Towards a Sustainable Agriculture
The Living Soil
by Lady Eve Balfour
The following is the text of the paper exactly as given by Lady Eve Balfour at the IFOAM Conference of 1977.
In order to set the scene for this historic conference, and for the benefit of the younger participants, I think it might be helpful to start by sketching, briefly, the origins and development of the, now worldwide, organic movement.
After that, I propose to explain how my own involvement in the movement led to the so-called “Haughley Experiment”, and outline the contribution that experiment made towards today’s recognition of the importance of ecological awareness in Agriculture.
Finally, I want to share with you some of my thoughts on what I believe should be our approach, both philosophical and pragmatic, in working for Sustainable Agriculture.
I do not know where or when the ideas that have brought us together here were first called a movement, but I have little doubt that the main inspiration derived from the work of the early research pioneers in the first quarter of this century, though this is not to discount the influence of one of the most important, who was even earlier, namely Rudolf Steiner.
Those I particularly have in mind were: in the medical field, Sir Robert McCarrison, Drs. Francis Pottinger Jnr. and Weston Price, and in the agricultural field, Sir Albert Howard, Dr. William Albrecht, and Dr. E. Pfeiffer.
Following these, and overlapping with them to a certain extent, came another wave of giants–men like Dr. George Scott-Williamson, Dr. Lionel Picton, Dr. Dendy, Prof. Barry Commoner, and the courageous Rachel Carson, and among the list of departed great ones, I must, sadly, now add Dr. Schumacher.
These pioneers had one thing in common–they were what we should now call Ecologists. They all succeeded in breaking away from the narrow confines of the preconceived ideas that dominated the scientific thinking of their day. They looked at the living world from a new perspective–they also asked new questions. Instead of the contemporary obsession with disease and its causes, they set out to discover the causes of Health. This led inevitably to an awareness of wholeness (the two words, after all, have the same origin) and to a gradual understanding that all life is one.
Although I started farming in Suffolk in 1919 my own interest in the ecological approach only began in the early 1930’s. By that time local societies had been formed in more than one country to promote organic husbandry and whole food, though I was not aware of this until 1945 when plans were underway for forming the Soil Association, the first society in the movement aiming at a world membership, and with research high on its list of priorities, which brings me to the Haughley Experiment.
This was started in 1939 on my farm and taken over by the Soil Association in 1947 which for the next 25 years directed and sponsored it. This pioneering experiment was the first…