Lord Palmerston and the Empire of Trade, and Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture. For eight years he was the Editor-in-Chief of the noted historical journal, Britain and the World.Barton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Global History of Organic Farming and reported the following:
While Ford Madox Ford spent much of 1931 writing his autobiography, Return to Yesterday, another writer in that same year launched the organic farming movement with a book that also harkened back to the romantic world of the past.Learn more about The Global History of Organic Farming at the Oxford University Press website.
Alas, the book was titled, unappealingly, The Waste Products of Agriculture. But despite the off-putting title, Albert Howard along with his first wife Gabrielle, and then his second wife Louise, would soon take his place as the founder of the organic farming movement and change forever how millions of consumers thought about modern industrial farming.
Page 99 of my book, The Global History of Organic Farming, captures the essence of this story that marries ancient wisdom with scientific discovery. Page 99 also captures the tragic death of his first wife and fellow scientist, Gabrielle, who worked side by side with Albert in the blinding heat and grinding poverty of India. Here they devised a new method of composting that allowed Indian peasants to fertilize their crops without artificial fertilizers and pesticides.
After Gabrielle’s tragic death Howard retired to England broken hearted and exhausted from overwork. With the help of Louise, Gabrielle’s sister, Albert began writing for a popular audience of farmers and gardeners that launched a new movement that would throw down the gauntlet and challenge the values of chemical farming and mass consumerism. This book—based on newly discovered archives— tells the untold story of how the organic farming movement attracted the support of millions of followers from Gandhi to Prince Charles, and from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
The story also highlights the forgotten role of women in the broader environmental movement. After Albert Howard’s death, Louise Howard almost single handedly carried the message of the organic farming to the world. Throughout the 1950s to the 1960s she maintained a network of amateur activists fighting against the damage of DDT on the environment and against the ill effects of industrial pollution on human health. Little could she foresee at the time, that her lonely battle for organic farming would gain widespread acceptance after 1980 and change the way hundreds of millions of consumers think about how the food they eat affected human health and the health of the entire world of nature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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