The end of the Second World War was a watershed time. The devastation was tallied, the millions of dead were counted, and the gargantuan tasks of reconciliation, reconstruction, and recovery were contemplated and initiated. Two Englishmen saw the end of hostilities as an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up. Guy Theodore Wrench wrote 'Reconstruction by Way of the Soil, A History of Humanity, Agriculture and the Soil' in 1946, following 'The Wheel of Health' from 1938. Following 'An Agricultural Testament' from 1940, Sir Albert Howard penned his seminal treatise 'The Soil and Health, A Study of Organic Agriculture' in 1947.
Chinese farming, practised continuously for two thousand years
Looking back, Sir Albert Howard remarked that China: "... is indeed the classic example of a nation which has conserved the fertility of its soil. Other nations have done the same, but none over so long a period or on so vast an area. Is it legitimate to interpret the history of the nation by the way in which they have made use of the land which chance or their own valour assigned to them?"
Guy Wrench refers to a golden age for agriculture (over a thousand years ago) as described in 1904 by S. Scott in his 'History of the Moorish Empire in Spain': "... the most complex, the most scientific, the most perfect, ever devised by the ingenuity of man. Its principles were derived from the extreme Orient, from the plains of Mesopotamia, and from the valley of the Nile - those gardens of the ancient world where, centuries before the dawn of modern history, the cultivation of the earth had been carried to a state of extraordinary excellence."
For more than twenty thousand years, trees and greenery largely girded the Earth. In their wake, they left the perfect peaty rich humus to support the panoply of plants multiplying by wind dispersal, cross-fertilization, pollination by synergistic insects. Vegetation grew wildly, profusely, of Nature's accord. Then, some ten thousand years ago, mankind began to effect enhanced, concentrated, controlled growth by trans-planting, seed-saving, and complementary soil building. Food was provided in predictable, plannable fashion, and so nomadic hunter-gatherers became farmers settled in small communities. For forty six consecutive centuries, the Chinese have grown crops in the same soil by continuously using fertility to grow food and returning fertility to the soil in what Guy Wrench calls 'The Wheel of Life'. Adhering to the rule of return, plants were grown and harvested here and elsewhere, with their cast-offs returned at the end of every growing season to the soil to replenish for the next cycle of growing and harvesting. Cultivation was concentrated in pockets of fertility, fields of plenty, according to the annual cycle of seasons. Animals like goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, cows, pigs were domesticated to provide food for all and manure for the land.
Civilizations sprouted in China, Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Americas. As these empires expanded, pressures on the soil grew, as did a burgeoning population. With trade came tools and travel by horse, mule, camel, and llama over vast distances, across civilizations. With exchange came the spreading of ideas and religions, cultures and traditions. With empires came money, power, control and the move away from sound traditional maintenance of soil and fertility. The rule of return became overlooked, and empires were shaken by volatility. Ecological adversity, wars and conquest in multiple forms would tip an empire over the edge into collapse or oblivion. Land stewardship was snatched from indigenous peoples and tribes by conquering invaders, colonizers claiming ownership. Traditional methods of nurturing the soil were buried as fast profit, efficiency of production, and maximum rate of return became paramount. The crucial measure of Nature's rule of return was abandoned, with the result that soils deteriorated, lands were rendered infertile, and further pressures placed on maintaining sustenance, law and order.
Great civilizations were built, then after a few centuries of fabulous wealth, prosperity, trade and expansion (built mostly on the backs of slaves), they imploded and collapsed, top-heavy and unable to sustain their growing populace. They ignored the soil at their peril. Lord Ernle wrote in 1912 in his 'English Farming, Past and Present': "In Roman Italy, after the Punic Wars, the deterioration in fertility of the soil led to the substitution of family-owned farming with large estates, the *latifundia*, and large landowners. In Tudor England the same substitution of *latifundia* for small family farming also took place. In post-Punic Italy, acquisitive men seized the lands of weakened farmers with complete disregard of the law". And so it is that in England, agricultural methods generally followed the Roman way.
Long before Tudor times, the Conqueror, William of Normandy (1066 and all that) had already transformed the farming landscape by confirming the subordinate position of the English farmers by giving them foreign conquerors as their lords. Land became the property of the King, who rewarded his followers and bound their interests to his through gifts of land. Guy Wrench writes: "In addition to farming by the manor system, the most educated section of the population - the monks of the Church - contributed to the farming culture of the nation the benefits of their devotion, learning, and art... To their practical farming, the monks brought the help of the classic writers of Rome - Cato, Varro, Columella and others - whose works in Latin they were able to read. They were *cultured* farmers, to whom the spiritual side of creation appealed with special significance... It was they who built roads and bridges, and opened their monasteries as places of temporary rest and hospitality to all travellers, rich or poor; they who drained marshes, reclaimed wastes, and improved livestock. It was they who sustained a soil-based civilization by giving it the vision of religion, the art of the temple, and the culture of studentship. They also defended, as far as they could, the independence of the peasants, and supported them in their efforts to rise out of serfdom." The grand edifice of communal farming came crashing down with the advent of the new money economy. The acquisitive new aristocracy of Tudor England was attracted by the price that British wool fetched on the Continent: "It was this opportunity for more wealth that made them seize the land of the small farmers and monasteries, and with the expenditure of their capital turn it into sheep farms (the enclosures).... From that time onwards, the proletariat and poverty became familiar parts of English society." The Industrial Revolution hastened the hollowing-out of William Blake's "England's green and pleasant Land", as able-bodied men, women, and children were conscripted and sent flocking to "those dark Satanic mills".
In the early nineteenth century, great herds of buffalo, more appropriately called American bison, roamed the Great Plains. Then over 50 million buffalo existed (perhaps as many of 75 million). Numbers decreased by 1872 to 7 million. The decimation of the great buffalo herds heralded the transition of the extensive grasslands into agricultural production. The fertile soil of the prairie itself eventually disappeared as the plow opened up the land to erosion. Severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the wind erosion caused The Dust Bowl, which came in three waves of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930.
With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, newly-mechanized farming methods had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. This rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland. During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – travelled across the country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.
Sir Albert Howard writes: "The net result of a century's mismanagement in the United States was summed up in 1937 as either the complete or partial destruction of the fertility of over 250 million acres, i.e. 61 per cent of the total area under drops: three-fifths of the original agricultural capital of his great country has been forfeited in less than a century."
At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the future of farming was contested. Sir Albert Howard and the Organic movement advocated an approach based purely on the natural health of the soil.However, they faced a fearsome, powerful opponent - chemical agriculture as sanctioned by large corporations and governments held in their thrall. Like those mustard gases left over in 1918 after the First World War, what use could they put all those munitions to in 1945? When the nitrogen was no longer needed for bombs, what were they going to do with all this capacity? Their answer was, use the nitrogen-rich ammonia for fertilizing the nation's crops.
