“The Soil and Health, A Study of Organic Agriculture” was written in 1945, today the book is widely available for everyone to read.

Written by Sir Albert Howard in 1945, the book is now published by Oxford City Press and is available for £16.

It is a long studious read, but whatever your professional orientation, you know that you haven’t wasted your time going through it.

Written in a very respectful, stylish language it tries to be objective with agricultural facts.

The purpose of the book is to show the correlation between soil and health. For health to be healthy it needs to have its base in food grown in a healthy soil. To keep soil healthy a lot of knowledge, natural intuition and inspiration is needed, as well as a lot of common sense.

“The Soil is as a matter of fact, full of living organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as dead or inert mass. A handful of soil is teeming with life.”

The book tells us too about the significance of humus.

“This accumulated reserve – humus – is the very beginning of vegetable life and therefore of animal life and of our own being”

We learn that compost is very important to keep humus healthy.

There are various suggestions about how to make good compost and therefore how to manage urban waste effectively without doing harm to the environment. A great importance is paid to observing the law of return to the soil.

After reading the book, in support of the author’s battle with chemical farming, I conclude: to live we all need to eat. We all like to eat well and are happy to do so.

We talk fairness and democracy, but it is not offered by the conventional farmer to the Soil.

The living organisms in the soil fed chemically live deprived life. That apparently is for our benefit.

Use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides described as “banditry” by Sir Albert Howard is somehow an abuse of democracy and fairness towards life, towards the life of the Soil.