The southeast coast of Maine is dotted with hundreds of islands. Some are large, covered with vacation homes, and visited regularly by...

In June 1966, editor Bob Rodale announced a new series of article in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine. Titled “The Organic Nature...

As I write this, the wild pin cherry trees are just finishing blooming, white petals drifting down to the ground in a fragrant snow. The...

Note: Everything in this post is true, but I have omitted the name of the professor and the research institution to protect everyone...

Note: Everything in this post is true, but I have omitted the name of the professor and the research institution to protect everyone...

Note: Everything in this post is true, but I have omitted the name of the professor and the research institution to protect everyone...

I loved science when I was a kid—especially biology. I loved learning more about nature, going out in the woods to look at plants and...

One of the most difficult aspects of researching the early history of organic farming in the United States is the lack of documentary...

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...

Six years after my failed pot fertility experiment at OSU, it happened again. The instructor for my Soil Microbiology class at the...

Fresh out of my first year of agronomy classes, I was excited to do my first internship at an organically managed CSA. My job at the...

Tillage is bad. That’s the message I was getting in all of my agronomy classes at Ohio State. No-till farming was the most...

I’ll admit it. My first attempt at designing an “organic” fertility experiment was a complete failure. When I started my forages class at...

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...

If, like me, you get emails from nonprofit organizations, your inbox is probably filling up this week with calls for year-end giving. But...