Lord Northbourne - the first ‘organic’ farmer

80 years of ‘Organic’ food and farming

While since earliest times farmers have understood the importance of giving back to the land in return for the food that it provides us, the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming was first used by Lord Northbourne in his book ‘Look to the Land’ published in 1940.  It came out at a time when industrial farming had relentlessly destroyed the accumulated fertility of millennia and sparked a debate for sustainable farming that continues to this day.  But where did the inspiration come for Northbourne’s ideas?  The trail leads back to the late 18th C and to the ideas of the poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1790 book, An Attempt to Interpret the Metamorphosis of Plants, laid the foundations for modern plant biology.

Two hundred years ago Goethe propounded the idea that there was a life force in plants. He saw that plants were driven by an ongoing intensification and that a ‘cycle of expansions and contractions’ shaped the plant, making either leaf, flower or seed depending on the degree of the ‘dynamic and creative interplay of opposites’. This is what underpins the harmony of the universe and the harmony of life on earth down to the tiniest life forms.

Rudolf Steiner wrote extensively on Goethe and developed Anthroposophy on the foundation of what he called Goethe’s ‘spiritual-scientific basis’ of thinking.

Goethe’s doctor was Christoph Hufeland, author of  Makrobiotik oder Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (1796),  (Macrobiotics: the Art of Living Long). He was a naturopath who was also doctor to the King of Prussia Frederick Wilhelm lll, Schiller and Goethe, all part of the Weimar set. His ideas on human health and vitality mirrored Goethe’s observations on plant health and vitality and he was a close friend of Samuel Hahnemann, creator of homeopathy. Goethe hosted a Freitagsgesellschaft (‘Friday Society’) at which Hufeland would read from his drafts of Makrobiotik.  Hufeland’s medicine envisaged a life force that should be nourished - the Hufelandist movement was largely vegetarian and inspired the Lebensreform (“Life Reform”) movement in the rest of Germany over the next century. 

Steiner was an active proponent of this Lebensreform movement which sought a ‘back to nature’ way of living, with an emphasis on healthy diet and alternative medicine. In 1924 Steiner gave an agriculture course that was organised by biodynamic farming researcher Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer then went on to found the 800-acre biodynamic research farm at Loverendale In the Netherlands that provided the practical proof of Steiner’s theory. So in 1939 when Lord Northbourne decided to set up Britain’s first biodynamics conference he invited Pfeiffer to run it. The resulting Betteshanger Summer School and Conference brought together a wide range of proponents of biodynamic farming. It was a seminal event in the history of the organic farming movement. A few months later Germany invaded Poland, World War ll broke out, making further collaboration difficult. A year later, in 1940, inspired by the visionary 9 days of the Betteshanger Summer School, Lord Northbourne’s book ‘Look to the Land’ was published.   

It was a best seller. In it Northbourne identifies debt and ‘exhaustive’ farming as having the potential to lead to ‘the extermination of much of the earth’s population by war or pestilence.’  He points out that if the land is sick, then farming is sick and that people will be sick. That Nature ‘is imbued above all with the power of love; by love she can after all be conquered but in no other way.”  In ‘Look to the Land’ Northbourne coins the term ‘organic’ to describe farming that sees the farm as an organism. “The mechanism of life is a continuous flow of matter through the architectural forms we know as organisms. The form alone has any life or any organic identity.” In this he mirrors Goethe’s writing on botany.

He wrote that to quarrel with nature makes no more sense than a ‘quarrel between a man’s head and his feet.’  He described ‘organic’ farming as “having a complex but necessary interrelationship of parts, similar to that in living things”. Although nobody had previously used the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming, ‘Organic’ became, in English,  the accepted descriptor.

In 1943 Eve Balfour’s ‘The Living Soil’ began by quoting across several pages in her first chapter directly from ‘Look to the Land’  She founded the Soil Association 3 years later in 1946, with support from Northbourne. Her book and Northbourne’s informed the debate about the future of farming in Britain, a debate that was closed off by the Agriculture Act of 1947 where ‘exhaustive’ agriculture to maximise production prevailed. Subsidies were given to farmers who used ICI’s chemical fertilisers and farmers who refused to ‘modernise’ were threatened with land confiscation. Farming was nationalised and the organic movement was marginalised. 

In Japan, Sagen Ishizuka, doctor to the Japanese imperial family, followed up on Hufeland’s macrobiotic ideas and developed “shokuiku” (“Food Study”) and in 1907 created the Shokuyo (Food for Health) movement.   A shokuiku follower, George Ohsawa, subsequently published a book in 1960 setting out the principles of healthy living and called it ‘Zen Macrobiotics’.

