Regenerative farming is the buzz word now. Biodynamic and organic describe farming that treats the entire farm as an organism and adopts practices that think about the farm holistically. Regenerative embraces organic and biodynamic and looks at how we can regenerate the entire planet through agriculture.
The American War of Independence is often characterised as a revolution based on ‘no taxation without representation’ and the iconic Boston Tea Party. There is another, darker motive for the revolt against British rule. With Iroquois support, the British successfully drove the French out of Canada in 1770. The Iroquois were motivated by the promise that, if they helped Britain prevail against the French, King George guaranteed there would be no further settlement by farmers of the lands west of Pennsylvania.
But by that time the fragile soils of Pennsylvania had been deforested and eroded and become ‘farmed out’ - no longer fertile. Desperate farmers wanted the rich lands further West and Britain’s commitment stood in their way. The Revolutionary War was a disaster for Britain and for the Native Americans, who were pushed further and further west by land-hungry farmers.
The farmlands of Ohio were the first to feel this onslaught and by the early 20th Century were almost totally ‘farmed out.’
It was a party animal and widely-acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Louis Bromfield, who decided to try to reverse that situation. In the 1930s he had a groovy house in Senlis just outside of Paris, where luminaries of the Paris creative scene would gather for his legendary weekend parties. Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Elsa Schiaparelli, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Douglas Fairbanks and Edith Wharton were all friends and regular visitors. He learned traditional gardening techniques from his French peasant neighbours. He embarked on a voyage to India, where he visited Sir Albert Howard’s soil institute at Indore and learned the Indore composting technique that was to become the bedrock of British organic farming. He wrote a best-selling novel set in India called “The Rains Came” that became a wildly successful movie. That set him up financially for life. He despaired at Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and wrote “England, the Dying Oligarchy” a bitter critique of British policy. After the Munich Agreement he’d had enough and headed back to the US. He bought a 600-acre farm in Ohio where he could raise his family in safety and apply the techniques he had learned in France and India. The land was in dire condition, but he knew what had to be done.
In 1942 he set up the Friends of the Land and allied it with the US Soil Conservation Service with the goal of turning around the ruinous impact of the ‘Dirty Thirties’ where the Dust Bowl had led to the abandonment of vast acreages of farmland that had become useless. He introduced what he called ‘trash farming’ which we now call ‘no till agriculture’ where you didn’t plough the land, you let the crop residues sit on the soil and then planted into the residue in the Spring. He introduced green manures, mulching and strip cropping to stop erosion and rebuild soil fertility. The Friends of the Land journal ‘The Land’ included contributions from Rachel Carson, whose 1962 best seller “Silent Spring” kickstarted the environmental movement. He was best man when Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall at his organic farm. If his Senlis residence was the hippest place outside of Paris, his Ohio farm drew groovers from all over the USA.
A poem in the New Yorker captured the vibe:
‘Strangers arriving by every train, Bromfield terracing against the rain,
Catamounts* crying, mowers mowing, Guest rooms full to overflowing,
Boxers in every room of the house, Cows being milked to Brahms and Strauss,
Kids arriving by van and pung**, Bromfield up to his eyes in dung,
Sailors, trumpeters, mystics, actors, all of them wanting to drive the tractors,
All of them eager to husk the corn, some of them sipping their drinks till morn’
But while all the partying was going on there was serious business - the soil of his Ohio farm steadily became more fertile year after year. It regenerated. He proved that degeneration could be reversed and laid the foundations for the organic farming movement in the USA.
*wild cat **sleigh
