Eve was so cool

She was born in 1898, the daughter of a leading suffragist and the grand-niece of a British Prime Minister. 

At twelve she knew she wanted to be a farmer.

At seventeen she became the first woman to enrol in a diploma of agriculture at the University of Reading.

At nineteen she lied about her age and got a job managing a farm in Wales.

At twenty-one, with her sister, Mary, she bought New Bells Farm in Suffolk. 

She wore an eye patch over a weak eye, she wrote crime novels and played saxophone in a jazz band to support her farm

In 1939 she began a decades-long agricultural experiment and published a book about it that would influence a global farming movement. 

Her name was Eve Balfour, the book was The Living Soil and the movement was organic agriculture, or as she preferred to call it biological husbandry because of its emphasis on life.

In 1939, with her neighbour Alice Debenham, Eve Balfour began The Haughley Experiment, the first long-term scientific comparison of organic and chemical-based farming in history. 

Her 1943 book, The Living Soil,  became a founding text for the global organic movement, making the case that “the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” 

What is so striking reading her words all these years later is that Eve Balfour returns again and again to the tenet that all life is connected.

In 1946, Eve co-organised a meeting of farmers, scientists, nutritionists and concerned citizens that founded the Soil Association – the UK’s largest and most influential organic organisation.

Eve, its first president, was unstoppable — she tirelessly wrote, spoke, travelled and persuaded. 

In 1959 she spent a year in Australia and New Zealand where she was embraced by organic organisations that had emerged in the 1940’s responding to local land degradation crises.

This included the Victorian Compost Society, the Living Soil Association of Tasmania and the Humic Compost Society of New Zealand.

Organic farming as an idea was spontaneously emerging around the world. 

In 1960 when Rachel Carson published The Silent Spring – showing how the herbicide DDT was bio-accumulating up through food chains decimating eagle, osprey, pelican and falcon populations, interest in organic farming exploded.

A decade later Eve Balfour helped connect 100 international organic farming organisations and researchers for the first time under the IFOAM banner.

At 79 years old she gave a landmark speech to the 1977  IFOAM conference in Switzerland, Eve titled “Towards a Sustainable Agriculture — The Living Soil”  it became a classic text of the international movement.

Then in 1984 at 85: after nearly four decades of active leadership Eve Balfour stepped down from the Soil Association.

For much of those forty years she was consistently discredited and portrayed by Big Agriculture, politicians and conventional academia as a crank.

She copped a ton of shit, turned it into compost and helped create a global movement.

Eve Balfour lived with her partner, dairy farmer Kathleen Carnley, for 50 years, and was awarded an OBE for her service to agriculture.

On January 17, 1990, one day after Eve Balfour died, the Conservative Government announced it was giving out grants encouraging conventional British farmers to change over to organic methods.

Have a great week

Chris