Organic Farming

ORGANIC FARMING

ORGANIC FARMING coalesced as a movement in the United States in the 1940s with the work of J. I. Ro-dale of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, who followed the British agricultural botanist Sir Albert Howard in the belief that healthy soil produces healthy people. Beginning in 1942, Rodale published Rodale's Organic Gardening, a magazine dedicated to organic gardening and farming, which drew subscribers ranging from home gardeners to truck farmers. Spurning synthetic fertilizers, he advocated natural soil-builders, such as composted organic materials and ground rock. He and his disciples reacted against synthetic pesticides such as DDT, and livestock antibiotics such as penicillin, which were just finding their way onto farms and into farm produce. After the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), many Americans became concerned with human health and permanence. Thus, organic farming found many adherents in the late 1960s and the 1970s among both antitechnology members of the counterculture and environmentally concerned consumers. Synthetic agricultural chemicals, which had become a staple in U.S. agriculture in the post–World War II period, increasingly came under attack as scientists recognized many of them as carcinogenic. The back-to-basics philosophy of the environmental movement boosted the popularity of organic agriculture as a healthy alternative to the seemingly apocalyptic results of high technology.

For decades the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had advocated use of synthetic agricultural chemicals while bemoaning the loss of humus and topsoil. Responding to environmental concerns, petroleum shortages, and rampant inflation in the 1970s, the USDA began to advocate research into conversion of urban and industrial organic wastes into composted soil-builders that farmers could use to increase fertility and restore soil structure. The Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 called for federally funded pilot projects to help introduce organic techniques as supplements to chemical-intensive agriculture. Advocates maintained that organic farming would support family farms by lowering costs, increasing yields, and raising quality, as well as by helping farmers to conserve soil and other natural farm resources. By the mid-1980s organic techniques such as low-till and no-till farming, in which farmers leave crop residues in fields to increase humus and to decrease water and wind erosion, were common practice among cereal farmers in the Midwest.

Public awareness of these issues continued to grow. In the late 1980s a widely publicized controversy erupted over Alar, a chemical sprayed on apples and other produce to enhance color and prolong shelf life, which had been linked to cancer in laboratory studies. The Environmental Protection Agency attempted to reconcile 1950s legislation prohibiting carcinogenic pesticide residues on food with the highly sensitive measuring devices of the 1990s. Projects such as Biosphere 1 and 2 experimented with a sustainable lifestyle in a closed ecosystem. Organic farmers hoped to tap into the antichemical sentiment that drove these activities by selling produce labeled "organically grown" in supermarkets. Initially organic farming was an attempt to preserve "good farming" practices in the face of a rapidly changing agriculture. By the 1990s organic farming techniques had gained wide acceptance as a result of environmental regulation, rising energy prices, and consumer demand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hays, Samuel P. Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Wolf, Ray, ed. Organic Farming: Yesterday's and Tomorrow's Agriculture. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1977.

Dennis Williams / c. w.

See also Agriculture ; Agriculture, Department of ; Cancer ; Gardening ; Hydroponics ; Soil .