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A brief history
Prior to the mid-20th century, agriculture was generally smaller in scale and was largely organic-based. Farmers and gardeners utilized cover crops, animal and green manures, and other natural means of managing the fertility of the soil, thereby also limiting the effects of pests and diseases on their crops by encouraging a healthy and balanced ecosystem.
From the Second World War to the conflict in Vietnam, chemical manufacturers produced a surplus of chemical nerve agents, ammonium nitrate (used in explosives), and various defoliants that soon became the pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides of the Green Revolution.
The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 spurred the environmental awakening of the 1970s that gave rise to early sustainable agriculture efforts. These, in turn, evolved into the organic agriculture and food movements of today. Now farming with chemicals is being questioned more carefully as people begin to realize that—to put a twist on Newton's third law of motion—what goes in must come out, somewhere and sometime.
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 "Organic farming is using the very latest in technology, applied to current research, to fulfill the principles of good soil husbandry our forefathers adhered to." ~Ray Wolf, Organic Farming: Yesterday's and Tomorrow's Agriculture (1977)
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