Birth of the Organic Cool

In "Farmers of Forty Centuries" F. H. King captured a vision of sustainability that was imploding even as he preached its gospel. But first, a word or two about soybean root nodules.

Nitrogen is the very stuff of life. It constitutes a major part of the nucleic acids that determine the genetic character of all living things and the enzyme proteins that drive the metabolic machinery of every living cell.

(James N. Galloway and Ellis B. Cowling “Reactive Nitrogen and The World: 200 Years of Change”)

From soy beans a good crop can be easily secured even in adverse years, therefore it is quite natural for the ancient people to grow soya as a provision against famine.

(“Fan Shengzhi’s Agricultural Manual” circa first century B.C.)

Man is the most extravagant accelerator of waste the world has ever endured. His withering blight has fallen upon every living thing within his reach, himself not excepted; and his besom of destruction in the uncontrolled hands of a generation has swept into the sea soil fertility which only centuries of life could accumulate, and yet this fertility is the substratum of all that is living.

(F. H. King “Farmers of Forty Centuries”)

Our story starts in the Cretaceous. Scientists believe that roughly 100 million years ago various strains of bacteria began symbiotically co-evolving with members of the legume family. One such bacterium -- Bradyrhizobium -- hooked up with the wild soybean. In return for life-supporting energy harvested by the soybean via photosynthesis, Bradyrhizobium extracted nitrogen from the air and “fixed” it into the roots of the soybean. The physical manifestation of this process reveals itself as a proliferation of “nodules” across the roots.

Plants require nitrogen to make proteins. For farmers, a plant that generates its own nitrogen is a very useful thing. According to Hu Daojing, a specialist in the history of Chinese agriculture, even though the Chinese peasants who selectively bred soybeans for thousands of years had not the slightest conception of the microbiological mechanisms that enabled soybeans to work their magic, they did understand that as far as soybean root nodules were concerned, the more the better. Not only did soybeans with a greater number of root nodules produce larger and more plentiful beans, but if the roots were left in the ground after harvesting, soil fertility increased.

Soybeans were first domesticated in northeast China roughly 5000 years ago. Exactly when Chinese farmers made the connection between soil fertility and plentiful soybean root nodules is impossible to say for sure, but in his essay, “Explaining the Chinese Peasantry’s Understanding of Soybean Root Nodules,” published in 1963, Hu makes the argument that the link was clear by at least the time of the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 B.C.) As proof, Hu points to ancient Chinese calligraphy. Prior to the Han dynasty, writes Hu, the most commonly used character for soybean was shu, or  菽. The illustration featured above collects different versions of the character shu inscribed onto bronze vessels dating back to the Western Zhou. Hu theorizes that the three vertical dashes in the bottom left quadrant of each character are pictographic representations of root nodules. The critical importance of the soybean’s ability to fix nitrogen, in other words, was embedded in the structure of the Chinese language at least 3000 years ago.

Visitors to China over the centuries have often marveled at the efficiency and productivity of Chinese farmers. (For a fascinating review of how Chinese farmers came to be referred to as “peasants” at a surprisingly late date, I strongly recommend Charles Hayford’s The Storm over the Peasant: Orientalism and Rhetoric in Construing China.) One of the most remarkable characteristics of traditional Chinese agriculture was its sustainability over time. In the Yangzi delta, the source, as pointed out previously, of a substantial portion of the “grain tribute” that fed the Ming and Qing imperial courts and army, some studies suggest that peasant farmers maintained or even increased soil fertility for multiple centuries even as the population expanded significantly.

Soybeans were just one tool in the sustainability arsenal. For the Chinese farmer, every last little bit of plant fiber, food waste, and manure – human or animal produced – was fodder for regenerating soil fertility. Some historians believe that rural households raised pigs primarily for the agricultural value of their manure. The exquisitely interlocking systems of agricultural cyclicality devised by Chinese farmers make a present-day gardener drool with admiration.

