Organic. What does that word conjure in your mind?
For many, it means food grown naturally. No synthetic fertilizers. No chemical pesticides. It may evoke images of farmers’ markets, hippies, and back-to-the-land idealists. For others, “organic” signals exclusivity: expensive produce, artisanal branding, and premium prices at upscale or “crunchy” grocery stores.
It’s easy to assume the idea was born in California, dreamed up by a free-love naturalist railing against modern life. In reality, the origins of organic farming are far more complex — and far darker.
The early organic movement was championed, not by countercultural rebels, but by people deeply concerned with racial purity, social hierarchy, and aristocratic decline. In fact, organic farming was entangled with the rise of fascism in early 20th-century Europe.
And yet the story does not begin with ideology. It begins with science, empire, and colonial arrogance.
When the Student Became the Teacher
At the turn of the 20th century, India remained firmly under British rule, having been colonized for roughly 150 years. The British Empire extracted enormous wealth from the subcontinent. Tea, spices, cotton, and grain flowed outward, while Indian labor was exported across its colonial territories. British officials largely viewed themselves as intellectually and technologically superior to the people they governed, including in agriculture.
In 1905, an English botanist named Sir Albert Howard arrived in India with a clear purpose. He was there to teach Indians how to grow food “properly,” using modern Western agricultural techniques. The assumption was obvious: traditional Indian farming methods were backward, inefficient, and in need of correction. What followed was an unintended reversal of roles.
Howard soon noticed something unexpected. Crops grown by Indian farmers were healthier and more resilient than those cultivated at his research institute in Bihar. When he investigated further, he discovered that local farms were mixed systems — crops grown alongside animals. Animal waste returned nutrients to the soil, fostering microbial life. The soil, Howard realized, was alive.
This was a radical observation. In Britain, artificial fertilizers were celebrated as the height of agricultural modernity. But Howard saw that they offered only short-term gains. What Indian farmers had developed managed to sustain soil fertility over generations.
Determined to perfect the system, Howard spent years testing the right mixture of plant and animal waste. By the 1920s, he had developed what he called the Indore Method, a systematic process that produced microbe-rich humus. He laid out these ideas in his influential book An Agricultural Testament.
Scientists largely dismissed it. But others did not.
Organics and the Crisis of the British Aristocracy
During the 1920s, fascist movements were gaining momentum across Europe. In Britain, fascism took on a distinctly rural character, presenting itself as a remedy for the perceived decline of the countryside and the aristocracy.
And the aristocracy was, indeed, in trouble.
For centuries, Britain’s ruling class drew its power from land ownership. Aristocrats owned the land, peasants worked it, and authority flowed naturally from property. But the Second Agricultural Revolution disrupted this order. Peasants became independent farmers. Scientific knowledge replaced inherited wisdom. Landlords lingered, but their influence waned.
Farmers increasingly owned and managed their own land. They could consult scientists instead of aristocrats. The traditional ruling class began to see its role evaporate.
Political changes compounded the threat. Liberal reforms under David Lloyd George — including pensions, free school meals, and minimum wages — were funded by inheritance taxes on aristocratic estates. Economic power, political influence, and social authority were slipping away all at once.
Against this backdrop, figures like William Sanderson emerged, arguing that Britain had lost its soul. The nation, he claimed, had been forged in the countryside. Industrialization and capitalism had uprooted people from the land, encouraged individualism, and placed wealth in the hands of those untrained to wield it responsibly.
Sanderson’s solution was unapologetically reactionary: a return to a feudal system under aristocratic leadership.
Organic farming became central to this vision. Not simply as an agricultural technique, but as a moral and racial project. Organic agriculture symbolized purity. It promised food untouched by chemicals and industry, but it also carried darker ideas of moral hygiene and racial cleanliness. Rural farmers, especially those in remote countryside regions, were cast as the last unspoiled fragments of British stock — white, Anglo-Saxon men imagined as untouched by the corrupting forces of industrialization and an increasingly globalized world.
Soil health became a metaphor for national health. And national health, in fascist thinking, inevitably became racial health.
Scientific farming, the far right argued, poisoned the soil and weakened the nation. Chemical fertilizers did not merely harm crops; they threatened the vitality of the British people themselves.
The difficulty was persuasion. Conventional agricultural science had data, experiments, and institutional authority. Organic advocates needed proof of their own. So, they created it.
Soil, Ideology, and War
In 1939, aristocrat Lady Eve Balfour offered her estate at Haughley in eastern England for an organic farming experiment. Side-by-side farms would compare organic and conventional (e.g. scientific) methods.
