Professor William Albrecht, Chairman of the Soil Department of the University of Missouri, tried to help farmers raise healthier livestock and made unemotional but very explicit connections between soil fertility, animal, and human health. Any serious gardener or person interested in health and preventive medicine will find the books of all these unique individuals well worth reading.
I doubt that the writings and lectures of any of the above individuals would have sparked a bitter controversy like the intensely ideological struggle that developed between the organic gardening and farming movement and the agribusiness establishment. This was the doing of two energetic and highly puritanical men: Sir Albert Howard and his American disciple, J.I. Rodale.
Howard's criticism was correctly based on observations of improved animal and human health as a result of using compost to build soil fertility. Probably concluding that the average farmer's weak ethical condition would be unable to resist the apparently profitable allures of chemicals unless their moral sense was outraged, Howard undertook an almost religious crusade against the evils of chemical fertilizers. Notice the powerful emotional loading carried in this brief excerpt from Howard's Soil and Health:
"Artificial fertilizers lead to artificial nutrition, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women."
Do you want to be "artificial?" Rodale's contentious Organic Front makes readers feel morally deficient if they do not agree about the vital importance of recycling organic matter.
"The Chinese do not use chemical fertilizers. They return to the land every bit of organic matter they can find. In China if you burned over a field or a pile of vegetable rubbish you would be severely punished. There are many fantastic stories as to the lengths the Chinese will go to get human excremental matter. A traveler told me that while he was on the toilet in a Shanghai hotel two men were waiting outside to rush in and make way with the stuff."
Perhaps you too should be severely punished for wasting your personal organic matter.
Rodale began proselytizing for the organic movement about 1942. With an intensity unique to ideologues, he attacked chemical companies, attacked chemical fertilizers, attacked chemical pesticides, and attacked the scientific agricultural establishment. With a limited technical education behind him, the well-meaning Rodale occasionally made overstatements, wrote oversimplification as science, and uttered scientific absurdities as fact. And he attacked, attacked, attacked all along a broad organic front. So the objects of his attacks defended, defended, defended.
A great deal of confusion was generated from the contradictions between Rodale's self-righteous and sometimes scientifically vague positions and the amused defenses of the smug scientific community. Donald Hopkins' Chemicals, Humus and the Soil is the best, most humane, and emotionally generous defense against the extremism of Rodale. Hopkins makes hash of many organic principles while still upholding the vital role of humus. Anyone who thinks of themselves as a supporter of organic farming and gardening should first dig up this old, out-of-print book, and come to terms with Hopkins' arguments.
Organic versus establishment hostilities continued unabated for many years. After his father's death, Rodale's son and heir to the publishing empire, Robert, began to realize that there was a sensible middle ground. However, I suppose Robert Rodale perceived communicating a less ideological message as a problem: most of the readers of Organic Gardening and Farming magazine and the buyers of organic gardening books published by Rodale Press weren't open to ambiguity.
