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...

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...