Milton Whitney, Regenerative Advocate? Putting "Inexhaustible Soil" in Context

Was Milton Whitney a villain or an early advocate of regenerate farming?

Milton Whitney is the closest thing soil science history has to a villain. Not only did he have an abrasive personality and get in serious conflicts with most of his colleagues, but he’s gone down in infamy for making the following statement in a 1909 USDA bulletin titled Soils of the United States: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset the Nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” That statement was often interpreted as implying that farmers didn’t have to worry about degrading their soils and could farm in any old way they pleased.

When I first wrote about Milton Whitney in an Acres article in 2018, I followed the consensus and framed him as a bad guy. Fortunately, before reprinting that article in my new book, I decided to go back and read the "inexhaustible soil" quote in context to make sure I wasn’t misrepresenting him. When I did, I got quite the shock, because what Whitney was actually talking about was regenerative agriculture!

When Whitney analyzed the mineral contents of seemingly “exhausted” soils, they still contained seemingly ample amounts of minerals to grow crops. The only difference between “exhausted” and “fertile” soils of the same type was the presence of what he called “toxic organic bodies.” Organic chemistry methods were still too crude for Whitney to figure out the exact analysis or origin of these toxins, but one things seemed clear—soil exhaustion had a biological factor that might be even more significant than any chemical factors. He also noted that organic fertilizers, like manure or legumes, were far more effective in “purifying” the soil of these toxins than chemical fertilizers.

Soil exhaustion, Whitney believed, was caused by poor farming practices, not simply a withdrawal of too many minerals from the soil bank account. “There is thus every reason to believe that with better methods of cultivation, more attention to crop rotation, and the introduction of live stock the problem of the fertility of these soils will be satisfactorily worked out,” he concluded.

In 1925, just a couple years before he died, Whitney published Soil and Civilization. In this book, he proposed a new theory—that soil was not just an inert mass of chemicals, but was rather “a living thing, having many of characteristics of an animal.” A good farmer understood that the soil was a living organism and had a “sympathetic feeling and interest in his partnership with the soil.” Most importantly, because it was alive, soil had the ability to regenerate. “There are many reasons for believing, however, that the soil has a regenerative power that will prolong its life indefinitely and that the ability to continue to produce crops is dependent solely upon the knowledge and skill of the man who works the soil,” Whitney argued. That’s right—he actually used the word “regenerative”!

Placed in its original context, Whitney’s statement that the soil was “inexhaustible” was not as crazy as his contemporaries made it out to be. He was not saying that farmers could continue to degrade their land and still produce good crops. He was saying that if farmers started using better methods like crop rotation, animal and green manures, and mixed crop and livestock farming, they could regenerate exhausted soils and make them fertile once again. Most importantly, he was confident that regenerative farming could feed the world for thousands of years without chemical fertilizers.

Maybe Milton Whitney wasn’t such a bad guy after all.