Anneliese Abbott
Blame the Americans: Why India Turned Away from Organic Farming
Up through the early 1950s, practically every Indian agricultural writer promoted composting according to Howard’s Indore Method as the...
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History of Organic Farming in America
By Anneliese Abbott
Organic History
Blog
Anneliese Abbott
Nov 143 min read
Gandhi and Organic Farming: A Little-Known Connection
Sir Albert Howard’s Indore Method of composting eventually founded the organic farming movement in the English-speaking world. There’s...
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Anneliese Abbott
Nov 72 min read
Compost or Chemicals? Fertilizer Experiments in Colonial India
One of the most famous experiments comparing chemical fertilizers and manure is the long-term study at the Rothamsted Experiment Station...
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Anneliese Abbott
Oct 313 min read
The British in India: Colonial Origins of Organic Farming
Most people agree that organic farming started in India. That’s where Sir Albert Howard, often referred to as the “father of organic...
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Anneliese Abbott
Oct 243 min read
The Desolate Year: Defending Pesticides with Horror Stories
One of the things that intrigues me most about the anti-organic rhetoric used by scientists is how unscientific and emotional it usually ...
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Anneliese Abbott
Oct 173 min read
Insect Apocalypse: Promoting Pesticides with Doomsday Fears
A little-known fact about the rise of chemical-intensive agriculture in the United States is that it was motivated by doomsday fears....
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Anneliese Abbott
Oct 103 min read
Rejected by Society: Why Helen and Scott Nearing Went Back to the Land
While many people went back to the land because of an impending societal crisis, for others the crisis was personal. Such was the case...
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Anneliese Abbott
Oct 33 min read
Island of Security: Why Louis Bromfield Went Back to the Land
In the twentieth century, each major wave of the back-to-the-land movement has been triggered by some kind of crisis. In 1939, that...
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Anneliese Abbott
Sep 263 min read
Preparing for the Apocalypse: Doomsday Fears and Homesteading
I find connections to organic farming in the most unexpected places. This time, it was in a random book I just picked up from the library...
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Anneliese Abbott
Sep 193 min read
An Inconvenient History: The Racist Roots of Progress
After completing my master’s degree at UW-Madison and moving home, I spent over a year trying to understand why highlighting a connection...
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Anneliese Abbott
Aug 292 min read
Are Christianity and Environmentalism Incompatible? Refuting Lynn White, Jr.
I am a Bible-believing creationist Christian. I am also an environmentalist and an organic farmer. I see no conflict between the two. But...
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Anneliese Abbott
Aug 223 min read
Fighting Racism with Love: Koinonia Farm in the 1950s
“On Monday night, July 26, Koinonia Farm’s roadside market was dynamited. About 10:15 p.m. a car evidently came into the driveway, tossed...
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Anneliese Abbott
Aug 153 min read
Women and the Land: Organic Gardening at Grailville in the 1940s
Along with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and Catholic Worker, there was a third organization involved in the Catholic...
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Anneliese Abbott
Aug 83 min read
Activist Homesteaders: Catholic Worker Communes in the 1930s
An urban organization of activists devoted to social justice and racial equity decided to form a commune and go back to the land. This...
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Anneliese Abbott
Aug 13 min read
Back to the Land and Back to Christ: Catholic Homesteading in the 1930s
Homesteading was huge in the 1930s. With a shortage of jobs in urban areas and a lack of market for large-scale farmers, many New Deal...
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Anneliese Abbott
Jul 253 min read
Organic Society: Catholic Agrarianism and Biodynamics in the 1930s
Progressivism had failed in the 1930s. Despite technological innovations, all of the social problems of humanity were just as bad as they...
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Anneliese Abbott
Jul 183 min read
Spiritual Narratives: Pope Pius XI's Catholic Critique of Materialism
All of the historical narratives that I’ve discussed so far have one thing in common—they are secular. They focus almost exclusively on...
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Anneliese Abbott
Jul 113 min read
When Facts Don't Fit: Limitations of Critical Race Theory
I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2020 to 2022—during some of the most tumultuous years politically in...
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Anneliese Abbott
Jul 43 min read
The Newest Narrative: Critical Race Theory and Agricultural History
There’s one more major narrative about agricultural history that I haven’t mentioned yet—not because it isn’t important, but because it’s...
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Anneliese Abbott
Jun 273 min read
Sir Albert Howard's Version of Agricultural History
Organic farming has always questioned the progressive narrative of history. It has to. After all, if the progressive narrative is true,...
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