My Tale about the Rise of Organic Farming
It's All About the Soil...and Hawaii
No one pays much attention to soil (don’t call it ‘dirt’!) but it is the key to healthy plants. We all agree about that now but it has been a slow journey to get here.
Tony Avent of Plant Delights nursery once told Anne Raver of the New York Times that his switch to using a compost-enriched soil (40% native soil and 60% compost) made a world of difference to his plants:
“…After Tony switched to organics, “it took about a year before everything started jumping. Our insect problems disappeared. It was just amazing.”
This statement took me back to 1972 when I was a young landscape architecture student at the University of Hawaii and minoring in tropical agriculture. I also lived on a working organic farm.
The university farm was in Pearl City, next to Pearl Harbor. It had large fields devoted to standard agriculture, for the agribusiness students, and a small section in the corner, next to a banana tree windbreak, for our individual organic garden plots. The plots were tended to by us hippie ‘haoles’ who were studying at the UH College of Tropical Agriculture.
This was back when ‘organic’ was some weird, unrealistic approach to agriculture. Not serious. It is hard to believe now.
The standard agriculture students got encouragement and stipends for their seeds, fertilizer and pesticides while the organic students were ignored. And guess what happened?
Every semester the organic plots got better and better because we constantly improved the soil with fish emulsion and compost ( a local health services organization supplied us with compost made by their clients nearby). The crop yields were outstanding.
Meanwhile, the fertilized fields run by the aggies got worse. In one case, a student growing a field of bell peppers applied herbicides to suppress grassy weeds. Then the following semester another student took over and tried to grow corn, which is a grassy monocot, and guess what happened? The herbicide was still in the soil and prevented the corn from growing. It was a sad sight.
None of our ag. professors would acknowledge what was pretty evident to the eyes.
Of course, it didn’t help when the campus newspaper did a cover story on our ‘new organic plots’ at Pearl City.. and they interviewed me.
I talked about how our crops were flourishing and about a new (ha!) organic pest control called BT - Bacillus thuringensis. After that interview, I presented a report to the Hawaii legislature agriculture committee recommending that the Island of Oahu process their sewage sludge as a fertilizer similar to that of Milwaukee’s Milorganite.
The legislators did not go for it (silly me for trying) but look at what is out in Hawaii today:
Now, 50 years later, I marvel at how long it took for society to understand what we – the 70’s hippies – knew: Organic is Nature’s Way.
Today the University of Hawaii has a dedicated department for organic and sustainable agriculture.
Better than never. The truth is that health and tranquility lies in compost and happy earthworms.
Takeaway #1: It is heartening to hear that people such as your student-self have been spreading the good word about organics for a long time; and massively disheartening that despite the no-brainer/common sense/clear and present benefits of organics, it is still seen as some sort of niche, hippy-dippy, anti-establishment movement rather than just the best way to guarantee tasty, resilient crops and the longterm health of our soil. Takeaway #2: I need a Kenyan Kikoi!
Hard won empirical knowledge. I hope that you still have the dress.