From WLockeretz@infonet.tufts.eduSun Jun 16 07:08:24 1996 Date: Sat, 15 Jun 96 21:44:57 EDT From: WLockeretz@infonet.tufts.edu To: sanet-mg@amani.ces.ncsu.edu Subject: re: Attacks on organic researchers? I'd like to offer my own experience as a small (but encouraging) counterexample to friend Patrick Madden's comment that in "the early years of the organic, then the alternative, then the 'sustainable' agriculture movement ... all of [his] colleagues and comrades in arms" were on the the receiving end of "devious lines of attack" similar to those being aimed at the people now raising the alarm about endocrine disrupters. (I am proud to number myself among his early "colleagues and comrades in arms," having been invited by him to speak on organic farming at his home institution at the time, Penn State, in 1978, and coauthoring a paper with him on the subject several years later.) After I and my colleagues at Washington University, St. Louis, began studying commercial organic farmers in 1974, many organic farming supporters -- long accustomed to being victimized as kooks by an overbearing, hidebound agricultural establishment -- assumed that we had to struggle to get funding to do the work at all, to get it published in a respectable journal, and to have it accepted by the scientific community. Quite the contrary. The research was supported at a very generous level by the National Science Foundation, that bastion of scientific legitimacy; moreover, NSF gave us completely free rein to pursue the subject as we saw fit, even though it was very unconventional at the time. In 1976, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics--we're talking deadly serious ag research establishment here, folks--actually INVITED an article on our research. (Talk about not having to struggle to be published!) And once the work was published, even though its findings on the high productivity and profitability of organic farms certainly went against prevailing dogma, the "attacks" never amounted to more than an occasional wiseacre remark or a few ludicrous irrelevancies. To a substantial degree, the scientific community took a serious interest in the work, scrutinizing it in the constructively skeptical way that any scientific paper reporting a surprising result should be scrutinized. (Granted, there were some exceptions, but they just made our lives more fun.) Very likely, our experiences were atypical; Patrick's remarks probably are an accurate characterization of many people's experiences. He concludes that "it's hard to avoid getting discouraged, or angry, or both" about attacks on researchers who report results that (some) people don't want to hear. In general, I agree, but I am delighted that at least in our case, it wasn't hard at all. I'm not sure why we were so lucky. William Lockeretz Tufts University