The Life Blood of the Soil: When the Fertilizer Industry Promoted Organic Matter

From 1948 to 1950, the fertilizer industry encouraged farmers to build organic matter - and use fertilizer.

“Organic matter is the life blood of productive soils….A productive soil is a living biological mechanism the productive capacity of which can be used, caused to be regenerated and used over and over again if managed intelligently.”

“The inclusion of more grass is a necessity in order to maintain the structure and the productivity of the soil essential to the production of profitable crops.”

The above quotes are from 1948 and 1950, respectively. They might sound like they're from an organic farming magazine, but actually they are both from articles published in Plant Food Journal, a fertilizer industry publication. That’s because, up through the early 1950s, the fertilizer industry was emphasizing the importance of soil organic matter—with a little fertilizer sprinkled on top, of course. It wasn’t until the 1960s that agricultural scientists started downplaying the importance of organic matter. In 1950, soil conservation was at its peak, and the horrors of the Dust Bowl were still fresh enough in people’s memories that they understood how important it was to keep soils healthy so they wouldn’t erode.

That’s why the earliest attacks on organic farming—in the late 1940s—were much milder than those that would come a decade or two later. The authors of the earliest anti-organic articles always started out by emphasizing that high levels of organic matter were critically important for keeping soils productive and healthy. The only thing they didn’t like about organic farming was that organic farmers didn’t use chemical fertilizers at all—which, if widely adopted, would seriously impact the growing fertilizer industry. And so they promoted fertilizers and organic matter, arguing that both were necessary.

“High input of soil organic matter is a prerequisite of good tilth and consistently high fertilizer efficiency,” Robert Yoder wrote in April 1948. “Fertilizers increase crop yields,” Firman Bear wrote in April 1950. “But they are of equal importance for adding organic matter to the soil and for increasing the life in the soil.”

“Agricultural scientists by the hundreds and farmers by the millions are the strongest advocates of conserving soil organic matter,” Fertilizer Review wrote in 1951. “On this score, the advocates of chemical fertilizer have no quarrel with the organic farming enthusiasts.” As the fertilizer industry’s reasoning went, fertilizers increased crop root and residue biomass, which automatically built up soil organic matter. As long as farmers were using chemical fertilizers on top of other good conservation practices—crop rotations, green manures, grass farming, and conservation tillage—fertilizers and organic matter could work together as a team to improve American agriculture.

That’s what the academic consensus was for a few brief years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And that’s why the earliest attacks against organic farming were focused specifically on the idea that soils could be kept healthy and fertile using only organic amendments and rock powders, not processed soluble fertilizers. As long as farmers didn’t go that far, organic matter and fertilizers seemed perfectly compatible in the era of postwar optimism.