In 1905, the British government sent Albert Howard to India to improve Indian agriculture. He had a Cambridge degree, a diploma in agriculture, and first-class honors in the natural sciences tripos. [1] He was, by every measure, the expert in the room.
Within a few years, he’d concluded that the farmers he’d been sent to teach knew things he didn’t.
Their crops, grown without laboratories, without synthetic fertilizers, without any of the interventions Howard had been trained to recommend, were healthier than anything his research station was producing. They had less disease, better yields and soils that didn’t exhaust themselves. Howard spent the next two decades figuring out why.
The answer, he eventually decided, was compost.
He Wasn’t the First to Notice
Howard wasn’t working from scratch. In 1909, an American soil physicist named F.H. King had traveled to China, Japan, and Korea to document how traditional Asian farmers had cultivated the same land for thousands of years without exhausting it. The book he wrote, Farmers of Forty Centuries, was meticulous – covering cucumber trellises, hand-transplanted rice, the deliberate return of every organic scrap back to the field. Nothing, he said, was wasted – everything was recycled. [2]
Howard read it like a scientist reading a field report from his own research site. King had documented in East Asia what Howard was seeing in India: that the oldest farming systems in the world shared one common practice. They fed the soil.
Indore, 1924
In 1924, Howard was given permission to found the Institute of Plant Industry in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. He was 51. His wife Gabrielle, a botanist in her own right, who’d come to India the same year he did and co-authored research papers with him since 1907 [1], worked alongside him from the start. Their colleagues described their partnership as inseparably joint. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography would later compare them to Sidney and Beatrice Webb: everything a shared effort. [1]
Over the next seven years, they developed what Howard called the Indore process.
How It Works
The method is precise. It isn’t just throwing things in a pile.
You start with a base layer of coarse brush material — this keeps the pile off the ground and allows drainage and airflow. Over that goes a 6-inch layer of green or dry vegetable matter: crop residues, weeds, leaves, kitchen waste, hay, straw. Then a 2-inch layer of animal manure. Then a sprinkling of soil. Repeat until you reach five feet high. [3]
The proportions: 3 to 4 parts vegetable matter to 1 part manure, by volume. Howard also recommended adding lime or chalk between layers, and always that sprinkling of soil — which introduces the microbial populations that do the actual work. [3] (Note for composters – this is no longer often recommended for home composting, and is certainly not necessary to make good compost.)
For farm-scale work: piles 10 by 5 feet, or placed in a pit 2 or 3 feet deep or in windrows 10 feet wide at any practical length. [3]
Turn it at six weeks. Turn it again at twelve. Two turnings is the standard, though timing varies with conditions. [3]
One thing that often gets glossed over: the Indore process isn’t purely hot aerobic composting in the modern sense. Harold Gotaas noted that the piles were aerobic briefly after piling and after each turn, but largely anaerobic in between. [4] Both phases do useful work. Howard understood this. He wasn’t trying to maximize heat. Instead, he was trying to produce stable, fertile humus.
The Contribution Nobody Mentions
Howard’s Indian chemist colleague at Indore, Yeshwant Wad, handled the chemical analysis throughout the research. He co-authored The Waste Products of Agriculture: Their Utilization as Humus (1931), the first full technical account of the Indore method. [5]
His name is on the book. It rarely appears anywhere written about it afterward, and I have been unable to find a confirmed photo of Yeshwant to give him the recognition he deserves in this article.
Gabrielle
In 1930, with the work largely complete and The Waste Products of Agriculture nearly ready for publication, Gabrielle Howard died suddenly. [1]
Howard was devastated. He left India in 1931, returned to England, and as far as he was concerned his scientific career was over. He had said what he had to say in that thin technical book. He didn’t expect anyone to read it.
Then, slowly, people started reading it.
The Book That Started Everything
Back in England, Howard married Louise Matthaei – Gabrielle’s sister, also a botanist. [1] It was Louise who helped him shape his ideas into something larger than a technical agricultural report. Together they worked on what became An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. [6] That book didn’t just describe the Indore method. It argued for an entirely different way of thinking about food, soil, and health. It became the founding text of the organic farming movement.
In the United States, a man named J.I. Rodale read it and was galvanized. He launched Organic Gardening magazine in 1942. [7] The American organic movement grew directly from that moment.
Lady Eve Balfour read it too, and wrote The Living Soil in 1943. [8] The Soil Association, which Balfour co-founded in 1946, was built substantially on Howard’s ideas. Howard himself refused to join, unhappy that scientific work would be subject to control by laypeople. [1] He remained characteristically difficult to the end.
Howard was knighted in 1934. He died in 1947. [1]
What Happened to the Method
The Indore process spread. By the mid-20th century it was being practiced across India, Sri Lanka, Malaya, China, South Africa, Costa Rica, and East Africa.
It spawned adaptations: the Bangalore method, still widely used in India today; variations using night soil and sewage sludge; one version that used only animal bedding and fresh green material under black plastic and was done in three weeks without any turning at all. [3] When my parents visited Goa recently, they saw composting experiments inspired by the Indore method.
The University of California method, developed in the early 1950s and one of the most clearly articulated rapid composting systems ever written down, was explicitly built on Howard’s foundations. [3]
In fact, most – if not all – composting guides you’ve read traces back, directly or indirectly, to seven years of work in a city in central India – carried out by two botanists who called the local farmers their professors, and meant it.
References
[1] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Howard, Sir Albert (1873–1947). Oxford University Press. https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-56157
[2] King, F.H. (1911). Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. Madison, WI: Mrs. F.H. King. (Posthumously published)
[3] Martin, D.L. & Gershuny, G. (eds.) (1992). The Rodale Book of Composting. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press.
[4] Gotaas, H.B. (1956). Composting: Sanitary Disposal and Reclamation of Organic Wastes. WHO Monograph Series No. 31. Geneva: World Health Organization.
[5] Howard, A. & Wad, Y.D. (1931). The Waste Products of Agriculture: Their Utilization as Humus. Oxford: Humphrey Milford & Oxford University Press.
[6] Howard, A. (1940). An Agricultural Testament. London: Oxford University Press.
[7] Rodale, J.I. (1942). Organic Farming and Gardening. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press.
[8] Balfour, E.B. (1943). The Living Soil. London: Faber and Faber.