Nature is the ultimate value of the practical or economic world. We cannot escape either it or our dependence on it. It is, so to speak, its own context, whereas the context of agriculture is, first, nature and then
the human economy. Harmony between agriculture and its natural and human contexts would be health, and health was the invariable standard of Howard’s work. His aim always was to treat “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.”
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And Louise Howard spells this out in
Sir Albert Howard in India:
A fertile soil, that is, a soil teeming with healthy life in the shape of abundant microflora and microfauna, will bear healthy plants, and these, when consumed by animals and man, will confer health on animals and man. But an infertile soil, that is, one lacking sufficient microbial, fungous, and other life, will pass on some form of deficiency to the plant, and such plant, in turn, will pass on some form of deficiency to animal and man.
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This was Howard’s “master idea” and he understood that it implied a long-term research agenda, calling for “a boldly revised point of view and entirely fresh investigations.”
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His premise, then, was that the human economy, which is inescapably a land-using economy, must be constructed as an analogue of the organic world, which is inescapably its practical context. And so he was fundamentally at odds with the industrial economy, which sees creatures, including humans, as machines, and agriculture, like ultimately the entire human economy, as an analogue of an industrial system. This was, and is, the inevitable and characteristic product of the dead-end materialism that is the premise of both industrialism and the science that supports it.
Howard understood that such reductionism could not work for agriculture:
But the growing of crops and the raising of live stock belong to biology, a domain where everything is alive and which is poles asunder from chemistry and physics. Many of the things that matter on the land, such as soil fertility, tilth, soil management, the quality of produce, the bloom and health of animals, the general management of live stock, the
working relations between master and man, the esprit de corps of the farm as a whole, cannot be weighed or measured. Nevertheless their presence is everything: their absence spells failure.
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This understanding has a scientific basis, as it should have, for Howard was an able and conscientious scientist. But I think it comes also from intuition, and probably could not have come otherwise. Howard’s intuition was that of a man who was a farmer by birth and heritage and who was a sympathetic as well as a scientific observer of the lives of plants, animals, and farmers.
IF THE FARM is to last—if it is to be “sustainable,” as we now say—then it must waste nothing. It must obey in all its processes what Howard called “the law of return.” Under this law, agriculture produces no waste; what is taken from the soil is returned to it. Growth must be balanced by decay: “In this breaking down of organic matter we see in operation the reverse of the building-up process which takes place in the leaf.”
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The balance between growth and decay is the sole principle of stability in nature and in agriculture. And this balance is never static, never finally achieved, for it is dependent upon a cycle, which in nature, and within the limits of nature, is self-sustaining, but which in agriculture must be made continuous by purpose and by correct methods. “This cycle,” Howard wrote, “is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.”
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The interaction, the interdependence, of life and death, which in nature is the source of an inexhaustible fecundity, is the basis of a set of analogies, to which agriculture and the rest of the human economy must conform in order to endure, and which is ultimately religious, as Howard knew: “An eastern religion calls this cycle the Wheel of Life . . . Death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.”
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The maintenance of this cycle is the practical basis of good farming and its moral basis as well:
[T]he correct relation between the processes of growth and the processes of decay is the first principle of successful farming. Agriculture must always be balanced. If we speed up growth we must accelerate decay. If, on the other hand, the soil’s reserves are squandered, crop production ceases to be good farming: it becomes something very different. The farmer is transformed into a bandit.
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IT SEEMS TO me that Howard’s originating force, innate in his character and refined in his work, was his sense of context. This made him eminent and effective in his own day, and it makes his work urgently relevant to our own. He lacked completely the specialist impulse, so prominent among the scientists and intellectuals of the present-day university, to see things in isolation.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,”
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and this he had done intentionally and in accordance with “the guiding principle of the closest contact between research and those to be served.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 contemplated was four animals.
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By the observance of such limits, Howard was enfolded consciously and conscientiously within the natural and human communities that he endeavored to serve.