Why Small Organic Farming Is Indeed Radical (and Beautiful)

This post was adapted from an address given at the recent Eco-Farm conference in California.

When a friend told me of two of the proposed discussion topics for a major agricultural conference -- "What is so radical about radical agriculture?" and "Is small the only beautiful?" -- I told him that I thought both questions had the same answer.  Let me see if I can explain.

The radical idea behind by organic agriculture is a change in focus.  The new focus is on the quality of the crops grown and their suitability for human nutrition.  That is a change from the more common focus on growing as much quantity as possible and using whatever chemical techniques contribute to increasing that quantity.

None of the non-chemical techniques associated with organic farming are radical or new.  Compost, crop rotations, green manures and so forth are age-old agricultural practices.  What is radical is the belief that these time-proven "natural" techniques produce food that is more nourishing for people and livestock than food grown with chemicals.  What is radical is successfully pursuing that "unscientific" belief against the counter-propaganda and huge commercial power of the agrochemical industry.

The initiators of this new focus were a few perceptive old farmers from the 1930s and ‘40s who had not been taken in by commercial pressures and saw clearly the flaws of chemical agriculture.  The popularizers of the new focus were the young idealists of the 1960s and 70s who were attracted to the idea of food production based on non-industrial systems, even though most of them had no previous connection to agriculture.

The effect of those new young minds entering agriculture defined the early days of organic farming in the US and thus also provides a context for the second question -- "Is small the only beautiful?"  Small became beautiful because of the passion of the new generation of idealistic young farmers.  I was like most of them.  I had no farming background, no farmland, and very little money.  None of us would have been able to buy 500 acres in the Imperial Valley even if we had wanted to. So we ended up on a few acres of inexpensive, abandoned land because of economic reality rather than by conscious choice, and we started farming with compost and rototillers.  The flavorful produce we sold, plus our passionate belief in quality, established the connection between the words "small" and "beautiful" in the public mind.

Once our combined efforts succeeded in making "organic" popular, the real farmers, the large-scale professional farmers, became interested.  (We always knew we weren't considered "real" farmers.)  For most of them, growing organically was a market decision as opposed to the deep passion for soil quality and food quality that had inspired us hippies.  Since the age old farming techniques had not been abandoned because they couldn't work but because chemicals were promising miracles that they couldn't deliver, the transition to organic farming was not difficult for the large farmers and they began selling "organic" produce.  But the "small is more beautiful" idea remains in the public mind, because the organic-buying public intuits that the large-scale farmers may have changed their agronomy but not their thinking; that their minds are still logically focused on how much they can produce rather than on how well it will nourish their customers.  I don't think the public objects to scale (America is the land of large farms) but rather objects to organics by the numbers.  They don't see the old-time hippie passion for quality produce or any innovative new soil fertility improvement ideas coming from the large farms.  They just see coloring between the lines according to the minimum standards that USDA certification requires.