Organic Viticulture: History

The origins of the organic agriculture movement are late-20th-century European. Like its predecessors the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, and Darwinism, organics can be seen as attempting to redefine man’s relationship to his natural surroundings. By the end of the 1920s, when the green movement was closely intertwined with reactionary cultural and political phenomena such as National Socialism in Germany and Guild Socialism in Britain, organics had declared itself as opposing the industrialization of agriculture for both social and environmental reasons. Its main target was the mineral ‘NPK’ fertilizer devised in 1836 by Justus von Liebig and mass produced from 1913 using the Haber-Bosch process. These fertilizers transformed the agricultural landscape and economic and social structures. However, two World Wars, austerity, rural depopulation, rapidly rising metropolitan populations, and the ease with which nitrogen production was switched post-1945 from making munitions to fertilizer meant the infant organic movement provided only a fringe argument against the inexorable industrialization of agriculture. And whereas industrial food conglomerates found globalization both necessary and desirable, organic activists struggled to form international bonds, and hence risked accusations of parochialism. The formation in 1972 of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) to oversee the setting of the majority of the world’s organic standards and the certification bodies has helped change this perception.