Ohsawa knew of Christophe Hufeland and freely adopted Hufeland’s term ‘Macrobiotik’ to describe his diet based on similar principles, embodying a yin and yang approach to food. He sought out and met a descendant of Hufeland in 1958. Ohsawa’s seminal book was adopted by the emerging alternative society and inspired the natural foods movement of the 1960s that supported whole food and organic farming. The natural foods stores adhered to macrobiotic principles, selling only whole grains, eschewing sugar and artificial ingredients and supporting organic food.

So it was that Goethe’s doctor Christophe Hufeland coined the term “Makrobiotik” that drove the Lebensreform movement and inspired Rudolf Steiner to develop the anthroposophical farming principles known as ‘biodynamic, which were proven in practice by Steiner’s follower Pfeiffer. Lord Northbourne’s book gave the movement momentum and the name ‘organic.’ A Zen version of the same principles emerged in the 1960s and helped drive the natural and organic transformation of farming, diet and medicine that will ultimately restore our soils and thereby underpin the health and vitality of us all.

"Who knows himself and others well / No longer may ignore: / Orient and Occident dwell / Separately no more”  Goethe

1960s Rebels: Craig Sams, Health Food Pioneer from Victoria & Albert Museum

In conjunction with their exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966 – 1970 (10 September 2016 – 26 February 2017), the Victoria and Albert have uploaded a series of videos interviewing 1960s Rebels including myself.

The late 1960s saw progressive ideas emanate from the countercultural underground and revolutionise society. Challenging oppressive, outdated norms and expectations, a small number of individuals brought about far-reaching changes as they sought to attain a better world. Their idealism and actions helped mobilise a movement which continues to inspire modern activists and shape how we live today.

Agribusiness

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When a business sector sees a rash of mergers and acquisitions, it's for one of two reasons, growth or decay. The organic food industry has seen a lot of acquisitions by companies anxious to get in on the ground floor of the 5% annual growth rate in organic food and regenerative farming. Meanwhile, on the dark side, Monsanto is facing takeover by Bayer, not for any positive reasons, but because they are both looking into the abyss. Merger is one way to survive when the farmers they are competing for are spending less. Farmers aren't stupid - they can do the maths. When they see diminishing returns on their investment in seeds and agrichemicals, they reduce their spending. Normally in a situation like this the agribusiness operators would go to the EU or Washington and just wheedle more subsidies out of the national purse, bleating about food security while encouraging biofuels to prop up soy, rapeseed and corn prices. Who cares if you're destroying the earth's precious farmland at 30 football fields a minute? If you were a big landowner, you'd feel entitled to being paid to do this. That's what us mugs are here for. Now that the EU even subsidises grouse moors you'd think the gates were wide open. But the money is running out. Half the EU budget goes to farmers, much of it British money going via Brussels to France. The US spends $350 billion a year propping up agriculture in the US, channeling money through farmers to agribiz.

Let's take a look at who's eating whom. The potash fertiliser price has halved in the past 3 years, from $450 a tonne to $219. So in Canada, Agrium and Potash, two of the world's biggest potash producers, are merging in a desperate attempt to keep afloat while they wait for a bounce in price that may never happen. Bayer and Monsanto are both facing plunging sales and profits. Monsanto have the seed and Bayer have the pesticides to go with them. But again it's desperation. They hope that innovation will save them, but innovation is not something you find in mega corporations.   GMOs are losing support - US farmers never wanted them but were denied choice after Monsanto bought up all the seed companies and forced GMOs down their throats.

The whole ethanol biofuels scam is blowing up, too. It was never even vaguely 'carbon neutral' - it takes more energy to produce a litre of ethanol than the energy you get by burning it. It's more energy efficient to just mix corn with coal and shovel it into a power station, but that would be too obvious and repulsive.

Chem China has taken over Syngenta. They make the herbicides that Syngenta's GM seed can resist. Nobody in China will eat GMO rice but they'll tolerate pork or chicken fed on GM maize. But the real prize for Chem China is Syngenta's strong presence in US market: they're after Bayer/Monsanto's piece of the diminishing pie. Their US competitors are suddenly bleating about food security.   Two other agrichemical giants, Dow and DuPont, also merged recently. They're all like a bunch of drunks spilling out of the pub after a good night out, trying to keep each other from falling down.

If you're a farmer, what do you do? You used to be able to play off one agrichemical giant against the other, but soon you'll just take what you're given. Or look for an alternative and boy, what an alternative is on the horizon!

