Living Soil (1943)

The Living Soil (1943) by Lady Eve Balfour is considered a seminal classic in organic agriculture and the organic movement. The book is based on the initial findings of the first three years of the Haughley Experiment, the first formal, side-by-side farm trial to compare organic and chemical-based farming, started in 1939 by Balfour (with Alice Debenham), on two adjoining farms in Haughley Green, Suffolk, England.

The Living Soil (1943) was also published as The Living Soil and the Haughley Experiment.

The Living Soil (pdf)

Towards a Sustainable Agriculture: The Living Soil by Lady Eve Balfour
This classic text on the organic movement is an address given by the late Lady Eve Balfour, author of the organics classic "The Living Soil and the Haughley Experiment", to an IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) conference in Switzerland in 1977.

"This pioneering experiment was the first ecologically designed agricultural research project, on a full farm scale. It was set up to fill a gap in the evidence on which the claims for the benefits of organic husbandry were based. It was decided that the only way to achieve this was to observe and study nutrition cycles, functioning as a whole, under contrasting methods of land use, but on the same soil and under the same management, the purpose being to assess what effect, if any, the different soil treatments had on the biological quality of the produce grown thereon, including its nutritive value as revealed through its animal consumers. This had never been done before.

Three side-by-side units of land were established, each large enough to operate a full farm rotation, so that the food-chains involved -- soil - plant - animal and back to the soil, could be studied as they functioned through successive rotational cycles, involving many generations of plants and animals, in order that interdependences between soil, plant and animal, and also any cumulative effects could manifest."

http://www.ladyevebalfour.org/ .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Eve_Balfour .

http://thebertonandeastbridge.onesuffolk.net/history/history/lady-eve-balfour/ .

http://soilandhealth.org/copyrighted-book/the-living-soil/ .

https://www.soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/01aglibrary/010116Balfourspeech.html .