The concept of community-supported agriculture has caught on
quickly in towns and cities around the world, since it was originally
introduced in Europe and Japan in the 1960s. The idea of sustainable farming is
quite a bit older—for millennia, farming had to be sustainable because, quite
simply, the land had to sustain the farmer and the other people the farmer grew
food for.
But gradually farming became industrialized, like many other
production chains. Someone who saw what was happening and made a conscious
effort to return to organic and self-sustaining farm methods did so right here
in Ohio. If you’ve never heard of Louis Bromfield, you might be surprised to
learn that he was far ahead of most folks in thinking about how farming could
work with nature instead of against it, right in the middle of Ohio, way back
before the middle of the last century.
Bromfield grew up in Pleasant Valley, Ohio, not too far from
Mansfield, and his grandfather had a farm there. Louis began college at Cornell
University, where he studied agriculture from 1914 to 1916, but then he
transferred to Columbia University to study journalism.
He became a novelist, and won many awards, including a
Pulitzer Prize, for his best-selling novels. They aren’t as well known today as
they were in his own day, but at the time he was one of the country’s leading
writers. Bromfield and his family lived in Paris for years, but they came back
to America when Europe was heading toward war in the 1930s. He returned to
Pleasant Valley and bought an old farm in 1939; he bought adjacent farms in
1940 and 1941, until he had almost 600 acres of land.
Bromfield was an early proponent of organic and
self-sustaining gardening, and his farm was one of the first to ban pesticides.
His farm was also used as a government test site for soil conservation
practices. Bromfield developed a technique known as conservation farming, based
on grass farming, which produced large quantities of forage and pasture.
Malabar Farm became a national model for sustainable agriculture and was one of
the first modern farms to experiment with composting using manure from livestock
on the farm.
As he became more interested in farming and conservation of
farmlands, Bromfield’s writing turned from fiction to non-fiction. He invited
many guests to Malabar Farm to visit and learn about what he was doing there,
but perhaps his most famous guests were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who
were married at the Bromwell house on May 21, 1945 (the first celebrity wedding
at a secret, undisclosed site). The photo at left was taken at their wedding at Malabar Farm.
Louis Bromfield died in 1956, but his innovative and
visionary work continues to influence modern agricultural methods. Malabar
Brazil, under the direction of Bromfield’s daughter, Ellen Bromfield Geld, brought
his ideas to South America, and a foundation named for Bromfield created a
center for study of agricultural methods at Malabar Farm in Ohio, which is now
a state park.
Malabar Farm is still a working farm, and a fascinating
place. It’s only about 2½ hours from Cincinnati, if you ever have the urge to
visit one of the first modern organic farms, right here in Ohio.
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