The debate over who “invented” the term “organic farming” is still open (though I’m vouching for Ehrenfried Pfeiffer). But sometimes the person who popularizes an idea ends up having more influence than the first person who articulated a phrase. This is definitely true with organic farming. Whether it was Pfeiffer, Northbourne, Borsodi, or a bunch of people simultaneously who first started using it, they were all inconsistent in that use. The credit for standardizing the name of this new agricultural system as “organic farming and gardening” arguably should go to J.I. Rodale.
Rodale ran a quirky independent publishing business as a sideline to his real job as co-owner of an electrical components manufacturing firm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. One of his interests was in health, and when he read about Howard’s book An Agricultural Testament in a small British health magazine called Health for All, he was intrigued. He reprinted a review of An Agricultural Testament in the July 1940 issue of his health magazine You Can’t Eat That. He mentioned Lady Eve Balfour’s Haughley Experiment in the September 1940 issue of another of his magazines, Fact Digest. Then nothing on the topic for an entire year.
Finally, in November 1941, Rodale published the first installment of what I call his “founding series” on organic farming. He ultimately ran this same five-part series, with minor modifications, in three of his magazines. The debut was in Health Guide (sometimes also called You Can’t Eat That), where the series ran from November 1941 to April 1942. It was reprinted in Fact Digest from February to July 1942. Finally, Rodale re-used a lot of this material in the earliest issues of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine, launched in May 1942.
Notably, Rodale did not use the phrase “organic farming” in the earliest iterations of this series. It first appears in the first article of the first issue of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine. Rodale never really explained why he settled on that title for his new magazine, but once he did, he began using the term “organic farming” exclusively to refer to the new compost-based farming system. Others followed suit, and by 1945 almost everyone was using the phrase “organic farming.” Simultaneously, many of the non-Anthroposophists who had been using and promoting biodynamic farming (like Ralph Borsodi, Luigi Ligutti, and Paul and Betty Keene) stopped mentioning the word “biodynamic” and recommended “organic farming” instead. Even Ehrenfried Pfeiffer followed this trend and began referring to biodynamics as a subset of organic farming in his articles for a non-biodynamic audience.
What I haven’t been able to figure out is how Rodale settled on “organic farming and gardening” as the initial title for his new magazine. Is it a coincidence that, except for substituting “organic” for “bio-dynamic,” Rodale copied the title of Pfeiffer’s book, Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening? Did Rodale hear people using the phrase “organic farming” or “organic gardening” at the School of Living or Kimberton Farms School? Or, as has usually been assumed, did he get it from Lord Northbourne’s book Look to the Land (even though there’s no evidence he had read that particular book by 1942)? For all his ability as a marketer, Rodale rarely came up with any original ideas, so he must have heard the phrase somewhere.
Regardless of where the phrase “organic farming” originated, it was definitely Rodale who cemented the term as the leading English-language nomenclature for a compost-based farming system that worked with nature.
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