How 19th-century British botanist Albert Howard changed the world with an Indian secret in soil health
The few which have made a difference might include the 'Bhagavad Gita', the 'Panchatantra tales', the 'Kama Sutra', Patanjali’s 'Yoga Sutras', and Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. To which I might add Albert Howard’s 'An Agricultural Testament' (1940). Howard was British, but his life’s work was mostly in India.
He came in 1905 as an Imperial Economic Botanist, based at the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in Bihar, established by Lord Curzon with a donation from his father-in-law, American philanthropist Henry Phipps. IARI’s location was said to be named from Phipps plus USA, or Pusa.
Howard’s job was to improve Indian agriculture with modern techniques from the West.
But in 'An Agricultural Testament', he recounts how he started noticing that plants on the farms of nearby Indian farmers seemed to be in better condition than those at the institute.
These were mixed farms, like the one he had grown up on in England, where animals were raised along with a combination of grain, pulse and vegetable crops. Howard began to suspect that the key to healthy plants was healthy soil, which was boosted by the natural wastes generated from such mixed farms.
Fertilisers could give a temporary boost, but a holistic approach was better for long-term soil health.
Howard’s writings suggest that his views became too heretical for his British colleagues, so in 1924 he took up the offer by Maharaja Tukojirao Holkar III to set up an institute for him in Indore. This is where Howard perfected a system for composting plant wastes mixed with small amounts of animal wastes.
