The Farm as Organism: The Foundational Idea of Organic Agriculture

Northbourne, in his book Look to the Land, and published in wartime England in 1940. It was a response to what he dubbed chemical farming, and from the outset he presented these as two mutually incompatible, and contesting, agricultural method-ologies. The terms are introduced in contention: “organic versus chemical farming ” in the Chapter 3 heading (Northbourne, 1940, p. 81). Northbourne’s key contribution is the idea of the farm as organism. He wrote of “the farm as a living whole ” (p.81). In the first elaboration of this concept, he wrote that “the farm itself must have a biological completeness; it must be a living entity, it must be a unit which has within itself a balanced organic life ” (p. 96). A farm that relied on “imported fertility … cannot be self-sufficient nor an organic whole ” (p.97). For Lord Northbourne “the farm must be organic in more senses than one ” (p. 98), and he pre-sents the holistic view that “The soil and the microorganisms in it together with the plants growing on it form an organic whole ” (p. 99). Northbourne was influenced by the thoughts of Rudolf Steiner (1924), and he imple-mented those ideas on his own estate in Kent. He wrote that: “the bio-dynami