He himself began as a specialist, a mycologist, but he soon saw that this made him “a laboratory hermit,” and he felt that this was fundamentally wrong:I was an investigator of plant diseases, but I had myself no crops on which I could try out the remedies I advocated: I could not take my own advice before offering it to other people. It was borne in on me that there was a wide chasm between science in the laboratory and practice in the field, and I began to suspect that unless this gap could be bridged no real progress could be made in the control of plant diseases: research and practice would remain apart: mycological work threatened to degenerate into little more than a convenient agency by which—provided I issued a sufficient supply of learned reports fortified by a judicious mixture of scientific jargon—practical difficulties could be side-tracked.10
The theme of his life’s work was his effort to bridge this gap. The way to do it was simply to refuse to see anything in isolation. Everything, as he saw it, existed within a context, outside of which it was unintelligible. Moreover, every problem existed within a context, outside of which it was unsolvable. Agriculture, thus, cannot be understood or its problems solved without respect to context. The same applied even to an individual plant or crop. And this respect for context properly set the standard and determined the methodology of agricultural science:The basis of research was obviously to be investigation directed to the whole existence of a selected crop, namely, “the plant itself in relation to the soil in which it grows, to the conditions of village agriculture under which it is cultivated, and with reference to the economic uses of the product”; in other words research was to be integral, never fragmented. 11
If nothing exists in isolation, then all problems are circumstantial; no problem resides, or can be solved, in anybody’s department. A disease was, thus, a symptom of a larger disorder. The following passage shows as well as any the way his mind worked:I found when I took up land in India and learned what the people of the country know, that the diseases of plants and animals were very useful agents for keeping me in order, and for teaching me agriculture. I have learnt more from the diseases of plants and animals than I have from all the professors of Cambridge, Rothamsted and other places who gave me my preliminary training. I argued the matter in this way. If diseases attacked my crops, it was because I was doing something wrong. I therefore used diseases to teach me. In this way I really learnt agriculture—from my father and from my relatives and from the professors I only obtained a mass of preliminary information. Diseases taught me to understand agriculture. I think if we used diseases more instead of running to sprays and killing off pests, and if we let diseases rip and then found out what is wrong and then tried to put it right, we should get much deeper into agricultural problems than we shall do by calling in all these artificial aids. After all, the destruction of a pest is the evasion of, rather than the solution of, all agricultural problems.12
The implied approach to the problem of disease is illustrated by the way Howard and his first wife, Gabrielle, dealt with the problem of indigo wilt:In fifteen years £54,207 had been spent on research, at that time a large sum. Yet the Imperial Entomologist could find no insect, the Imperial Mycologist no fungus, and the Imperial Bacteriologist no virus to account for the plague.
The Howards proceeded differently. Their start was to grow the crop on a field scale and in the best possible way, taking note of local methods. Their observation was directed to the whole plant, above and below ground; they followed the crop throughout its life history; they looked at all the surrounding circumstances, soil, moisture, temperature. But they looked for no virus, no fungus, and no insect.13
And it was the Howards who solved the problem. The plants were wilting, they found, primarily because the soils were becoming water-logged during the monsoon, killing the roots; the plants were wilting and dying from starvation. It was a problem of management, and it was solved by changes in management. But it could not have been solved except by studying the whole plant in its whole context.
Because he refused to accept the academic fragmentation that had become conventional by his time, Howard, of course, was “accused of invading fields not his own,”14 and this he had done intentionally and in accordance with “the guiding principle of the closest contact between research and those to be served.”15
AGRICULTURE IS PRACTICED inescapably in a context, and its context must not be specialized or simplified. Its context, first of all, is the nature of the place in which it is practiced, but it is also the society and the economy of those who practice it. And just as there are penalties for ignoring the natural context, so there are penalties for ignoring the human one. As Howard saw it, the agricultural industrialists’ apparent belief that food production could be harmlessly divorced from the economic interest of farmers needlessly repeats a historical failure:Judged by the ordinary standards of achievement the agricultural history of the Roman Empire ended in failure due to inability to realize the fundamental principle that the maintenance of soil fertility coupled with the legitimate claims of the agricultural population should never have been allowed to come in conflict with the operations of the capitalist. The most important possession of a country is its population. If this is maintained in health and vigour everything else will follow; if this is allowed to decline nothing, not even great riches, can save the country from eventual ruin.16
The obligation of a country’s agriculture, then, is to maintain its people in health, and this applies equally to the people who eat and to the people who produce the food.
