Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Organic pioneer and publisher, J.I. Rodale wrote (Rodale 1948):
The
organiculturist
farmer must realise that in him is placed a sacred trust, the task
of producing food that will impart health to the people who consume it. As a
patriotic duty, he assumes an obligation to preserve the fertility of the soil, a
precious heritage that he must pass on, undefiled and even enriched, to subsequent
generations.
Organic farming also has cultural roots in the observations of F.H. King, Sir Albert Howard,
and others who attempted to discern the principles of a permanent agriculture in the centu-
ries-old farming systems of the world, particularly in the Far East. In the preface to King's
topic
Farmers
of
Forty
Centuries
(King 1916), Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote:
We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling of the earth;
yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition of civilization.
King's topic was an attempt to gather the experiences of 40 centuries of farmers in the Far
East. He concluded that organic farming was essential to a permanent agriculture because it
returned organic matter to the soil.
Howard began his topic,
An
Agricultural
Testament
(Howard 1940), with the assertion:
The maintenance of the fertility of the soil is the first condition of any permanent
system of agriculture.
Much of his opening chapter (Howard 1940) was then devoted to contrasting the perma-
nent agriculture of the Orient with the agricultural decline that accompanied the fall of the
Roman Empire. He wrote:
The peasants of China, who pay great attention to the return of all wastes to the
land, come nearest to the ideal set by Nature. They have maintained a large
population on the land without any falling off in fertility. The agriculture of
ancient Rome failed because it was unable to maintain the soil in a fertile
condition.
Historian, Theodor Mommsen, ref lecting on the rise of Rome (Mommsen 1894), wrote:
Many nations have gained victories and made conquests as the Romans did; but
none has equalled the Roman in thus making the ground he had won his own by
the sweat of his brow, and in securing by the ploughshare what had been gained by
the lance.
G.H. Wrench, commenting of the later fall of Rome (Wrench 1939), wrote:
Money, profit, the accumulation of capital and luxury, became the objects of
landowning and not the great virtues of the soil and the farmers of few acres.
Howard concluded:
The farmers of the West are repeating the mistakes made by Imperial Rome.
Modern definitions of organic farming
The early advocates of organic farming clearly understood the critical connections between
health of the soil, health of people, and health of society. These connections also are recog-
nised in most current definitions of organic farming. For example, the Organic Farming
