Who Came Up with "Organic"? Origins of the Term "Organic Farming"

This School of Living announcement from 1939 used the phrase "organic gardening" a year before Lord Northbourne.

One of my favorite things about doing archival research is that, every now and then, I run across a document that challenges the existing historical consensus. It happened just a couple weeks ago, when I found the phrase “organic gardening” in a 1939 advertisement for the School of Living in Suffern, New York. In a long list of the School’s activities, the anonymous author of this brochure slipped in the following sentence: “Soil and food chemistry, botany, biology, physiology, and health principles come thrillingly alive in organic gardening and animal culture.”

Based on the context, it seems pretty clear that the School of Living’s definition of “organic gardening” is the same one that J.I. Rodale would use when he first published the phrase “organic farming and gardening” in 1942. Most intriguingly, the phrase “organic gardening” isn’t highlighted, defined, or marked out as a novel term. It’s thrown in just as nonchalantly as it would be five or ten years later, with the assumption that the reader already knew what it meant.

The reason this brief reference upsets the historical consensus is that almost every historian of the organic movement has given credit to the British farmer Lord Northbourne for the first use of the phrase “organic farming” in his 1940 book Look to the Land. Northbourne used the phrase “organic versus chemical farming” in a chapter heading, arguing, “In the long run, the results of attempting to substitute chemical farming for organic farming will very probably prove far more deleterious than has yet become clear.” Clearly, Northbourne also defined the phrase “organic farming” in the same way that the term would be later used. Notably, he also used the phrase with no definition or explanation, as if the reader already knew what he was talking about.

Since Northbourne’s book was released in 1940 and Rodale didn’t publicly use the phrase “organic farming and gardening” until 1942, the assumption has been that Northbourne is the one who coined the term and that Rodale got it from him. But that explanation raises its own set of problems, because Rodale did not cite Northbourne’s book in his earliest writings on organic farming. When he first used the phrase “organic farming” in May 1942, here's what Rodale said:

“The subject of organic farming is new to the majority of farmers. In this country it has been taken up on a limited scale, only in the last few years. In Europe—England, Denmark, Switzerland and Germany especially—it has been in use on a more extensive scale for many years and its advantages have been tested widely. There are two methods that have been used, the Bio-Dynamic system and the Indore method, the latter receiving its name from the city of Indore in India where it was first tried by Sir Albert Howard….The Bio-Dynamic method is described in a book called ‘Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening’ by Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer.”

Who should get credit for coining the phrase “organic farming”? My current theory, based on the available evidence, is that Rodale, Borsodi, and Northbourne all got the word “organic” from Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. While Pfeiffer did not actually use the phrase “organic farming” in his 1938 book Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening, he often used the word “organic,” especially in referring to the farm as an “organic whole.” Since none of these authors claimed to have originated the phrase, it’s likely that it was already in common oral use in the nascent organic farming community—especially among non-Anthroposophists who used biodynamic methods.

Of course, I could be wrong about that, too—perhaps I’ll run across yet another document that complicates the story even more!