The Myth of Our Organic Past

In the last few years the organic movement has been gaining ground both in terms of the number of farmers and gardeners who are incorporating organic techniques as well as in terms of consumer awareness. This second fact I see nearly everyday here on the Pliny Freeman Farm at Old Sturbridge Village as visitors routinely ask if, and usually assume that, early 19th century farmers were organic. Clearly, concerns over chemical residues and environmental damage have been heightened to the point that the term organic is not unfamiliar to most people. But while the word may be familiar, its definition is not at all clear. That is why most people look perplexed when we answer that no, early 19th century farmers were not organic.

The confusion I've witnessed while explaining this concept and the subsequent discussions I've had with many interested people caused me to think more than I already had about the misconceptions people have formed or have been taught about both agricultural history and organic farming. The public's assumption is that the two go hand-in-hand. This assumption reveals, among other things, a basic misunderstanding of both our agricultural past and of organic agriculture in general. It is easy, however, to understand how and why these misperceptions have come to pervade out society's consciousness.

In what I hope will be the first in a future series of articles, I will briefly discuss the origins of this myth and examine the historical record that convincingly contradicts it.

Slovenly, careless, wasteful, negligent and ignorant. These are not the first words most people would choose to describe the yeoman farmers who made up the majority of the United States population in the first decades of nationhood. After all, our national psyche is based in large part on the image of the rugged, hardworking and virtuous farm family nobly toiling the earth for the good of God and country. We read Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Crevecouer's Letters from an American Farmer and countless other essays about our nation's early farmers and conclude that they were the moral and physical backbone of American society.

Advocates of the farm, both conventional as well as organic, and of the "culture in agriculture" continue to use this image in their appeals to the urban and suburban majority to save the family farm or promote farm products, agricultural practices and lifestyles. And we as a society remain seduced by the icon of the early American farmer because of the ideals and the promise we believe he symbolizes: independence, thriftiness, and a respect for and communion with Nature.

History is often imbued with more than a touch of romanticism and nostalgia for what once was. The problem is that what we think once was, in fact rarely existed. No, despite what we want to believe, our agricultural forebears were not organic. Nor did they venerate nature. To understand this we need only examine the historical record found in town tax valuations, state and federal census data and in an assortment of other less catalogued and less available sources of agricultural information like farmers' daybooks, accountbooks, and letters. In addition, we need to realize that while many sang the praises of farmers in the days of the early republic, many more commentators had few kind words for the type of husbandry they practiced - which as one writer estimated was in a near total state of devastation.

This last criticism certainly exaggerated the state of American agriculture. While not nearly as haphazard as some authors suggest, it is clear, with the hindsight that the present allows, that the agricultural system practiced by our early farmers was rife with problems. Thus any equation of early American agriculture with modern organic techniques only helps to promote a myth that compounds the public's misunderstanding of what does and does not constitute organic farming. Further perpetuation of this myth could also severely damage the organic movement's attempts to attract more main stream consumers and farmers (something this writer feels we must do to ensure continued growth) as it helps reinforce the mistaken but negative stereotype of organic agriculture - low yields of second rate produce - so entrenched in many people's minds. Finally, promulgating this myth also dismisses the historical record and advances another entrenched but misinformed idea, that of the past as a golden era, a quieter, simpler time.

Organic and early American agriculture need not be mutually exclusive - many early techniques are appropriate to organics. It is wrong, however, to define one with the other, or to use the terms interchangeably. The introduction to the NOFA/Mass Certification Standards begins with a quote from Wendell Berry's The Gift of Good Land that suggests why this should be so: "An organic farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system that has the integrity, the independence and the benign dependence of an organism."

According to this criterion, few, if any, early 19th century farms could be classified as organic. By the same token, one would be hard pressed to find many of the same farms that could meet NOFA/Mass certification requirements. This is so primarily for what these farmers didn't do rather than what they did. The list of what our forebears didn't do is exhaustive. Some of the more obvious omissions were a near total absence of cover crops, effective or beneficial rotations, and most glaring of all, manure and soil management.

The key to any system calling itself organic is the establishment and maintenance of a healthy, viable, and productive soil. Simply avoiding the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, or other caustic compounds (something our forebears did not do!) does not make a farmer organic as that alone cannot maintain the soil's fertility over even a short period of time. Of all the criteria one needs to call oneself organic, feeding the soil is perhaps the most important. And more than anything, it is the one thing our 18th and 19th century farmers failed to do or, in many cases, didn't do well enough.

They themselves recognized that fact. Manure management was among the most discussed and debated topics in the early agricultural press. Yet only a small percentage of farmers subscribed to such journals and fewer still incorporated what they read into everyday practice. While farmers in the early republic took advantage of market opportunities unavailable to generations that preceded them, they were slow to adopt new methods of husbandry that these increased opportunities demanded. Often times they turned a deaf ear to any suggestions coming from either agricultural societies or the press, deriding them as impractical examples of "book farming." Indeed, many were. On the other hand many suggestions made little financial sense to farmers without the wherewithal to invest in new equipment, buildings, or livestock. Nevertheless over time the land suffered considerably.