Howard accepted this obligation unconditionally as the obligation also of his own work. He realized, moreover, that this obligation imposed strict limits both upon the work of farmers and upon his work as a scientist: First, neither farming nor experimentation should usurp the tolerances or violate the nature of the place where the work is done; and second, the work must respect and preserve the livelihoods of the local community. Before going to work, agricultural scientists are obliged to know both the place where their work is to be done and the people for whom they are working. It is remarkable that Howard came quietly, by thought and work, to these realizations a half century and more before they were forced upon us by the ecological and economic failures of industrial agriculture.
In India he used his training as a scientist and his ability to observe and think for himself, just as he would have been expected to do. But he also learned from the peasant farmers of the country, whom he respected as his “professors.” He valued them for their knowledge of the land, for their industry, and for their “accuracy of eye.”17 He accepted also the economic and technological circumstances of those farmers as the limit within which he himself should do his work. He saw that it would be possible to ruin his clients by thoughtless or careless innovation:Often improvements are possible but they are not economic. . . . In India the cultivators are mostly in debt and the holdings are small. Any capital required for developments has to be borrowed. A large number of possible improvements are barred by the fact that the extra return is not large enough to pay the high interest on the capital involved and also to yield a profit to the cultivator.18
The reader may wish to contrast this way of thinking with that of the Green Revolution or with that of the headlong industrialization of American agriculture since World War II, in both of which the only recognized limit was technological, and in neither of which was there any concern for the ability of farmers or their communities to bear the costs.
Howard’s solution to the problem was simply to do his work within the technological limits of the local farmers:The existing system could not be radically changed, but it might be developed in useful ways. This must never exceed what the cultivator could afford, and, in a way, also what he was used to. This principle Sir Albert kept in mind to the very end . . . his standard seems to have been the possession of a yoke of oxen; when more power was needed, the presumption was that the second yoke could be borrowed from a neighbor. Thus the maximum draught contemplate
d was four animals.19
By the observance of such limits, Howard was enfolded consciously and conscientiously within the natural and human communities that he endeavored to serve.
NO UNIVERSITY THAT I have heard of, land-grant or other, has yet attempted to establish its curriculum and its intellectual structure on Sir Albert Howard’s “one great subject,” or on his determination to serve respectfully and humbly the local population. But a university most certainly could do so, and in doing so it could bring to bear all its disciplines and departments. In doing so, that is to say, it could become in truth a university.
At present our universities are not simply growing and expanding, according to the principle of “growth” universal in industrial societies, but they are at the same time disintegrating. They are a hodgepodge of unrelated parts. There is no unifying aim and no common critical standard that can serve equally well all the diverse parts or departments.
The fashion now is to think of universities as industries or businesses. University presidents, evidently thinking of themselves as CEOs, talk of “business plans” and “return on investment,” as if the industrial economy could provide an aim and a critical standard appropriate either to education or to research.
But this is not possible. No economy, industrial or otherwise, can supply an appropriate aim or standard. Any economy must be either true or false to the world and to our life in it. If it is to be true, then it must be made true, according to a standard that is not economic.
To regard the economy as an end or as the measure of success is merely to reduce students, teachers, researchers, and all they know or learn to merchandise. It reduces knowledge to “property” and education to training for the “job market.”
If, on the contrary, Howard was right in his belief that health is the “one great subject,” then a unifying aim and a common critical standard are clearly implied. Health is at once quantitative and qualitative; it requires both sufficiency and goodness. It is comprehensive (it is synonymous with “wholeness”), for it must leave nothing out. And it is uncompromisingly local and particular; it has to do with the sustenance of particular places, creatures, human bodies, and human minds.
If a university began to assume responsibility for the health of its place and its local constituents, then all of its departments would have a common aim, and they would have to judge their place and themselves and one another by a common standard. They would need one another’s knowledge. They would have to communicate with one another; the diversity of specialists would have to speak to one another in a common language. And here again Howard is exemplary, for he wrote, and presumably spoke, a plain, vigorous, forthright English—no jargon, no condescension, no ostentation, no fooling around.
NOTES
1 An Agricultural Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 4.
2 Sir Albert Howard, The Soil and Health (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 11.
3 Louise E. Howard, Sir Albert Howard in India (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1954), 162.
4 The Soil and Health, 11.
5 An Agricultural Testament, 196.
6 The Soil and Health, 22.
7 Ibid., 18.
8 Ibid.
9 An Agricultural Testament, 25.
10 The Soil and Health, 1-2.
11 Sir Albert Howard in India, 42.
12 Howard, as quoted in Sir Albert Howard in India, 190.
13 Sir Albert Howard in India, 170.
14 Ibid., 42.
15 Ibid., 44.
16 An Agricultural Testament, 9.
17 Sir Albert Howard in India, 222 and 228.
18 Howard, as quoted in Sir Albert Howard in India, 37-38.
19 Sir Albert Howard in India, 224.
Agriculture from the Roots Up
(2004)
HENRY DAVID THOREAU wrote somewhere that hundreds are hacking at the branches for every one who is striking at the root. He meant this as a metaphor, but it applies literally to modern agriculture and to the science of modern agriculture. As it has become more and more industrialized, agriculture increasingly has been understood as an enterprise established upon the surface of the ground. Most people nowadays lack even a superficial knowledge of agriculture, and most who do know something about it are paying little or no attention to what is happening under the surface.