The experiment, however, was never designed as a neutral test. Rather than testing a hypothesis, it aimed to discredit agricultural science. At best, it demonstrated different approaches. Balfour herself distrusted chemists, writing in The Living Soil, “The chemists’ methods are incapable of revealing the essential nature of the most important ingredient of all, because that ingredient does not survive the tests necessary to determine the others. I refer, of course, to the ingredient of life.”
Unsurprisingly, agricultural experts dismissed the experiment. And then the Second World War intervened.
Supply chains fractured, and for a country like Britain, which relied heavily on imported food, the prospect of mass hunger became alarmingly tangible. In response, the government turned to intensive, scientific agriculture, urging farmers to extract the maximum possible output from their land. Organic methods, however appealing in theory or philosophy, simply could not deliver the yields the moment demanded.
Still, committed fascists such as Jorian Jenks and Gerard Wallop pressed on, founding the Kinship in Husbandry, which promoted organic farming as a means to restore Britain’s moral, physical, and economic health.
And they weren’t alone. Across the channel, another group of fascists were drawing similar conclusions.
Blood and Soil
In Nazi Germany, organic farming aligned seamlessly with ideology.
The Nazis feared racial degeneration and believed that preserving the “master race” required pure food grown in German soil. In 1942, Nazi physician Werner Kollath popularized the slogan, “Leave our food as natural as possible.”
This was not about individual wellness. It was about national purity.
The doctrine of Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”) fused race, land, and agriculture. “Natural” food would produce “natural” people. Farmers would form the backbone of the Nazi state. Organic agriculture was promoted as culturally authentic, economically efficient, and racially regenerative.
As in Britain, fear of hunger also loomed large. Many Germans believed food shortages had contributed directly to their defeat in the First World War. The Nazis vowed that hunger would never again weaken the nation.
Yet organic farming alone could not feed Germany’s growing population. The solution, in Nazi thinking, was expansion. More land meant more food and more living space for Germans. Lebensraum, the quest for more land to secure the “master race,” became the ideological justification for conquest, beginning with the invasion of Poland.
Reinvention After the War
After 1945, organic farming did not vanish. It adapted.
In Britain, Jorian Jenks, a founder of the Kinship in Husbandry and member of the Union of Fascists, joined Lady Eve Balfour to establish the Soil Association. Jenks became editor of the Association’s journal, Mother Earth, and used it to continue advancing far-right ideas. Ecological concern and extremist politics remained intertwined.
Only after Jenks’s death did the Association begin to shed many of its connections to the far right. Over time, those origins faded from view, and today the Soil Association is widely regarded as occupying the opposite end of the political spectrum, often associated with left-leaning values.
In Germany, organic agriculture also persisted. Though it developed along different paths in East and West Germany, the belief in natural farming and natural food remained deeply embedded in the national consciousness. In fact, many of Germany’s modern sustainability policies echo ideas first institutionalized under the Nazi regime, even if those origins are seldom acknowledged. Today, Germany ranks as the world’s second-largest organic market, surpassed only by the United States.
So how did organic farming come to be associated with the political left?
The shift began in postwar America.
J. I. Rodale, a Jewish entrepreneur from New York, was inspired by Sir Albert Howard’s work and purchased a farm to put those ideas into practice. As Howard experienced decades earlier, agricultural scientists dismissed him, but the counterculture did not. From the 1960s onward, back-to-the-land movements embraced organic farming as a path to self-sufficiency and resistance to industrial systems.
Some of those counterculture experiments grew into major businesses, including Earthbound Farm.
By the 1990s, producers and consumers pushed for national standards. The result was USDA organic certification. But in defining “organic” largely as a list of prohibited substances, the government stripped away much of its ecological philosophy. Soil regeneration, social justice, and agroecology were largely excluded.
When the certification was launched in 2001, large agribusinesses quickly moved in, transforming organic food into a lucrative niche market.
A Complicated Legacy
In one sense, organic farming achieved its goal — it became a viable alternative to intensive agriculture. But it did not become what its earliest advocates envisioned.
Those early organicists were not environmental progressives. They sought to restore feudal order, preserve aristocratic dominance, and protect racial hierarchy.
The history of organic farming reminds us that ideas can yield genuine benefits, while emerging from deeply troubling origins. History is rarely black and white. Something can be both beneficial and compromised.
Understanding where organic farming came from doesn’t invalidate it. But it does force us to reckon with how and why we choose the food we grow, the systems we trust, and the futures we imagine.
History, like soil, is never simple.
- John Paap is the Sustainability and Brand Marketing Manager at Jac. Vandenberg, Inc. and co-host of the “History of Fresh Produce” series on The Produce Industry Podcast.
