The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [74]
PERHAPS MORE THAN any other single writer, Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947), an English agronomist knighted after his thirty years of research in India, provided the philosophical foundations for organic agricultural. Even those who never read his 1940 Testament nevertheless absorbed his thinking through the pages of Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming, where he was lionized, and in the essays of Wendell Berry, who wrote an influential piece about Howard in the The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971. Berry seized particularly on Howard’s arresting—and prescient—idea that we needed to treat “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.”
For a book that devotes so many of its pages to the proper making of compost, An Agricultural Testament turns out to be an important work of philosophy as well as of agricultural science. Indeed, Howard’s drawing of lines of connection between so many seemingly discrete realms—from soil fertility to “the national health” from the supreme importance of animal urine to the limitations of the scientific method—is his signal contribution, his method as well as his message. Even though Howard never uses the term “organic,” it is possible to tease out all the many meanings of the word—as a program for not just agricultural but social renovation—from his writings. To measure the current definition of organic against his genuinely holistic conception is to appreciate just how much it has shrunk.
Like many works of social and environmental criticism, An Agricultural Testament is in broad outline the story of a Fall. In Howard’s case, the serpent in question is a nineteenth-century German chemist by the name of Baron Justus von Liebig, his tempting fruit a set of initials: NPK. It was Liebig, in his 1840 monograph Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture, who set agriculture on its industrial path when he broke down the quasi-mystical concept of fertility in soil into a straightforward inventory of the chemical elements plants require for growth. At a stroke, soil biology gave way to soil chemistry, and specifically to the three chemical nutrients Liebig highlighted as crucial to plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, or to use these elements’ initials from the periodic table, N-P-K. (The three letters correspond to the three-digit designation printed on every bag of fertilizer.) Much of Howard’s work is an attempt to demolish what he called the “NPK mentality.”
The NPK mentality embraces a good deal more than fertilizer, however. Indeed, to read Howard is to begin to wonder if it might not be one of the keys to everything wrong with modern civilization. In Howard’s thinking, the NPK mentality serves as a shorthand for both the powers and limitations of reductionist science. For as followers of Liebig discovered, NPK “works”: If you give plants these three elements, they will grow. From this success it was a short step to drawing the conclusion that the entire mystery of soil fertility had been solved. It fostered the wholesale reimagining of soil (and with it agriculture) from a living system to a kind of machine: Apply inputs of NPK at this end and you will get yields of wheat or corn on the other end. Since treating the soil as a machine seemed to work well enough, at least in the short term, there no longer seemed any need to worry about such quaint things as earthworms and humus.
Humus is the stuff in a handful of soil that gives it its blackish cast and characteristic smell. It’s hard to say exactly what humus is because it is so many things. Humus is what’s left of organic matter after it has been broken down by the billions of big and small organisms that inhabit a spoonful of earth—the bacteria, phages, fungi, and earthworms responsible for decomposition. (The psalmist who described life as a transit from “dust to dust” would have been more accurate to say “humus to humus.”) But humus is not a final product of