Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 335

The American novelist and farmer, Louis Bromfield (1896–1956), is currently proving a subject of interest to historians, on account of his agricultural endeavours rather than his literary successes. Close on the heels of Stephen Heyman’s The planter of modern life: Louis Bromfield and the seeds of a food revolution (2020: see the Review, 68.2) comes Anneliese Abbott’s Malabar Farm, which carries an endorsement from Heyman on its back cover. As the book’s title and sub-title indicate, Abbott concentrates on the history of Bromfield’s farm and the environmentalist projects with which it has been associated. Bromfield and his legacy dominate the story, but Malabar Farm is not primarily a biography of him. Unlike Heyman’s book it describes in detail the estate’s history since Bromfield’s death.

Anneliese Abbott deals succinctly with Bromfield’s life up to 1939, the year he purchased the land in Ohio which he named Malabar Farm. He was brought up on a farm in Ohio, served with the Red Cross during the First World War; became a successful novelist, lived in northern France and created a much-admired garden, and returned to America as the threat of another war increased. His memories of his family’s farm inspired in him the thought that agriculture could provide an island of security in a world of turmoil. It was winter when Bromfield first saw the land he decided to buy; only when the snow cleared did he realize the scale of the challenge he was taking on. Ohio in the late 1930s was suffering from serious soil erosion: in Richland County, where Malabar was located, most of the land had lost 25 to 75 per cent of its topsoil. Abbott describes the destructiveness of the North American pioneers’ farming methods, pointing out that this had been a cause for concern since the time of Jefferson. George Perkins Marsh had warned in 1864 of the impoverished productiveness which must follow if farmers continued to exploit the soil; scientists such as Franklin King (1848–1911) and L. H. Bailey (1858–1954) emphasized that the soil was the greatest of all natural resources.

Abbott shows, however, that officialdom, in the person of the Bureau of Soils chief, Milton Whitney (1860–1927), considered soil fertility inexhaustible; this despite the warnings of one of his surveyors, H. H. Bennett (1881–1960). Bennett’s fears were amply justified by the disaster of the Dust Bowl, and he became a leading figure in Friends of the Land (FoL), founded in 1940. FoL held its annual meeting the following year in Ohio, and Bromfield, who had already enjoyed success in restoring the denuded soil at Malabar, spoke at the gathering and invited the Friends to inspect his methods and their results. Bromfield also entered into an agreement for Malabar to become an official demonstration farm for the Soil Conservation Service.

Abbott traces, with a wealth of archival photographs, how Bromfield and his managers had by 1944 turned Malabar into a national showpiece and a centre for a variety of environmental projects. The pace of regeneration was remarkable, and in his autobiographical best-seller, Pleasant Valley (1945), Bromfield presented himself as a new kind of pioneer, dedicated to restoring the nation’s farmland. This was the golden age of FoL, of Soil Conservation Special trains and ‘farm facelift’ days, as the possibility of post-war food shortages lent urgency to the drive for fertile soil.

But it was short-lived. By 1953 FoL membership had declined substantially and most of its earlier, charismatic leaders had retired. Bromfield had subsidized his projects from his personal wealth, but his later novels were less successful than his earlier ones and Malabar Farm struggled financially. The second half of Abbott’s book tells the story of Malabar’s history since Bromfield’s death: how in 1957 the oil-based Noble Foundation enabled FoL to preserve the farm; how FoL’s ambitious plans for dairy farming brought further financial problems, and how FoL itself was swallowed up by a conservation group called the Izaak Walton League. Even the growth of the environmental movement, in response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), had little effect on the Louis Bromfield Malabar Farm Foundation, which struggled on as a tourist museum and dairy farm during the 1960s. In 1972, Malabar’s deeds were transferred to the State of Ohio for use as ‘a site for ecological research and the development of sound conservation practices in agriculture’ (p. 156).

Malabar’s fortunes rose again following the 1970s energy crisis, which highlighted the vulnerability of an agriculture dependent on fossil fuels. Under the management of Jim Berry, the farm attracted increasing numbers of visitors as a State Park which demonstrated the success of Bromfield’s conservation tillage methods. By 1990, the number of annual visitors was ten times what it had been during Bromfield’s lifetime, and his ‘ideas about working with nature to develop a permanent agricultural system were being seriously considered once again – under the new name of “sustainable agriculture”’ (p. 173). ‘Sustainable’, not ‘organic’. Although strongly influenced by Sir Albert Howard’s ideas, and sharing the organic movement’s mistrust of chemical sprays, and its interest in the connection between the state of the soil and human health, Bromfield was not averse to the tactical use of chemical fertilizers, regarding Jerome Rodale and his acolytes as ‘organic absolutis[ts]’ (p. 105). Balance, above all, was what mattered.

Anneliese Abbott’s book is a tribute to the importance of historical studies. She describes how, as a student in Sustainable Plant Systems at Ohio State University, she discovered that the institution offered no classes on agricultural history. She also came to realize that agricultural history books published during the Cold War ignored the soil conservation movement. Thanks to a helpful librarian she discovered the Louis Bromfield Collection, which made her realize that methods she thought new had been practised and (for a while) influential, 70 years earlier. Bromfield’s work has been rediscovered, and recognized as being of practical value to a world seriously in need of food production methods which increase soil fertility and encourage the abundance of nature’s ecology.