It’s the first week of November, and I’m on the road again. But I’m heading west, not east, and my destination is in the opposite direction philosophically as well as geographically. This time, I’m heading to Iowa State University, in the heart of the Midwest’s corn and soybean fields. I’m on my way to look at the archives of the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), one of the most vocal opponents of organic farming in the 1970s and 1980s.
Iowa State boasts that they have one of the most beautiful campuses of any land-grant university in the US, and they might be right. The spacious quadrangle is surrounded by buildings that look like they could have been transplanted directly from Ancient Greece, with their soaring columns, ornate carvings, and beautiful goddesses. Other buildings are bold and modern, rectangles of concrete, steel, glass, and brick.
Occupying the place of honor at the top of the quadrangle is the library. It is an amalgam of new and old, with the functional elements of books and computers housed in a modern structure and the artistic elements of the old building retained in a gallery off to the side. The old façade is inscribed with names: Agassiz, Pasteur, Faraday, Shakespeare, Emerson, Newton, Darwin, Liebig—the heroes of Western science and philosophy. Above the names are these words: AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.
That was Charles Allen Black’s goal in life—to promote the truth. He undoubtedly saw and pondered those words during his daily walks to his office in the nearby Agronomy Building. The truth, as Black saw it, was that chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and plant breeding had enabled the Green Revolution to feed the world and save a couple billion people from death by starvation. With a proper sense of modesty, he saw himself and his fellow agronomists as superheroes. They had saved the world, and the world should be grateful.
But there were ignorant people who didn’t know that. They weren’t grateful at all that they were alive instead of starving to death. They actually blamed life-saving chemical technologies like DDT and dioxin-contaminated 2,4,5-T for polluting the environment, killing wildlife, and causing birth defects or cancer. Most disturbingly, some of these “extreme environmentalists,” like Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, pretended that these claims were backed up by science—and the media was listening to them instead of objective, factual scientists like Black!
Black felt like he had to fight to defend science—which, in practice, meant defending pesticides and chemical fertilizers and attacking environmentalism and organic farming. He worked with like-minded scientists in 1972 to form the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), an organization devoted to publicizing the “truth” about science and discrediting the “myths” that chemicals might be hazardous or that organic farming was viable.
Unlike the organic and biodynamic archives I visited in June, the CAST archives are a historian’s treasure trove. Black was a meticulous professor who saved every bit of relevant correspondence. He was so convinced that he was saving the world that he wanted every detail documented for posterity. And so I won’t have to guess what he thought, or why he founded CAST—the answers are there in black and white. I’ve found a key missing piece of organic farming history—the reason why many agronomists think organic farming can’t feed the world.
