were manure and pesticides were plant extracts. As a child in England, I remember learning in first or second grade about medieval strip farming and crop rotation, including periodic fallow years.
Much of what now is considered “organic farming” is not new.
It certainly isn’t!
Different direction than i imagined after reading the opening quote. I know some doctors who have begun to talk about how loosing our connection with the earth is having a negative impact on our health. But looking at changes in farming will be of even greater interest to me.
What I want to do is to recreate the Wiltshire farmer’s world ca 1950 to explain why the pleas of the Rolf Gardiner Kinship were so unpersuasive.
My perspective on biodynamic agriculture is @ https://stephenjforbes.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/biodynamic-viticulture/
So, essentially both biodynamic and organic agriculture might view the farmer primarily as a curator (- someone who ‘takes care of’). The caring part is critical. David Levi Strauss explains curators in the context of art history, ‘One could say that the split within curating – between the management and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith) – was there from the beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest’.
The farmer/ curator pays (close) attention to the crop and its environment, and the resulting interventions reflect this attention.. Such an approach is then indeed an ancient one – at the very origins of agriculture. But perhaps there’s an algorithm that covers the farmer/ curator’s observation and care now.
I’m greatly looking forward to your history. Thanks again for your excellent work.
Good to see you pop up again Stephen. And thanks for the link. I wouldn’t want to limit the idea of curator to biodynamic or organic agriculture.As will become clear I am pretty skeptical about both. But I do think taking care is crucial.
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