This past summer, controversy erupted over white supremacist vendors at the farmers’ market in Bloomington, Indiana—a college town tucked in the hilly southern portion of a conservative state. The couple who owns Schooner Creek Farm are members of Identity Evropa, which has recently rebranded itself the American Identity Movement. Anti-fascists protested the stand, a right-wing militia group counterprotested, a protestor was arrested, and the city cancelled the market for two weeks.
For many who care about local, sustainably grown food, white supremacists at the farmers’ market might seem surprising. In the US, the organic farming movement has been associated predominantly with left politics since the counterculture began championing it in the 1960s. But, in fact, such links to the far right are nothing new: the organic farming movement was entangled with fascist and quasi-fascist politics at its origins in Britain and Germany in the 1930s and 40s, as historians have shown.
Politics in the History of Organic Farming
These entanglements derived, in part, from some ideological overlap. In his recent book The Global History of Organic Farming, Gregory Barton gives a useful account of how organic farming first emerged in the context of a broader agrarianism and a proliferation of romantic farm literature in the UK. All three trends shared a reverence for rural areas, as against ever-growing industrialized cities, and a conviction, going back to classical Roman writers, that small independent farmers are the political and agricultural foundation of a country’s stability. Such defenses of the rural could easily shade into a belief in “blood and soil,” as the Nazi slogan put it—that is, an inherent connection between people and land with nationalist, nativist, and fascist tones.
However, the three central leaders of the early organic farming movement, who were not fascists, instead saw soil from a nascent ecological perspective. Soil scientist Sir Albert Howard, his second wife, Louise Howard, and Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the Soil Association (still the main organic certification and advocacy organization in the UK), emphasized The Living Soil, as the title of Balfour’s 1943 bestseller had it. Albert Howard argued that the farm should imitate a forest, which “manures itself” as fungi, bacteria, microorganisms, and earthworms break down fallen leaves and other dead matter on the forest floor. During this time, advocates of “humus farming” took issue not primarily with pesticides, but with chemical fertilizers, which they criticized for compromising the health of soil—and, as a result, the health of crops, livestock, and people.
Like the Howards and Balfour, far-right organic farming advocates connected soil health with human health—but then they took that link in the direction of racial health, evoking eugenics. While fascist organizations did not embrace organic farming wholesale, there was overlap in personnel between the early organic farming movement and far-right groups. For example, the eccentric Rolf Gardiner and Gerald Wallop, the ninth earl of Portsmouth, were active in both quasi-fascist groups and in the Kinship in Husbandry. Jorian Jenks was a member of the British Union of Fascists before the Second World War, was interned during it, and afterward edited the Soil Association’s journal for seventeen years.