Lord Northbourne

Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne (18 January 1896 – 17 June 1982), was an English agriculturalist, author and rower who competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics.

James later applied the theories of Rudolf Steiner to the family estate at Kent. In 1939 he travelled to Switzerland to visit the leading exponent of biodynamic agriculture, Dr Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. The outcome of that visit was that he hosted, at his farm in Kent, the Betteshanger Summer School and Conference, the first biodynamic farming conference to be held in Britain.

Various scholars attribute the phrase organic farming to Lord Northbourne, and John Paull makes a case for it being the first time the phrase was in print in his book Look to the Land.

Wendell Berry’s assessment of “Look to the Land” in his Foreword to the collection of Northbourne’s work, “Of the Land and the Spirit,” p. viii: “And all these concerns and considerations, to the limited extent that they can be thought about, can be resolved only in the art of farming a particular farm. Lord Northbourne’s writing on agriculture can thus be seen as an early, and an immensely capable, reaction against scientific reductionism and the partitioned structure of modern intellectual life. To say this is to give the reason for his continuing usefulness. As a critic of agriculture, he aimed at wholeness of vision, and nobody has come closer to achieving it.”