In parts of the Yangzi delta a kind of self-sustaining ecosystem of rice, silk and fish was developed. Mulberry trees were grown on the banks between the rice fields and their leaves were used to feed silkworms, whose droppings were used as powerful fertilizers for the rice. Fish fry were put into the fields soon after the rice was transplanted; they were fed the silkworm moltings and they also protected the rice by eating the larvae of insect pests.

(Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China)

F. H. King

In 1909, the pioneering American soil scientist F. H. King spent eight months investigating how farmers plied their craft in China, Japan, and Korea. He returned home brimming with the fervor of a freshly converted evangelist. He coined the term “permanent agriculture” to describe what he had witnessed and he declared it the only path forward for humanity.

His account of his travels, "Farmers of Forty Centuries," thundered with fire and brimstone. King was virulently antiwar, believed tobacco to be a worse blight than opium, and argued that a universal language was a necessary prerequisite to world peace. But the topic that most dominated his narrative was the sacred importance of not wasting natural fertilizer. It pained him deeply to see shit treated with disrespect. King had spent his life studying the chemistry of soil fertility. The wanton disregard for the precious nitrogen that Westerners were flushing down the toilet irked him no end.

While Americans romped carelessly through the fertility of their farmlands, wiping out virgin productivity in the mere space of three generations, wrote King, the farmers of East Asia proved every day that they were the greatest recyclers and composters on the planet.

King was a man of strong opinions. He had been forced out of a job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for disagreeing with his supervisor's crackpot theory that American soil fertility could be maintained indefinitely without new inputs. He came back from Asia convinced that if there was to be any hope of supporting the burgeoning population of the world without bankrupting the planet's hard-won agricultural productivity, the West would be forced to imitate the efficiency of the Asian farmer before the twentieth century was finished. "These nations," he wrote, "have demonstrated a grasp of essentials and of fundamental principles which may well cause Western nations to pause and reflect."

"If the United States is to endure; if we shall project our history even through four or five thousand years as the Mongolian nations have done, and if that history shall be written in continuous peace, free from periods of wide spread famine or pestilence, this nation must orient itself; it must square its practices with a conservation of resources which can make endurance possible…

King died before his book was published. But his primal argument -- waste less, recycle more! -- struck an important chord. A small cadre of Western critics of modern industrial agriculture found inspiration in his tirades. Lord Alfred Northbourne, the British peer who coined the term "organic farming" in his 1940 manifesto "Look to the Land," called "Forty Centuries" a "classic... which no student of farming or social science can afford to ignore." Today, F. H. King is seen as one of the first Western proselytizers of the proposition that farming can and should be a steady state operation that doesn't require constant expensive inputs of synthetic fertilizer and energy, and doesn't produce unhealthy waste-streams that damage local watersheds and poison the air.

"Farmers of Forty Centuries" provides us with a fascinating example of subversive globalization. King preached a philosophy of agriculture derived from the practices of Chinese farmers. Decades later, as I mull over which of nine different varieties of eggplant to choose from at my local grocery store in Berkeley, I cannot help but be struck by how deeply his evangelism ended up penetrating my local culture.

Northern California hippies, often espousing versions of Buddhist and Daoist philosophy as their guiding conceptual framework, ended up building a thriving organic farming economy whose roots and ideology can be traced to the Chinese farmers of the Yangzi delta. In the compost pit of global culture, King's ideas, hippie transcendence, and the nascent environmental movement fermented into something new: a vibrant alternative to industrial agriculture.

But I also can’t help but be struck by an enormous caveat. The life of the Chinese farmer was never easy, but over all those centuries of sustainable farming in the Yangzi delta, it most surely appears that the battle for survival got harder and harder. There are a number of reasons for this: demographic pressure, negative impacts on the price of cotton and rice as China started to be integrated into the global economy, and massive institutional mismanagement by the Qing not least among them, but taken all together the best evidence suggests that the struggle for a Chinese farming family to feed and clothe themselves increasingly required more and more labor.

