Breaking Ground for a New Agriculture

Transformation and Expansion during the Organic Sector's Early Years

MANY PEOPLE ASSUME that the organic sector's origins lie in the efforts of idealistic farmers to transform agricultural systems, but ideas and practices that centered on business activities and market growth also have a long history in the organic sector. During the sector's early years, expansionary ideas appeared in the pages of organic farming periodicals, and farmers' groups and organic retail stores embraced practices that aimed to grow markets for organic foods, as well as ones that aimed to change relationships among farmers, consumers, and the land. One of the more striking features of the sector's early years was the relatively peaceful coexistence of these two ways of thinking and organizing. In the young, small, and decentralized organic sector, the contradictions between the two visions did not spark the widespread conflicts that emerged in the sector's later years.

The relative calm of the early organic sector, despite the presence of contradictory cultural understandings, differs from the contention that characterizes many emerging markets. Early markets and other sorts of organizational fields are usually "unsettled" in the sense that dominant understandings and modes of acting have not yet come into being, and they are often marked by struggles between participants who espouse different understandings and approaches (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Two factors were particularly important in limiting conflicts during the organic sector's early years. The first had to do with the decentralized organization of the sector as a whole. In the absence of overarching rules and regulations, members of the sector were able to practice organic farming in different ways. Markets were limited in size, and farmers typically sold to geographically proximate consumers, which enabled different regional styles of organic farming to emerge. The sector's fragmented character and the lack of a sizable national market for organic foods reduced the chances that different regional understandings would produce widespread conflicts.

Second, leading members of the sector downplayed tensions that existed between different understandings of organic farming. They did so by articulating visions of the organic sector that included both transformative and expansionary principles, as well as by ignoring ways in which organizing the sector for the purpose of market growth might be incompatible with the objective of systemic change. They told stories that implied that organic agriculture could be a lucrative business opportunity as well as an activity that produced social and cultural changes (Lounsbury and Glynn 2001). The statements of organic advocates during this period offer an early example of how people may frame organic farming in ways that seek compromise between different cultural logics. To illustrate this compromise-oriented framing, I discuss the work of J. I. Rodale and other writers for the magazine Organic Gardening and Farming (OGF), which Rodale created. Rodale was not the only mid-twentieth-century advocate of organic farming in the United States, but his prolific writings on the topic made him a central figure in the emerging organic field. For its part, OGF helped to synthesize transformative ideas from the alternative agriculture and countercultural movements with a vision of the organic sector's market growth. It also created some of the first institutions that were intended to support the national organic trade.

I begin by placing organic farming advocacy in the context of the development of modern agriculture and food production systems during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. I then examine Rodale's writing, as well as that of other advocates whose work appeared in OGF. I show how Rodale and his followers blended expansionary and transformative ideas as they engaged with an audience shaped first by post–World War II concerns about chemically intensive farming and industrial food processing and later by an influx of radical activists from the 1960s New Left and counterculture. I also discuss initiatives that the magazine launched during the late 1960s that aimed to grow the organic market. Finally, I examine the decentralized and regionally oriented character of the sector during the 1970s, which facilitated the existence of diverse understandings of organic production. Here, I focus on organic farmers' groups and on small-scale retailers that specialized in organic foods.

Industrialization and Resistance in the Food System

As the historian Philip Conford puts it, "Organic methods have existed for centuries, [but] the organic movement could begin only once an alternative to them existed" (Conford 2001, 17). Advocacy for organic farming emerged in the context of industrialized agriculture and mass-market food processing and built on the work of critics who called for a food system organized according to the principles of decentralized and locally oriented farms and markets. In the United States, the rise to dominance of modern (or, as it is usually referred to in organic farming circles, "conventional") agriculture was closely associated with the development of an industrial economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Large enterprises and mass production enabled the widespread use of labor-saving agricultural implements and machinery. These technologies allowed farmers to bring new areas of the country into cultivation and to increase the size of the acreages that they worked. The extension of railways also lowered transportation costs and encouraged the formation of national markets for agricultural commodities, which contributed to increases in the size of farms and to geographical specialization in agricultural production (Cronon 1992). Finally, the movement of people from rural areas to cities created new centers of demand for farm commodities and contributed to the growing emphasis on efficiency and productivity in agriculture.

The federal government, in an effort to ensure the food security of an increasingly urban population, subsidized the expansion of the railroad infrastructure and helped to provide access to land and credit (necessary for investments in new technologies) to farmers (Conkin 2008). Agricultural policymakers also explicitly sought to foster technical innovations through...