From the Ground Up? The Principles of Australian Organic Agriculture - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 211

pejorative shorthand term to describe manufactured fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides
and fungicides which were created in a laboratory; molecules that did not exist in
a natural form except through human synthesis. To quote author Rachel Carson
(1962), they were “the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his
laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature” (Carson 1963 ).
It was actually fertilizers that were the first type of chemical to galvanize
Australian organic farmers' attention. Chemical fertilizers based on nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potassium (N, P, and K) were used in large quantities in Australia
by the end of the Second World War. Australian farmers used well over a million
tons of artificial fertilizers on a quarter of a million acres of crop and pasture land in
the 1950s. Superphosphate, made by chemically treating phosphorus with sulfuric
acid, was the chemical fertilizer used most heavily by conventional Australian
farmers in the 1940s and 1950s as many Australian soils have a lower level of
naturally occurring soil phosphorus than soils in Europe and North America and
superphosphate, it was hoped, would rectify this 'deficiency'.
Organic growers spoke out strongly in opposition to chemical fertilizers. In
1948, the editor of the Victorian Compost News , stated: “The Victorian Compost
Society ( 1948 ) stands 4-square in its advocacy of organic methods as a means of
maintaining and increasing fertility of the soil. [

] Difficulties can be overcome
without resorting to inorganic chemical fertilizers”. Organic growers condemned
chemical fertilizers for damaging worms and other soil life and disrupting decay
and regrowth of plants (Living Soil Association of Tasmania 1946 ). However, their
antipathy to chemical fertilizers was more fundamental. Artificial fertilizers, based
on the elements nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium were derided for reducing soil
fertility to three agents. In contrast, organic agriculture, they argued, was about
maintaining the complex symbiotic relationship between humans, plants, animals
and soil matter.
British historian Philip Conford ( 2001 ) named these contrasting perspectives
on agriculture 'The Great Humus Controversy'. The chemical perspective held
that minerals (particularly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) were the most
important aspect of plant nutrition, while the biological perspective (held by organic
farmers) drew on agricultural biological research and argued that soil organic
matter was a crucial reservoir of nutrients and was additionally important as a
promoter of bacteria and fungi necessary for plant growth. This controversy was, in
essence, a philosophical battle between ecological and non-ecological perspectives.
Organic growers' ecological view was that health was achieved by working with
biological processes such as decay and regrowth and preventing disease by assisting
biological cycles between plant and animal waste, decay and growth, animal
health and human health. In contrast, supplying individual elements through the
addition of manufactured chemical fertilizers provided a 'quick fix' rather than
systemic prevention. Artificial fertilizers were like a drug, supplying a response to
a deficiency rather than creating a soil environment that would support and provide
healthy, nutrient-rich plants and animals.
By the early 1950s, the Australian organic societies were also strongly arguing
against the use of chemical pesticides. The Australian Organic Farming and

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