Oh, Pioneers: Settler Agriculture Versus Organic Farming

In the 1930s, soil conservationists blamed exploitative pioneer farming methods for the soil erosion crisis. This photo and caption are from the 1938 USDA book To Hold This Soil, by Russell Lord.

Like everything else in America, the development of organic farming has been shaped by narratives about the past, present, and future. And no single group has been as integral in these changing narratives as the pioneers—or settler colonists, depending on which narrative you’re using. I’ve opted for the term “settler” in my book because it works with any of the narratives.

Who exactly were the pioneers, settlers, or whatever you want to call them? Ah, how to phrase that has been a linguistic minefield since 2020. In the heroic narrative, they’re brave, self-sacrificing individuals who faced danger and deprivation to conquer the wilderness and lay the foundation for America’s future prosperity. In the critical narrative, they’re the racist, violent dregs of society who committed genocide against Indigenous people. In current terminology, they were immigrants (mostly from Europe and, later, the eastern United States) who wanted to raise their standard of living and took advantage of government policies that enabled them to buy large tracts of land for well below its real value.

So much for who the pioneers were. But what about their agriculture? Eighteenth-century European visitors called the East Coast settlers “the worst slovens in Christendom,” and many observers listed bad farming practices as a major impetus for westward expansion. The settlers typically practiced what we’d now call “slash-and-burn” agriculture, cutting down the forests, burning the trees, farming land for a few years until it “wore out,” then leaving the gullied, denuded land and moving west to repeat the cycle again.

In the soil conservation narratives of the 1930s, exploitative pioneer agriculture was considered the main cause of soil erosion crises like the Dust Bowl. Louis Bromfield blamed the wastefulness and exploitation of westward expansion for all the environmental, social, and health problems of the 1930s. “What we need is a new courage and a new race of pioneers, as sturdy as the original pioneers, but wiser than they,” he said in his 1945 book Pleasant Valley.

The organic movement began during this time period and absorbed this critique of wasteful pioneering agriculture. Sir Albert Howard said in his 1945 book Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease, “The settlers who had poured westwards in North America…set themselves to exploit this natural wealth with zest….Without personal wealth and with no harmful intentions he was, nevertheless, a true despoiler.”

Then something strange happened. After World War II, agribusiness promoters latched onto the critique of pioneer agriculture, saying that it could never have produced sustained high yields (which was true). But then they falsely equated organic farming with exploitative pioneer farming methods. That’s what Earl Butz did when he infamously said that 50 million people would starve if the United States went “back” to organic agriculture. He wasn’t really talking about organic agriculture. He was talking about pioneer agriculture, which was the antithesis of organic farming’s emphasis on building soil fertility and organic matter.

The first generation of organic farmers were honest about the exploitative nature of the westward expansion era. It’s what made organic farming necessary in the first place. The only reason we need regenerative agriculture now is because our land was so badly degenerated by bad farming practices, starting with the first wave of settlers. Where the critique of the 1930s differed from today’s critical narrative is that it didn’t blame the settlers themselves, only the methods they used and the societal norms that considered such methods acceptable.