Average yields remained fairly constant throughout this time period but plainly reveal that the soil was near exhaustion. Although grass for pasture and hay was the region's major crop, grasslands, perhaps more than tillable land, bore the brunt of the farmer's neglect. Typical yields for upland or English hay (Timothy, redtop, clover mix) were only on the order of 1 to 1 1/2 ton to the acre. Remember, however, that most farmers made only one cut of hay beginning in early July and grazed the regrowth later in the season. Yields for meadow hay were even lower, rarely approaching 1 ton/acre.

In terms of pasture, 3-5 acres was considered the minimum required to support a single cow or five sheep. More often than not the only manure these fields received was that left behind by grazing animals. Given an average of 10-12 head of cattle, 6-12 sheep, 1 horse, and several swine per farmer, whatever manure these animals left behind could only scarcely compensate for the nutrients removed by mowing and grazing. At best this system allows only for short term sustainability.

More tillable land was devoted to Indian corn than any other grain crop. These fields received the majority of whatever dung a farmer might have on hand come planting time. If a farmer housed his stock indoors during the winter, and quite a few did not, this might allow for 45 to 60 tons of available manure. (10 head*50 lbs/day*30 days/month*6 months = 90,000 lbs. dung.) Few farmers likely recouped this much dung and what was gathered was stored outside where much of its value was lost to the elements. Corn yields however rarely topped 40 to 45 bushels per acre. Wheat averaged 12-14 bu/acre, oats 18 to 20, and rye just a little less. Even the best farmers, given the extensive nature of their farms and the comparatively small number of stock they could maintain, wouldn't have enough manure to adequately fertilize all their fields.

While the difference might have been made up through the use of cover crops and green manure, this was not a common practice at the time. It required an additional expense in labor, equipment, and seed. A substantial minority of farmers didn't own even a single plow, not all had oxen, and fewer still would have considered the sowing of a bushel of grain with no measurable return (in grain) worthwhile. Given these limitations, the lack of cover cropping should not seem unusual. If a grain, chiefly winter rye, was sown for anything other than an intended grain harvest, it seems to have been as either late or early grazing. But that too does not appear to have been a common practice.

What crop rotations were practiced barely allowed the land to regain its fertility. Keeping a field in corn or grass as long as it would yield an acceptable harvest was the norm among most farmers. Breaking old sod was a task few farmers enjoyed; it was often avoided at almost any cost. A field often stayed in corn for 3 or 4 years. That might be followed by a summer fallow, then rye, oats or potatoes, then back to corn. Better farmers tried to add grass somewhere in the rotation but were often limited by the hilly terrain that dominates New England. On average only 15-18 percent of a farmer's land was considered suited to cultivation and less was actually plowed up with any regularity.

Although criticisms of such poor management practices filled the pages of many an agricultural journal, they apparently had little impact. Due to the high cost of labor at the time, most farmers found it cheaper to buy more land when yields no longer met their expectations. This practice as well as the zeal with which many farmers tried to acquire more land and tend to ever larger herds of livestock was also roundly condemned by the day's reformers.

Some, like Henry David Thoreau, lamented that farmers had become so preoccupied with their commercial ambitions that they had become oblivious to the natural world around them. Most critics, however, weren't as concerned with the spiritual issues of our friend Henry Thoreau. They cautioned, instead, of the economic consequences such acquisitiveness would bring. Larger holdings, they suggested, would bankrupt rather than enrich the region's farmers as well as the land they farmed. Thirty well managed acres, they opined, could be as productive as a farm three times that size managed in the usual fashion.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. These criticisms parallel many of those leveled at conventional agriculture today. Yet somehow we have chosen to ignore the destruction our forebears wrought throughout North America. Somehow the connection between erosion, loss of top soil, the dust bowl and our early agricultural practices has been severed in much of the public's consciousness. While the damage done prior to the development and widespread adoption of petroleum and chemical based fertilizers, insecticides & herbicides, is, in comparison to what has occurred in the last fifty years, small, we cannot easily write off the effects of the agricultural system created by our forebears in the first three centuries of European settlement of North America. Their agriculture was neither sustainable nor organic.

On the other hand, we should be careful not to judge the past through our own set of values. That would be both presumptuous and shallow. While early American farmers may not have been exemplary in terms of sustainability, given the situations and limitations that their time placed on them, I think it is difficult not to admire their tenacity not only to survive but also to improve their lot. We must not, however, confuse the myths of the past that we so readily create for ourselves, with the historical record available for our examination. More often than not the images contradict each other. Keep that in mind next time you hear anyone speak of our organic past.

Jochen Welsch is the supervisor for the Pliny Freeman Farm at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum located in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. He invites anyone interested in this topic to visit with him on the farm or by letter or telephone. He can be reached c/o Dept. of Interpretation, Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, MA 01566, (508) 346-3362 ext. 312

This page was last modified on February 25, 2004 at 9:30:13 PM.

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