The scientists at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, on the contrary, are striking at the root. Their study of the root and the roots of our agricultural problems has produced a radical criticism, leading to a proposed solution that is radical.
THEIR CRITICISM IS made radical by one crucial choice: the adoption of the natural ecosystem as the first standard of agricultural performance, having priority over the standard of productivity and certainly over the delusional and dangerous industrial standard of “efficiency.” That single change makes a momentous difference, one that is historical and cultural as well as scientific.
By the standard of the natural or the healthy ecosystem, we see as if suddenly the shortcomings, not only of industrial agriculture but of agriculture itself, insofar as agriculture has consisted of annual monocultures. To those of us who are devoted to agriculture in any of its historical forms, such criticism is inevitably painful. And yet we may see its justice and accept it, understanding how much is at stake. To others, who have founded their careers or their businesses precisely upon the shortcomings of agriculture as we now have it, this criticism will perhaps be even more painful, and no doubt they will resist with all the great power we know they have.
Even so, this is a criticism for which the time is ripe. A rational denial of its justice is no longer possible. There are many reasons for this, but the main one, I think, is the virtual meltdown of the old boundaries of specialist thought in agriculture—a meltdown that I hope foretells the same fate for the boundaries of all specialist thought.
The justifying assumptions of the industrial agriculture that we now have are based on a reductive science working within strictly bounded specializations. This agriculture, an agglomeration of specialties, appeared perfectly rational and salutary so long as it was assumable that efficiency and productivity were adequate standards, that husbandry was safely reducible to science and fertility to chemistry, that organisms are merely machines, that agriculture is under no obligation to nature, that it has only agricultural results, and that it can be confidently based upon “cheap” fossil fuels.
The inventors of this agriculture assumed, in short, that the human will is sovereign in the universe, that the only laws are the laws of mechanics, and that the material world and its “natural resources” are without limit. These are the assumptions that, acknowledged or not, underlie the “war” by which we humans have undertaken to “conquer” nature, and which is the dominant myth of modern intellectual life.
IN THE DAYS of human darkness and ignorance, now supposedly past, we found ways to acknowledge the sanctity of nature and to honor her as the common mother of all creatures, including ourselves. We conducted our relations with her by prayer, propitiation, skilled work, thrift, caution, and care. Our concern about that relationship produced the concepts of usufruct and stewardship. A few lines from the “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie” that Edmund Spenser placed at the end of The Faerie Queene will suffice to give a sense of our ancient veneration:Then forth issewed (great goddesse) great dame Nature,
With goodly port and gracious Majesty;
Being far greater and more tall of stature
Than any of the gods or Powers on hie . . .
This great Grandmother of all creatures bred
Great Nature, ever young yet full of eld,
Still moving, yet unmoved from her sted;
Unseen of any, yet of all beheld . . .
Thus, though he was a Christian, Spenser still saw fit at the end of the sixteenth century to present Nature as the genius of the sublunary world, a figure of the greatest majesty, mystery, and power, the source of all earthly life. He
addressed her, in addition, as the supreme judge of all her creatures, ruling by standards that we would now call ecological:Who Right to all dost deal indifferently,
Damning all Wrong and tortious Injurie,
Which any of thy creatures do to other
(Oppressing them with power, unequally)
Sith of them all thou art the equall mother,
And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.
And then, at about Spenser’s time or a little after, we set forth in our “war against nature” with the purpose of conquering her and wringing her powerful and lucrative secrets from her by various forms of “tortious Injurie.” This we have thought of as our “enlightenment” and as “progress.” But in the event this war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: That is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to both sides are extremely high.
The second surprise is that we are not winning. On the evidence now available, we have to conclude that we are losing—and, moreover, that there was never a chance that we could win. Despite the immense power and violence that we have deployed against her, nature is handing us one defeat after another. Even in our most grievous offenses against her—as in the present epidemic of habitat destruction and species extinction—we are being defeated, for in the long run we can less afford the losses than nature can. And we have to look upon soil erosion and the spread of exotic diseases, weeds, and pests as nature’s direct reprisals for our violations of her laws. Sometimes she seems terrifyingly serene in her triumphs over us, as when, simply by refusing to absorb our pollutants, she forces us to live in our mess.