As I’ve learned more about the earliest organic farmers in the United States, I’ve tried to figure out what they had in common. What made...

Organic farming did not start in a vacuum. It was part of a broad range of social, political, and agricultural movements that were...

As far as I am aware, the first book to outline a complete farming system that we would call “organic” today was Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s...

Beginning in the 1950s, J.I. Rodale started writing historical accounts about how he started Organic Gardening magazine. He always told...

I have a confession to make. In all of my earlier articles about the history of organic farming, I left out one critically important...

Beginning in 1950, soil scientists and agronomists began to claim that organic farming couldn’t feed the world. Surprisingly, they did...

Agronomists in the mid-20th century who claimed that organic farming had lower yields never read Organic Gardening magazine. Beginning in...

It’s not something the agronomists who talk about “feeding the world” usually mention, but most of the starvation that happened in the...

“We can go back to organic agriculture in this country if we must—we once farmed that way 75 years ago. We know how to do it. However,...

If the main influences of modern organic farming didn’t come from African or Indigenous American culture, where did they come from? The...

Modern organic farming did not develop in a vacuum. It started in a specific time and place—England in the 1930s. And it was developed as...

The second most frequent question that I am often asked is, “Didn’t George Washington Carver invent organic farming?” It’s an intriguing...

When I first started collecting oral histories in 2021, one of the most frequent questions I received was, “Why aren’t you writing about...

When organic farming came to the United States, it came in books. As far as I am aware, none of the early British organic leaders made it...

Where did organic farmers go on vacation in the 1960s? To other organic farms! Beginning in 1955, Rodale Press began publishing an annual...

Most historians credit the British plant scientist Sir Albert Howard with first developing the system that we now call organic farming....

“But didn’t all agriculture used to be organic?” That’s the number one question that I get when I tell people that I am doing research on...

Welcome to the first-ever blog post on my new History of Organic Farming in America website! I’ve been researching the history of organic...