Artificial or Biological? Nature, Fertilizer, and the German Origins of Organic Agriculture

This chapter investigates the origins of organic agriculture in the German life reform movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Aiming to make lifestyles more natural, life reformers paid close attention to food and farming. In the 1870s–1880s, they argued that natural agriculture was a necessary step on the road to freedom and embraced the new artificial fertilizers of German chemistry. By the early twentieth century, in contrast, concern with racial degeneration and agricultural globalization led a new generation to reject artificial fertilizers as unnatural. Working from the proto-ecological view that “humans are only plants in the garden of nature,” life reformers adopted new ideas from German biology to invent an early form of organic agriculture that also served rightwing political goals. As such, the life reform movement became an important site for developing and politicizing the “biological perspective,” a characteristic expression of German thinking about nature.