The bestselling book ( The Late Great Planet Earth ) and the top song ("Wish We'd All Been Ready") of the Jesus movement were both about the Rapture Ever since I started researching the history of organic farming, I’ve been trying to find connections between Christianity and the organic movement. I have found connections with Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. But the type of church I’ve always attended—the evangelicals—is conspicuously absent. And the reason why has

George Washington Carver was an amazing man. But did his composting method have African roots? When I started researching the history of organic farming in 2020, everybody was reading Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black  and Monica White’s Freedom Farmers . Based on brief, undocumented statements in these books, many people began claiming that organic farming was a traditional African system brought to the United States by George Washington Carver and later promoted by J.I. R

Yet another new book concludes that feedlots are a better way to feed the world than organic farming. The twist? This time it's aimed at a liberal audience. The war against organic farming isn’t over. In fact, things are starting to heat up again. But this time, the forces opposing organic farming are targeting groups that have historically supported organic farming—and they’re starting to succeed.   My first inkling that something fishy was going on was when I read We Are Ea

National defense claims protected pesticides in the 1950s. How can we avoid repeating that history? When President Trump issued an executive order on February 18 declaring glyphosate essential for national defense , the MAHA and organic farming movements were understandably upset. Of course, the biggest response was to reiterate all the reams of evidence that have accumulated proving that glyphosate is toxic. But that’s not going to win this one—and here’s why.   Declaring a

It was winter. It was snowy. So I had to stop at Valley Forge while I was in Pennsylvania. When I saw that Valley Forge was only a twenty-minute drive from Kimberton, I knew I had to stop. Yes, it made my already ten-hour drive a little longer. But 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the United States. And it was winter. And snowy.   As every American kid learns in elementary school, it was snowy that winter of 1777–78, too, when the poorly equipped Continental Army set up a has

Was Milton Whitney a villain or an early advocate of regenerate farming? Milton Whitney is the closest thing soil science history has to a villain. Not only did he have an abrasive personality and get in serious conflicts with most of his colleagues, but he’s gone down in infamy for making the following statement in a 1909 USDA bulletin titled Soils of the United States : “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset the Nation possesses. It is the one resource that ca

Fear appeals like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth were very successful in scaring people about climate change - but has overemphasizing the possibility of catastrophe backfired? Read almost anything written about the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and you’ll find bone-chilling forecasts of how terrible things will be by the year 2000. If all the things they predicted had come true, the world today would be a horrible, polluted, overpopulated nightmare where w

The amazing ecosystem recovery after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens inspired Bob Rodale's concept of regeneration. Regenerative agriculture has been the hottest “buzzword” in the alternative ag movement  since about 2019. Before that, all the focus was on “sustainable”—a word that’s often criticized as meaning nothing because everyone defines it differently. Regenerative, I quickly discovered, was suffering the same fate. Some define it as soil health or sequestering

Per capita milk consumption has plummeted since the 1940s. Does it have anything to do with processing? Data from USDA-ERS. As someone who spends a lot of time studying the past, I’ve found it very interesting to compare today’s movement against overprocessed foods to the natural foods movement of the 1940s. There are a lot of similarities, but one major difference is that today’s movement seems excessively focused on beef and beef tallow, which weren’t considered “protective

When settlers came to southwest Michigan in the 19th century, they found long-abandoned Indigenous garden beds. I’m often asked why I don’t write more about historic Indigenous agriculture when I’m discussing the history of organic farming. One reason is that nobody today really knows much about Indigenous agriculture before European contact. That’s why a recent archaeological discovery on the border between Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula  is so interesting. Using l

The AMA's 1959 film "The Medicine Man" discouraged people from eating whole wheat and other healthy foods. I’ve run into all sorts of unexpected things in the course of my research on organic farming history. Some are funny, some are intriguing, and some are disturbing. And now that I’m up to the late 1950s in drafting my book chapters, I’m in the most disturbing time period of all—when government agencies and trusted scholarly authorities withheld important health informatio

J.I. Rodale decided to take a humorous approach to the critics of organic farming. So, apparently, did cartoonist Joe Genovese, who drew...

J.I. Rodale's original chicken house at Founders Farm is a work of art. After dropping my luggage in my room, it was time for my tour of...

J.I. Rodale's original farmhouse--birthplace of the organic farming movement--is now owned and maintained by the Rodale Institute and...

Walnut Acres, in Penns Creek, Pennsylvania, was the first organic mail-order food company in the US. I knew it was the right place. It...

The term "organic farming" was not widely used before the late 1930s. But who used it first? I interrupt the series of articles on the...

The first students at Michigan Agricultural College spent three hours a day clearing forests and draining swamps. The land-grant...

The concept of "land-grab universities" was so polarizing in 2021 that I was unable to research the actual history of the land-grants...

Monsanto advertised Krilium as a way to make soils "friendly." But did it work? Organic matter was really big in the early 1950s. Even...

From 1948 to 1950, the fertilizer industry encouraged farmers to build organic matter - and use fertilizer. “Organic matter is the life...