In the introduction to her seminal book The Living Soil, which details the results of this experiment, she writes, “My subject is food, which concerns everyone; it is health, which concerns everyone; it is the soil, which concerns everyone.” For Lady Eve, who preferred to call organic agriculture by the name “biological husbandry,” as it was more positive and hearkened towards the life-giving imperative underwriting its theories, the rules to these were not set in stone, but rather depended on the farmer.

The organic farmer, according to Lady Balfour, “tries to see the living world as a whole.” This farmer sees pests and weeds as part of a natural pattern, “probably necessary to its stability and permanence, to be utilized rather than attacked.” In contrast, as Balfour depicts it in a 1977 speech reproduced here, the approach of the conventional chemical farmer is “negative, narrow and fragmentary…when he attacks [pests or weeds] with lethal chemicals he seldom gives a thought to the effect this may have on the food supply or habitat of other forms of wildlife among whom he has many more friends than foes. The predatory insects and the insectivorous birds are obvious examples.”

What stunning foresight for 1943! Two years later, under Lady Balfour’s auspices, the Soil Association (Britain’s main organic regulatory agency) was formed, and indeed still thrives today.

Lady Balfour continued to farm, write, and lecture until she died at the age of ninety-one. Let’s see what Jessica Simpson looks like then.