In first-world countries such as ours, women garden and men farm. While it might be acceptable for women to plant begonias and even a tomato or two, when it comes to wresting food from the ground in quantities large enough to make a serious profit, agriculture in the developed world has long been men’s work. And all too often that has meant nature be damned.

But then there’s Lady Eve Balfour, a British woman largely forgotten today, who questioned the long-term sustainability of chemical agriculture and thereby helped to spark the organic farming movement worldwide. Her surprise bestseller, The Living Soil, published in 1943, urged people to recognize that maintaining the health of the earth’s crust in which plants grow should be part of a holistic view of life on the planet. As Swiss agriculturist Hans Jenny noted, there is more life belowground than above it, and Lady Eve’s book explained the complexity of the soils that support the life we see around us.

In Lady Eve’s view, science should always be harnessed to efforts that promote health. Acknowledging her contemporaries including physician Sir Robert McCarrison and agricultural specialist Dr. William Albrecht, she said, “Instead of the contemporary obsession with disease and its causes, they set out to discover the causes of Health. This led inevitably to an awareness of wholeness (the two words after all, have the same origin) and to a gradual understanding that all life is one.”

Author Sophie Poklewski Koziell writes in Resurgence that Lady Eve became one of the first women to study agriculture at Reading University in 1915. A woman of science, Lady Eve conducted the famous Haughey experiment on her own land in Suffolk. It compared the organic practices used with the “modern” agricultural practices employed on land neighboring hers. In 1946, she co-founded The Soil Association in Britain as a means of promoting sustainable agriculture.

Summing up her philosophy in a speech to the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) in 1977, Lady Eve said:

There are two motivations behind an ecological approach — one is based on self interest, however enlightened, that is when consideration for other species is taught solely because on that depends the survival of our own. The other motivation springs from a sense that the biota is a whole, of which we are a part, and that the other species which compose it and helped to create it, are entitled to existence in their own right. This is the wholeness approach and it is my hope and belief that this is what we, as a federation, stand for. If I am right, this means that we cannot escape from the ethical and spiritual values of life for they are part of wholeness. To ignore them and their implications would be to pursue another form of fragmentation. Therefore, I hold that what we have to teach is the attitude defined by Aldo Leopold as ‘A Land Ethic’. This requires that we extend the concept of Community to include all the species of life with which we share the planet. We must foster a reverence for all life, even that which we are forced to control, and we must, as Leopold put it — ‘Quit thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem, but examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.

As the picture shows, Lady Eve may have been born into nobility, but she was more than willing to get her hands dirty. A contemporary and colleague of Rachel Carson, Lady Eve deserves our renewed attention as an important voice to hear on Earth Day.

NOTE: Sustainable Farmer has launched its Food for Thought section that includes historical documents including the entire text of Lady Eve’s speech “Towards a Sustainable Agriculture” delivered at an IFOAM meeting in Switzerland in 1977. The section also includes “Loss of Organic Soil Matter and Its Restoration” by the above-mentioned Dr. William Albrecht.