Sir Albert Howard

Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947) was the founder of the organic farming movement. Starting as a Plant Scientist in England, he worked for 25 years as an agricultural investigator in India, first as Agricultural Adviser to States in Central India and Rajputana, then as Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, where he developed the famed Indore composting process, which put the ancient art of composting on a firm scientific basis. 

Howard was a brilliant development worker. Early in his career he abandoned the restrictions of conventional agricultural science with its increasing overspecialization — “learning more and more about less and less” — and set out to learn how to grow a healthy crop in typical conditions in the field, rather than the usual untypical conditions in laboratories and test-plots that represented nothing other than themselves.

He listened to the local wisdom of Indians. He adopted the best teachers: Nature — “the supreme farmer”, India’s peasants (whom he regarded as his prime “customers”), and the pests and weeds the scientists were committed to fighting with an ever-widening array of poisons, but which Howard called his “Professors of Agriculture”. He saw pests in the context of Nature’s use for them as censors of soil fertility levels and unsuitable crops growing in unsuitable conditions. He found that when the unsuitable conditions were corrected the pests departed. His crops were virtually immune to pest attack, and so was his livestock.

Books: Waste Products of Agriculture one of the most important publications in world.

Websites:
1) https://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/howard.html
2) Sir Michael Howard obituary | History books | The Guardian

Video 1: HRH delivers the Sir Albert Howard Memorial Lecture – YouTube