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...

This year, we had a wonderful bumper crop of almost every vegetable in our garden. For months, our hallway and entryway were full of...

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,...

Korre Boyer, the park manager at Malabar when I visited in 2015, reminded me a lot of my fellow agronomy students at Ohio State. He was...