The Organic Counterculture
It seems like everybody wants to be the “real” rebel these days, ever since the idea of alternative culture proved to be the hottest-selling ticket in town. Did that process start with the rock group Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album, Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign, or the advent of social media platforms like “X”? Organic farmers and merchants must have thought they were safe. Who could possibly connive to topple them from their perch as the righteously definitive opposition to industrial agriculture?
However, amid the barrage of PR funded by the bottomless pockets of chemical manufacturers, the as yet unregulated claims of regenerative agriculture, and now the proclamations of precision fermentation, the voices of what farmer Eliot Coleman calls “biological” agriculture have become harder to hear amidst the din. In the United States the organic standard has become dangerously eroded. USDA Organic regulations have been bent so far out of shape that both hydroponic growing and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations now qualify. America’s Real Organic Project was set up in 2018 and provides an add-on label to the USDA Organic standard, to provide a corrective in line with the organic pioneers’ vision. Were it not for the rude health of the Soil Association, Lady Eve Balfour would be turning in her grave.
Amid these claims and counter-claims it becomes hard to chart the way forward for sustainably biological farming, to appreciate what we already have in the Soil Association. I’m the author of “The Garden: Visionary growers and Farmers of the Counterculture” (2025) and it’s my contention that to discover the true rebel spirit opposing industrial agriculture, we need to turn to the hippies. Writing the prequel to “The Garden”, a book titled “Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness” (2020) in February 2018 I had interviewed former Soil Association chairman and biochar pioneer Craig Sams about Macrobiotic food. The diet was described playfully as “kosher for hippies”. When we spoke, Sams had repeatedly referred to the soil’s role in promoting good health. In the first instance I was baffled – but over time I came to understand this logic, fundamental to the organic movement, and grasp how the hippies with their ethos of natural living felt a connection to ideas of the living soil.
However, when it came to the question of the hard graft involved in farming, with the legendarily “relaxed” hippies immediately there was a glaring issue. One of my interviewees, alone in electing to remain anonymous, reported the story of a Biodynamic colleague who was looking for someone to take on his farm, “He said, I don't want a poet. Properly doing agriculture is a path and it's not about wistfulness. It's not about “Ooh isn't that nice!” It's about getting up at four in the morning and going to bed at eleven o'clock at night… But at the same time, it takes a huge amount of focus, attention and energy.” As agricultural theorist Wendell Berry put it to Mother Earth News in March 1976, of the more feckless members of the counterculture, “I have a lot of enthusiasm, but I know how far it will get me. It doesn’t last until dark when you’ve got a full day’s work, or three or four days’ work, to do in a day. If you get all the way to dark and to the end of the job, then you’re going to be operating on something else.” Nevertheless, in spite of the movement’s reputation for impractical idealism, it might come as a surprise that the hippies that went into growing and farming turned out to be both obstinate and unsentimental.
Perhaps hippie farmers of that generation aren’t as numerous as they might be? Michael O’Gorman, who ran farming at guru Stephen Gaskin’s mega-commune “The Farm”, where at its high point he fed 1,500 people, lamented, “I think of all the dozens and dozens if not hundreds of people that I knew that were all going to be farmers, and at that time thought they'd be farmers for the rest of their life. The only two people I knew out of that period of my life that stayed with it were myself and my brother.” But by some quirk of fate, former hippies of the back-to-the-land generation ended up being some of the most influential figures in the organic movement. This including O’Gorman himself, who built three of North America’s largest and most influential organic vegetable farms and then went on to found the remarkable Farmer Veteran Coalition, where, to paraphrase Isiah 2:3, they literally beat swords into ploughshares.
I also had the honour of speaking to hippie giants such as Sustainable Food Trust supremo, Biodynamic patron, and former Soil Association director Patrick Holden. I sat round the kitchen table with America’s legendary and innovative grower, Eliot Coleman who proudly describes himself as “an old hippie,” and was regaled with countercultural tales by the co-originator of Permaculture David Holmgren. It seemed as though that, if “enthusiasm” wasn’t the vital ingredient the hippies availed themselves of, they drew durable ideological sustenance from the higher ethics which the counterculture promoted.
The appeal to the hippie generation of the Organic movement was, according to Gurney Norman writing in the hippie bible The Whole Earth Catalog in the early seventies that, “The whole organic movement is exquisitely subversive. I believe that organic gardeners are in the forefront of a serious effort to save the world by changing man's orientation to it, to move away from the collective, centrist, super-industrial state, toward a simpler, realer, one-to-one relationship with the earth itself.” Heeding President Eisenhower’s farewell address of 1961, with its ominous warnings of a “military-industrial complex”, the counterculture saw connections between the war in Vietnam and Dow and Monsanto, agricultural herbicide manufacturers, who acted under instruction from the U.S. government to produce Agent Orange. The herbicide, containing a chemical called dioxin, defoliated millions of acres of forests and farmland in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government says up to 3 million of its 84 million people have birth defects or other health problems related to dioxin. There seemed no better way to stand up to corporate America than in going organic, as farmer Jake Guest put it in an interview with the Real Organic project’s Dave Chapman. Of the small farms that disappeared, “They were taken over by the big corporations who took over the food industry. It was all connected, Vietnam, corporate America — these are not nice corporations.” Guest decided that it was a “no-brainer” that they grow their own food, and taught himself from books, the Rodale tomes, but also noted, “The British have a whole bunch of practical farming books… they tell you exactly how to plough a field…”
The British, especially Lady Eve Balfour and Sir Albert Howard took on legendary standing in America. Howard’s writing was inspirational to J.I. Rodale. Mildred Loomis, referred to as “the grandmother of the counterculture” because of her innovations in intentional communes, reports Rodale’s comments upon discovering Howard’s writing in Ralph Borsodi’s library, “The impact on me was terrific! I decided we must get a farm at once and raise as much of our family’s food by organic methods as soon as possible.” Eliot Coleman described meeting Balfour herself at an evening arranged by the Soil Association at a pub in London. After the encounter, one of Coleman’s group, a hardcore old leftist, turned to him, ““Damn,” he said, “If that's the aristocracy I think there should be more of them!” He was so impressed. And so was everybody else. She was just incredible.”