Organic Ohio Veggies: Organic Farming in 1950s Ohio

Louis Bromfield advertised his Malabar Farm produce as pesticide-free in the 1950s.

Thank you to the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association (OEFFA) for another great conference last week! I’ve been trying to decide which part of Ohio’s organic farming history to highlight for this post. It’s not an easy choice, since I learned about a lot of cool people while doing the research for my book Malabar Farm. So I’d like to highlight several of them.

There is, for example, Edward Faulkner, from Elyria, Ohio, whose 1943 book Plowman’s Folly was part of the early organic canon in the United States. Faulkner’s most famous argument in this book was that the soil-inverting moldboard plow was detrimental to soil health. But he also argued that, when enough organic matter was mixed into the soil, chemical fertilizers were unnecessary. He also argued that healthy plants would resist pests and diseases, even titling one of the chapters in Plowman’s Folly “Exit Pests.” His second two books, A Second Look (1947) and Soil Development (1952) developed this thesis even more.

Then, of course, there’s Ohio’s most famous farmer-writer—Louis Bromfield. Bromfield used chemical fertilizers like superphosphate to restore the worn-out soils at Malabar Farm near Mansfield, but he was opposed to the use of pesticides. “My point is that we as a Nation have plunged into the wholesale use of all of these poisons with little or no research concerning their ultimate effects upon health, vitality, and the powers of reproduction,” Bromfield testified at the Delaney Hearings in 1951. He explained that, at Malabar Farm, he was able to grow high-quality vegetables with no pesticides whatsoever, simply by keeping the soil healthy and full of organic matter.

And he wasn’t the only one. “The writer happens to be among a small but increasing group which has for some years been interested in the growing and production of food products, whether vegetable or animal, under conditions which lessen or make unnecessary the use of any poisons as a control either of disease or insects,” Bromfield told the Delaney Committee.

Who else was in this group? Bromfield explained that Cosmos Blubaugh, another Ohio farmer near Malabar Farm, mulched his orchard with alfalfa and was able to grow good apples without pesticides. Walter Pretzer, the president of the National Vegetable Growers’ Association, “operates his greenhouse and truck-gardening operations without dusts or sprays.”

Even more intriguingly, Bromfield explained that he had been approached by multiple food processors who wanted to buy vegetables grown without pesticides for their food products and put on the label that they had “never been touched by dust or spray.” These included the Heinz company, the A & P chain of grocery stores, and the Campbell soup company. Bromfield himself didn’t want to go into commercial production at the scale it would take to supply these big processors, but he was fully convinced that it was possible and tried to educate other farmers how to produce pesticide-free produce to meet the demand.

It appears that there was a lot of interest in organic farming in Ohio in the 1950s—from farmers, consumers, and food processors. But the defense of pesticides and chemical fertilizers triggered by the Delaney Hearings marginalized most of those people, including Bromfield. It wouldn’t be until the 1970s that organic farming would begin to be recognized as a viable production system—leading eventually to the formation of OEFFA in 1979.