When the French '4 per 1000 initiative' succeeds at the Marrakech COP22 climate conference in November every hectare of organic farmland will be set to get over €150 a year in carbon credits. A hectare of chemical-dependent farmland will have to pay for its carbon footprint and that could cost close to €100 per hectare.   It won't happen overnight but the French have fixed a price of €56 per tonne for carbon, to take effect by 2020. The world will probably follow, even the US.   If you were a government that was facing huge annual costs to subsidise farmers with money that flows through their bank accounts to Dow/DuPont, Bayer/Monsanto and Chem China/Syngenta and you could instead just let the carbon markets transfer the money from fossil fuel power stations direct to organic farmers, what would you do? Keep on propping up a dying industry or finally recognise that organic food, when the carbon is priced in, is actually cheaper than the degenerative kind that is destroying our available soil at the rate of 30 football fields per minute? (I can't repeat this often enough)

Governments have been holding back for quite a long time because of the immense political power of the agrichemicals industry and of the landowning fraternity. They passionately hate socialism in all its forms, until it comes to their welfare payments.

It's time for a change. We need to bring freedom to farming. Carbon pricing that encourages regenerative farming instead of degenerative farming is the way forward. Organic is good for you and the climate, too.

Imagine for a moment

Just imagine for a moment that a politician spoke the truth.   Now stretch your imagination even further and imagine that Owen Paterson, Defra Minister, spoke the truth.  Here is what he would say.

“Her Majesty’s Government announce that we will impose punitive taxes on organic food in order to keep it at a price level that will deter consumers.  We will implement policies to encourage agricultural practices that will destroy the soil on which all life depends.  We will also continue to ensure that foods that lead to obesity and ill-health are subsidised by our government and foods that lead to good health are taxed, regulated or prohibited.”

“Your Government believes that bigger is better, so we will support the biggest farms the most and encourage obesity to that we can have bigger people to help support a bigger NHS.

“Like Labour, the Conservative Party believes that people who own large amounts of land and money should be rewarded for their cleverness or accident of birth by receiving large amounts of money from the taxpayer on a never-ending basis.  We therefore intend to continue to reward all owners of large landholdings with £110 every year for every acre of land that they own, or £265 per hectare, regardless of how they manage it.  However, we will make it difficult and complicated to claim for farmers who own less than 50 acres.  People who own a farm and home will not have to pay inheritance tax. We will continue to charge inheritance tax on non-farmers who own property worth more than £325,000.”

 “We will ensure that subsidised farming pays best when farmers do least to rebuild soil fertility and treat animals as cruelly as inhumanly possible.   We will ensure that farmers who grow food to be burned as biofuels will make more money than farmers who grow food for human consumption. We will support farming that accelerates climate change. “

What do they really say:  “Britain needs to be able to feed itself in an uncertain world.  Our farmers are our guarantee of food security and food independence.  Britain’s farmers are the backbone of rural society and help us preserve all that is best about British tradition and our countryside. We are importing too much food, we need to be more self-sufficient.’ 

What tosh.  The fact is that for every country where there is reliable data, the evidence shows that smaller farms are from 2 to 10 times more productive than large farms.  That’s productivity as normal people know it – i.e. getting a profitable income from an input of labour and capital.  In subsidised farming productivity just means ‘production.’  It is measured in soybeans and corn and doesn’t measure the input costs or the labour costs or the externalised costs such as greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and soil degradation.  The profit comes from the taxpayer.

Of course small farms also tend to integrate crops and livestock, they rotate their crops, they employ human beings.  Most importantly, because they live on the land and it has been in the family and they expect it to continue to be in the family they treat the land with respect and care.  An industrial farm uses up land and the employees don’t really care about a future beyond the next pay cheque.

What would happen if we took away all the subsidies and only allowed land to be inherited tax free if it was smaller than, say, 200 acres?

Farmers would go back to mixed farming.  Our current system mirrors the disastrous communist farming of the 1950s and 1960s, where government decided what would grow where and who would grow what.  Farmers would study the market and respond to demand from consumers, not price manipulation by government.

Agriculture is multifunctional.  It produces food but it also manages the landscape.  It creates employment and it should keep us all healthy. 

Sadly, it does the opposite.  It would be better to plant trees on the 40% of the US land that is devoted to growing corn to be burned as ethanol.  Why subsidise greenhouse gas emissions when you could be planting trees?

What can be done?  Nothing in Whitehall, nothing in Brussels, nothing in Washington.  They are hopelessly corrupted by the manufacturers of agrichemicals who spend fortunes on lobbying them and ensuring that the public have no say in how their food is produced. 

We just need to be aware and become the change.  Every person who cuts back on meat and uses the savings to always buy organic food is slowly but surely driving back the tide of industrialisation.  Supporting small farms, local food producers and the future.