A short history of organic

Organic farming isn't a new idea. It's an old idea that was briefly abandoned and then rebuilt, more carefully, with more paperwork, while conventional agriculture was going through its synthetic-chemistry honeymoon.

1924, Rudolf

Steiner in Koberwitz

The usual starting point. Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, delivers a series of lectures to a worried group of European farmers who are noticing that their soils, seeds, and livestock are losing vigor as artificial fertilizers spread. Those lectures become the foundation of biodynamic farming, the oldest direct ancestor of modern organic. Biodynamics includes some ideas that didn't age well (the lunar calendars, the silica-in-a-cow-horn preparations), but also some that aged remarkably well: the idea of the farm as a whole living system, the importance of soil life, the necessity of rotating crops and integrating animals.

Biodynamic certification, under the name Demeter, established in 1928, is still operating and is stricter than ordinary organic.

1940s, Howard, Rodale, and the idea of the law of return

In Britain, the agriculturalist Sir Albert Howard, who had spent decades in India watching indigenous farming systems, publishes An Agricultural Testament (1940) and The Soil and Health (1947). His central idea is deceptively simple: everything that comes out of the soil must go back into the soil. Compost, manure, plant residues. Without that return, you're mining soil, not farming it.

In Pennsylvania, J.I. Rodale, an American editor who had read Howard's work, founds what will later become the Rodale Institute and begins publishing Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942. For decades it's the main popular voice of the organic movement in the English-speaking world.

1962, Silent Spring

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring comes out. It is a careful, quiet, devastating book about what synthetic pesticides, especially DDT, are doing to birds, insects, fish, and eventually people. It doesn't start the modern environmental movement single-handed, but it lights the fuse. Suddenly "maybe synthetic chemistry has downsides" is no longer a fringe opinion.

1972, IFOAM

The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) is founded in France as an umbrella body pulling together organic organizations from different countries. It doesn't certify farms itself. It sets the worldwide principles, health, ecology, fairness, care, that most national standards eventually converge on.

1991,

Europe writes it into law

EU Regulation 2092/91 establishes the first EU-wide legal standard for organic production. For the first time, "organic" isn't just a movement or a private certification. It's a regulated word, and misusing it is a legal offense across Europe.

2002, USDA writes it into law

After a decade of arguing, the USDA National Organic Program launches in the United States. A single federal standard, a single logo, and a single set of rules for what can and can't be called organic in the US market. It's a big deal: it kills off dozens of competing state and private labels and makes the word "organic" legally meaningful on American shelves too.

2018, EU Regulation 2018/848

The EU replaces its original regulation with a new, stricter, more harmonized version. It comes into force in 2022. Rules on imports tighten. Rules on pesticide drift tighten. Rules on greenhouse production tighten. Iceland, through the European Economic Area agreement, adopts the same regime.

Today

Organic is mainstream. In several European countries it accounts for close to a tenth of the grocery market. A stricter successor called regenerative organic is emerging, built on top of the organic rulebook and adding soil-carbon and social-fairness requirements. Biodiversity and carbon-credit schemes are starting to pile on top of that.

The movement that began in a Silesian farmhouse in 1924 is now a roughly century-old conversation about how to farm the world without destroying its soil, its pollinators, or the people doing the work. The label on the apple is a small piece of that conversation, but it's a piece that happens to be legally binding.