And, inevitably, more inputs of fertilizer.

The growing demand for fertilizer exceeded what could be locally produced. The rise of a commercial market for soybean-cake in the late Ming is part of this story. And, as Philip Huang recounts in his monumental study, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988, by the time the twentieth century rolled around and visitors like F. H. King came to marvel at the industriousness of the Chinese farmer, the economics of bean-cake fertilizer, in particular, were brutal.

“The effects of beancake fertilizer on peasant livelihood must be seen in conjunction with the new patterns of extraction that came with its increased use. In Huayangqiao, the seven rice merchants in the town of Huayang dominated the fertilizer business. They sold the beancake, most of it imported from the Northeast, in one of two ways: for cash up front or on credit. Sale on credit was generally made against a lien on the rice crop, which the merchant would acquire at its market price, minus the price of the fertilizer and 20 percent interest per month for each of the months between June/July, when the beancake was applied, and November/December when the rice harvest would be delivered to the merchants. The peasants thus effectively paid about 100 percent interest for the five months advance… In all 70 percent of the households in Huayangqiao purchased their beancake on credit, giving the merchants in town an enormous share of the increased output generated by the use of the fertilizer.”

Even as F. H. King was rhapsodizing about the wonders of Chinese farming, the system was falling apart. Perhaps most ironically, the very year King visited China, the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch demonstrated what later became known as the “Haber-Bosch process” for manufacturing ammonia, which promptly became the world’s primary source of nitrogen fertilizer. Over half the food consumed in the world today “is produced using nitrogen fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process.” If King were to have any inkling of the waste that would follow upon this innovation, of the sheer scale of the ensuing nitrogen pollution that is now one of the world’s biggest environmental crises, he would be appalled.

As for Chinese farming sustainability? One of the first priorities of the Chinese Communists after taking power in 1949 was to establish a chemical fertilizer industry, and in fact, the first major commercial transaction between the U.S. and China after President Nixon’s visit in 1972 was a contract to build eight chemical fertilizer plants in China. China is now one of the biggest (and most wasteful) consumers of synthetic fertilizer in the world.

It all seems like one unbearably huge and tragic contradiction: the nation whose farming practices helped inspired the concept of “organic farming” and whose people cherished the regenerative power of the soybean is not only a devout convert to ecologically disastrous industrial farming practices but also imports vast amounts of soybeans from the U.S. and South America that are decidedly not produced in what any organic gardener would consider a sustainable way. Soybean farming in South America, as we shall see in an upcoming installment, is an out-and-out environmental catastrophe.

And yet there is also now a nascent organic farming movement in China. And in a world challenged by climate change, F. H. King’s warnings about unsustainable farming practices are more relevant than ever.

We are now approaching the end-game of my soybean series. The point at which soybeans, capitalism, and biotechnology intersect to make the soybean a pre-eminent example of globalization’s discontents is only a few newsletter posts away. But at this point I have to confess that some of the biggest questions I started this journey with -- Can organic farming feed the world? Is the soybean a beacon of hope or a harbinger of doom? Will science rescue humans from the consequences of their own ingenuity? – are far from being resolved, and I’m beginning to fear they may never be.  The more I learn, the more complicated everything gets.

But just yesterday I noticed that the compost in one of my backyard bins had finally completed its transformation into rich loamy soil, and I started making plans to integrate this precious dirt, fueled by so much vegetative mass left over from my own cooking, into my raised bed. Maybe, I thought, I’ll plant some soybeans as a tribute to the hard work of all those generations of Chinese farmers who unwittingly inspired the organic farmers of Northern California. Because even if I don’t know how or if my big questions are going to be answered; I do know that there is something transcendently regenerative about the act of farming. And the more attention paid to that, the better.

Plus, I want to see how many root nodules I can get my own soybeans to flaunt.