Albert Howard

Sir Albert Howard was the founder of the organic farming movement. He worked for 25 years as an agricultural investigator in India, first as Agricultural Adviser to States in Central India and Rajputana, then as Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, where he developed the famed Indore composting process, which put the ancient art of composting on a firm scientific basis.

Howard was a brilliant development worker. Early in his career he abandoned the restrictions of conventional agricultural science with its increasing overspecialization -- "learning more and more about less and less" -- and set out to learn how to grow a healthy crop in typical conditions in the field, rather than the usual untypical conditions in laboratories and test-plots that represented nothing other than themselves.

He adopted the best teachers: Nature -- "the supreme farmer", India's peasants (whom he regarded as his prime "customers"), and the pests and weeds the scientists were committed to fighting with an ever-widening array of poisons, but which Howard called his "Professors of Agriculture". He saw pests in the context of Nature's use for them as censors of soil fertility levels and unsuitable crops growing in unsuitable conditions. He found that when the unsuitable conditions were corrected the pests departed. His crops were virtually immune to pest attack, and so was his livestock.

Journey to Forever founder-member Keith Addison says of Howard: "My first serious encounter with organics was as a journalist, in the context of Third World rural development work. I was investigating an ongoing famine in the sugar-growing areas of the Philippines and discovered a group there working on organics projects as a solution, and having some success.

"They realized they more or less had to educate me so I could understand what they were trying to do. It's a big subject and I was trying to get to the core of it. One of them went off and came back with some photocopies.

"'Read this,' he said. 'It's all here, it'll tell you everything you need to know.' I glanced at it: 20 pages, the introduction to a book called 'An Agricultural Testament' -- which seemed to me a bit of an arrogant title. And I was a bit sceptical that just an introduction could encapsulate all these spreading complexities.

"But he was right, it did tell me everything I needed to know, it's a brilliant summary of the subject. Of course I wasn't satisfied with that and got hold of the book itself as soon as I could. And found that the title isn't arrogant, it fully lives up to its claim.

"I'll never finish reading this book -- I've read it through three times and referred to it scores of times, and each time I learn something new. Meanwhile I've read Howard's other books, and a lot of his papers and essays, and a great deal besides. I've talked to many other people, seen many other organics projects, farms and gardens in many different areas; I've used these techniques myself in a variety of settings, and it all confirms Howard's thesis.

"I still see it mostly in the Third World development context. To me organic farming is THE basic appropriate technology for rural areas. It's the best place to start -- get this right and so many of the other problems will simply vanish."