Commenting on a 1950s summertime visit to Malabar Farm by the French Minister of Agriculture and sustainable farming advocates, Louis Bromfield observed, “Every good farmer is a mystic at heart and religious, but a good farmer’s mysticism and faith are founded upon the base of the earth itself, and so very different from what to me is that implausible mysticism of the detached spirit. I am Protestant enough and Anglo-Saxon enough to demand concrete results.” Bromfield concluded that biodynamic farming offers but “vague plans for a return to nature and a new agriculture,” ignores the benefit of modern machinery, and is blind to ill-fed world populations. At the same time, material gain and labor-saving devices are insufficient for meaning in life, “and if the spirit and nature itself are ignored, they lead only to the blind alley of defeat…. Mankind can do without plumbing, but not without St. Frances of Assisi.” Lord echoed the convictions and warning of his longtime friend in his last book, The Care of the Earth (1962). He emphasized the connectedness of a healthy biosystem to a flourishing society: “Man… is in dependent alliance with everything; …and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different.”
Through a range of literary, scientific, and political endeavors, Lord, Bromfield, Jerome Rodale, Wallace Stegner, and other influential voices in land stewardship raised important questions about agricultural production and notions of progress. Their work would give rise to a new era of environmental activism seen in the arts, public policy, and grassroots farmer initiatives. Publication of The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (1953) by political historian Grant McConnell (1915-1993) charted the conflict between the USDA’s Farm Security Agency and American Farm Bureau that led to government policies favoring larger producers and economic elites. McConnell’s research documented how New Deal, Grange, and Catholic Rural Life Conference initiatives aimed at preventing erosion and improving soil was overshadowed by other interests in the 1940s. The department’s broader public service and extension education mission shifted to commercial priorities while the Bureau launched mutual insurance programs and lobbying efforts. McConnell’s book documented the negligible effect of these changes on “common man” small farmer recovery and how the war economy enabled larger growers to increase their holdings and influence land-grant college agricultural research.
SARE Heritage Grain Plots (2017), Washington State University Bread Lab, Mt. Vernon, Washington
Columbia Heritage Collection Photograph
Tension between advocates of conventional farming methods using synthetic inputs and those promoting sustainable organic approaches has continued since the invention of artificial nitrogen in the early twentieth century. Productive dialogue took place in the late 1970s during the Carter administration when Secretary of Agriculture Robert Bergland formed the USDA Study Team on Organic Farming which was headed by alternative agriculture researcher Garth Youngberg and soil scientist Robert Papendick. Both men were familiar with Grant McConnell’s studies and conducted dozens of interviews with small farmers throughout America and in Europe and Japan who operated viable organic and other alternative production enterprises. The team released its Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming (1980) that included a series of practical recommendations to support production of organic heritage grains and other crops.
The study was strongly criticized by many conventional farming advocates within the department and commodity organizations. It did succeed, however, in establishing the USDA Office of Organic Resources Coordinator. Although the position was terminated soon afterward in the Reagan administration, Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy reestablished the office. Several of the 1980 report’s recommendations were subsequently implemented including creation of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition in 1988 and subsequent Sustainable Agriculture, Research, and Education (SARE) grants. Among numerous other initiatives, SARE funding has supported National Institute of Food and Agriculture programs to promote farm-themed arts education in public and private schools. Following his departure from the USDA, Garth Youngberg established the D.C.-based Institute for Alternative Agriculture and published The American Journal of Alternative Agriculture (now Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems). Robert Papendick directed the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service soil studies at Washington State University in Pullman where he also taught in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences.