Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 294

Gregory Barton’s book is the fruit of arguably the most important piece of detective work yet carried out by researchers into the organic movement’s origins and expansion. But its significance reaches well beyond the confines of organic farming. All historians of twentieth-century agriculture should welcome this study of one of the most influential agronomists and campaigners of that period, Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947), and of his second wife Louise, née Matthaei (1880–1969); particularly as it demonstrates that Howard was, earlier in his career, a more conventional practitioner of agricultural science than he became in the last twenty years or so of his life.

Barton first sets Howard within the context of his time, relating his work in India to the benefits which farming and forestry brought to the British economy in the days of the Raj. He then traces the stages by which Howard grew close to the English rural revivalists who praised the virtues of organic husbandry. After Howard’s death, his widow Louise played a major role in propagating his ideas.

The whereabouts of Sir Albert Howard’s papers – if indeed they had survived at all – were for many years a mystery. Just a few items were lodged at Wye College, where Howard had held a post before going to India in 1905. Gregory Barton, with the help of his mother, a skilled researcher on Ancestry.com, investigated the ancestors of Howard’s wives, Gabrielle and Louise Matthaei; Howard having no issue from either marriage. The Bartons discovered a relative of the Matthaei sisters and traced descendants, eventually being contacted by Louise’s niece Charlotte, who, astonishingly, had the Howard archives in her garage in Birmingham. It is little short of a miracle that the papers had never been disposed of. Barton’s book is therefore based on a mass of completely fresh material.

The Howard papers are being lodged at St John’s College, Cambridge, where Albert was a student, and so will become available to other scholars. Barton has by no means exhausted their material in his book, using only the parts he needed. Needed for what, in particular? The answer is, for two dominant purposes. One is to show that Louise Howard played a vital part in helping spread Albert’s ideas, and that she should therefore be recognized as a major figure in the development of the international environmental movement. Barton sees her as having, during the 1950s and 1960s, connected past ideas of wholeness to twentieth-century scientific narratives. The second purpose is to uproot the misconception that Howard’s humus-based philosophy of agriculture was arrived at primarily by observing methods of peasant cultivation. Barton identifies this reviewer as one of the myth’s uncritical chief purveyors, though its origins lie in Howard’s own summing-up of his career (see p. 17 of Farming and gardening for health or disease, 1945).

The question therefore arises of why Howard so explicitly misled his readers. The implications of Barton’s argument seem to be that Howard wanted to present a simplified and combative picture of where he stood towards the end of his life. The material which Barton presents demonstrates beyond doubt that Howard’s scientific pilgrimage towards uncompromising advocacy of humus farming was much more complex and ambivalent than he was prepared to reveal in his two last books. Indeed, it appears that Howard actually owed a considerable amount to work done at Rothamsted Research Station, a place of which in his later years he wrote scathingly, condemning it as ‘the Mecca of the orthodox’ (Farming and gardening for health or disease, p. 79).

In 1921, the Rothamsted scientists H. B. Hutchinson and E. H. Richards published an article which laid out the principles of organic farming: namely, ‘that composting vegetable matter such as straw into a fertilizer as potent as animal manure in an age of a decreasing supply of animal manure could change agriculture in a significant way’ (pp. 77–8). Barton argues that Howard did not give full credit to Hutchinson and Richards, whose work provided the basis of his Indore Method of composting. Instead, he popularized his own work ‘by pointing to the romantic notion that the origin of his own innovations were Indian and Chinese peasants’ (p. 79). Perhaps future scholars will uncover material in the Howard archives which will challenge this contention. (Equally, perhaps they will not.) Nevertheless, Barton offers substantial evidence that Howard was, earlier in his career, a much more ‘orthodox’ scientist than he later became.

Barton himself perpetuates a myth by writing that Howard’s ideas were ignored, rather than challenged, during the 1940s. Actually, the agricultural press was full of letters and articles about ‘the great humus controversy’ during the war years, a period which Barton largely ignores despite its importance for the growth of the organic movement. Rothamsted’s centenary in 1943 provided an ideal opportunity for the advocates of humus, inspired by Howard, and the advocates of artificial fertilizers to clash with each other. The chemical fertilizer companies were sufficiently rattled by Howard’s attacks on their ‘devil’s dust’ to launch advertising campaigns mocking the supposedly primitive ideas of their critics.

Barton’s research is impressively wide-ranging and detailed, full of new information and insights. Its summary – far from hagiographical – of E. F. Schumacher’s life and thought may prove, for Schumacher’s environmentalist admirers, one of its most unsettling sections. Although the book traces the stages by which the organic movement became ‘globalised’, it has necessarily to focus on certain areas of the globe, and there is an interesting section on Japan as ‘a key player on the global organic scene’ (p. 176) from 1945 onwards.

The global history of organic farming follows hard on the heels of Dan McKanan’s Eco-Alchemy (reviewed in volume 66 part 1 of the Review), which suggested that there might have been no organic movement at all without the part played by Rudolf Steiner’s disciples and their commitment to biodynamic methods. Anyone reading Barton’s book will find it frankly impossible to accept such a contention. If McKanan had had the opportunity to read Barton before writing Eco-Alchemy, I doubt that he would have made such a claim.