This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [27]
“It wasn’t until the second summer of 1970 that I really began to understand gardening,” Papa told Stanley Mills, the friend of the Nearings who wrote the quarterly newsletter about us. “That winter was when I read Sir Albert Howard’s classic, An Agricultural Testament, in which Howard claims that if plants are healthy there is no role for insects. The role of insects with plants is like the role of wolves with deer and caribou: to eliminate the unhealthy and unfit. The sicker, the weaker the plants, the more appealing they are to insects. After two years of following Rodale, I began to see how things really are. After this we began experimenting with the soil. With Rodale I was working in a system akin to Ptolemaic astronomy, with Sir Albert Howard I hit on Copernicus. The results speak for themselves.”
For most modern farmers of the time, when the pests arrived, it was time not to think about building up the soil but to get out the pesticides and kill the enemy. And no wonder—the farmers were being marketed to by formerly war-based companies.
“Gardening books published prior to nineteen-forty were mostly organic; those after nineteen-forty were mostly chemical,” Papa explained to Stanley. “Nineteen-forty seems to be the transition between organic and chemical practices, a kind of continental divide.”
In 1971, a certain loud-talking, strong-opinioned Dr. Earl Butz was making himself known as President Nixon’s new secretary of agriculture. He planned to encourage commercial farmers to plant commodity crops “from fencerow to fencerow” using pesticides and chemical fertilizers, in order to revitalize agriculture and cut costs, as well as to help out his friends in the chemical industry. His motivation was to feed the world on cheap corn, but small farmers were unable to compete, and this situation led to a counterculture movement to save the small farm and restore less invasive farming methods. Therein organic agriculture began to find its voice.
Papa’s future theory of plant-positive farming, for which he would gain renown, was based on Sir Albert’s claim that “the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” Instead of adhering to the mainstream concept of pests as a negative and using the alternative methods of pest control advocated by J. I. Rodale, Papa saw that simply creating fertile soil made the plants happy, and happy plants did not attract pests.
The secret, Sir Albert believed, was to leave the land better than you found it. That meant putting more nutrients and organic matter—in the form of compost and manure—back into the soil than you harvested from it. “The law of return,” Howard called it. The concern with chemical fertilizers was that the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—or N-P-K—were used directly by the plant and didn’t provide food for the soil. It became a vicious cycle similar to a drug addiction, leaving the victim unable to function without drugs. Sir Albert felt it was more productive to feed the soil for future growth. This age-old concept was far from revolutionary, but its discovery was, for Papa, a revelation. As long as we fed the garden, it promised, the garden would feed us. And because it seemed like such old-fashioned common sense, Papa had little idea that it was on the forefront of what would become an organic agriculture revolution.
The dragons along the path took the form of Butz-style ag extension agents who were quick to say ideas about compost and manure were full of shit. Despite their dismissal, further reading in books such as The Living Soil by Lady Eve Balfour left Papa confident that the natural sources of N-P-K were far better over the long term than the chemical versions. The only catch was that the old ways required trial and error and a good dose of patience to get the balance just right.
When Papa succeeded, people said it was the best lettuce they’d ever tasted. When he didn’t, the pests were just as happy to eat the unhappy plants and leave us with cabbages full of holes, or in one infamous case, slugs in the lettuce that we