As I walked past the big barn at Malabar Farm with Tom in 2015, I was surprised and pleased to see a freshly painted mural on the barn...

Tom Bachelder is passionate about Malabar Farm. After retiring from his career as an art teacher at the Mansfield Public Schools, Tom...

I knew I was getting close to Malabar Farm when I started to see hills. Before I took my first visit to Malabar Farm in 2015, I had spent...

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 I do oral history interviews with people, I always ask off the recording if they have any questions for me. And what they usually...

Oral histories are important primary source documents to help preserve the history of organic farming. But they’re long and most...

When I tell people that I’m collecting oral histories from people involved in organic and sustainable agriculture, I get an almost...

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...

Ever since people began collecting oral histories in the 1970s, they have tried whenever possible to record them in-person. Legends...

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

Archival research is the gold standard in the historical profession. Sure, you can do good historical research using published primary...

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

What is it like to do an oral history? It’s as easy as telling a story—your story. That’s what an oral history is: a chance for you to...

“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...

I had never seen so many books in one place in my life. It wasn’t my first time in The Ohio State University’s Thompson Library, but I...

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...