Putting Albrecht in Context: How I Ended Up Editing the Albrecht Papers
About a year ago, the Acres U.S.A. editor, Paul Meyer, brought me several cardboard boxes of papers to scan and edit into book volumes. These weren’t just any old papers. They were the famous Albrecht Papers—the articles of University of Missouri soil scientist William Albrecht, which he gave to Charles Walters in the early 1970s.
To be completely honest, I had mixed feelings as I opened those boxes of papers. On one hand, I love going through historic documents, and these were from the time period of agricultural history I’m most interested in—the 1930s through 1960s. On the other hand, I didn’t like the almost cultish way in which Charles Walters and some of his followers regarded William Albrecht. Albrecht was certainly an interesting person, but I thought that phrases like “a brilliant scientist” and “a man ahead of his time” lacked both historical context and scientific accuracy.
While he was at the peak of his career, Charles Walters edited the best of Albrecht’s articles into the original four volumes of the Albrecht Papers. A few years before he died, he decided that he wanted to publish all of the remaining articles. Acres U.S.A. released volumes 5–8 over a decade ago. The other seven proposed volumes were tidy stacks of low-quality photocopies, each in its own yellow envelope and manila folder just as Charles Walters left them.
With the aid of a good book scanner and OCR software provided by Acres, I digitized and copyedited volumes 9 and 10 of the Albrecht Papers exactly as Walters had envisioned. That was sometimes a challenge because the low-quality photocopied articles were sometimes missing parts of the text. I had to track down other copies to fill in the gaps, and in the process I discovered that all of Albrecht’s University of Missouri bulletins and scientific journal articles have been digitized and are now available through hathitrust.org or subscription databases.
At that point, Paul decided that there wasn’t realistically a market for five more volumes. So he asked me to go through the remaining five folders and select the best articles to make two final volumes. Happily, after removing the bulletins and scientific journal articles (which weren’t very fun to read and are available online), the remaining articles for a popular audience were just about the right amount of material to fill two volumes. That’s how it came to pass that my name is listed as a co-editor, right after Charles Walters, on volumes 11 and 12 of the Albrecht Papers.
I chose to arrange the articles in these volumes chronologically to demonstrate how Albrecht’s philosophies changed and developed over the years. Volume 11 explores how Albrecht developed his theories of the soil-health-climate connection, with an emphasis on his involvement with Friends of the Land (and a bonus article on Malabar Farm). Volume 12 explores Albrecht’s theories on fertilizer, politics, and education, containing some of his most philosophical writings.
The process of editing these articles gave me a much fuller and more positive view of William Albrecht. He was human, he made mistakes, and he changed his ideas over time. To me, that makes his writings even more valuable. Are they the last word on plant mineral nutrition, climate, and farming methods? Of course not. Are they important primary source documents that shed light on a little-documented period of great change in American agricultural history? Yes. And that’s why I’m happy to add editing volumes 11 and 12 of the Albrecht Papers to my literary portfolio.
