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Between the wars, Sir Alfred Howard was the director of the Institute of Plant Technology Indore. Later hailed as a guiding spirit of the organic movement, Howard’s vision of agriculture was one of interlocking sub systems that functioned as an integrated whole.
Between 1924 and 1931, Howard perfected the Indore process, naming it after the state in Central India where he had been working. The Indore process takes animal and/or human waste and combines it with vegetable waste to generate field-ready humus in just four weeks. The process runs at such a high temperature range that bacteria and insect larvae are literally cooked to death.
Howard also took the opportunity to restore natural balances within the process. The interaction between agriculture and the natural world had to be sustainable in Howard’s view, which was a rarity 100 years ago.
But if we go back several millennia, we can find multiple examples of what appears to be the same process, spread around the world yet with no obvious links. Two occurrences could be coincidence; three defy explanation, more would be incontrovertible evidence of shared knowledge. The locations of humus production that Howard discusses in his Agricultural Testament (Oxford University Press, 1940) are spread across a huge swathe of the globe. He describes an extensive system of megalithic stone terraces in Peru, arranged like staircases up mountain slopes. From the sides of the Andes, Howard shifts focus to terraced cultivation in China and Japan, farmed continuously for forty centuries. This can only be achieved with a truly sustainable supply of humus in the fields. In 1907, Japan fed a population of 47 million from 20,000 square miles of cultivated fields, more than three people to the acre.
Given the long span of history enjoyed by the world’s first agrarian city states, estimated to have lasted for millennia on the same site, there is a strong temptation to suppose that the Sumerians, and later the Babylonians, both understood and exploited a version of localised humus production. Current knowledge of the Sumerian writing and documentation systems means we lack any way of resolving the question, but continuous habitation for twenty centuries suggests an agriculture based on firmer principles than just luck alone.
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