A Sense of Humus: J.I. Rodale's Witty Responses to His Critics

J.I. Rodale decided to take a humorous approach to the critics of organic farming. So, apparently, did cartoonist Joe Genovese, who drew funny cartoons for Organic Gardening in the early 1950s.

If anybody had an excuse to be sullen, grumpy, and think the whole world was against him, it was J.I. Rodale. He’d been abused by his teacher in Hebrew school, denied accounting jobs because of antisemitism, and now was being publicly accused in the national media as being the leader of a cult based on pseudo-science, half-truths, and emotion. His responses could have been mean and nasty, giving back in kind what others gave him. But they weren’t. When he was attacked, J.I. didn’t get angry. Instead, he laughed. He discovered that humor went a lot farther than hate in making the world a better place.

After Ray Throckmorton, dean of the Kansas State College of Agriculture, wrote an article in the September 1951 issue of Country Gentleman magazine titled “The Organic Farming Myth,” J.I. gave a point-by-point refutation of Throckmorton’s inaccurate claims about organic farming. But he also saw the humorous aspect of the fact that a scientist was being so, well, unscientific. “Throckmorton’s writing was so full of errors that I began to think of him as Mr. Throck-mutton,” he wrote in his hilarious little 1954 book Organic Merry-Go-Round (unfortunately very rare today). “I mean that if he wants to call names, two can play at the same game, and it can be lots of fun.” 

When the scientists called organic farmers a cult, J.I. eventually decided to embrace it rather than get angry. What was a cult, anyways? It was simply “a group of people who disagree with you.” “The early Christians were a cult, for example,” he realized. “The Pilgrims were a cult. So when people refer to us as a cult from now on I am not going to become angered.”

J.I. attributed his good humor to his organic diet. Just look at the rats on his farm, he said. When he first bought the sixty-acre property south of Allentown, the rats in the run-down barns were the ugliest, nastiest, most irritable rodents he’d ever seen. But after the rats had been eating organic corn for a few years, they were fat, happy, “amiable creatures.” The same applied to people, too, J.I. believed. When he accidentally stopped his car a few feet past a stop sign, another driver stopped and started swearing and snarling at him. But J.I. “sat there like a gentleman, not even making faces at him. I am too well-nourished for that.” The poor angry man, he decided, probably ate a bad diet of processed food, and if he would start eating healthy organic food, he’d probably be good-natured, too. (Actually, J.I.’s optimism and sense of humor predated his interest in organic farming, but he didn’t let that get in the way of a good story).

The readers of Organic Gardening embraced J.I.’s positive outlook on life, and many of them followed his example of finding the funny side to even the nastiest attacks on organic farming. When the garden writer Ruth Stout read the National Fertilizer Association’s “Science vs. Witchcraft” article, she said, “When I saw a lot of ‘experts’ taking the trouble to try to convince growers that they must use chemical fertilizers, and are stooping to name-calling, I think: So enough people are going in for organics to get the ‘experts’ nervous! That’s fine! Three cheers for the faddists and opportunists, and hats off to the witches!”

In conclusion—well, I’ll leave you with J.I.’s conclusion to Organic Merry-Go-Round: “Conclusion? With regard to the organic method, this is not the time to speak of conclusions. We have barely broken ground. We have not yet begun to fight. We are only in the spade-work phase! Conclusion, humpf!”