Interview with Matthew Ingram - Author of 'The Garden'

Save Soil was delighted to speak to Matthew Ingram about his fascinating new book, “The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture”. The book explores the transformative journey of the 1970s countercultural farmers and growers whose radical practices redefined how we grow and eat today. He has interviewed Save Soil founder Sadhguru for the book, which is available online via Amazon.

In this fascinating interview, we discover his motivation for writing the book, and insights he gleaned into connections between soil, spirit and society.

Matthew, what inspired you to write the garden, and what was your motivation for getting started in this project?

Well, the previous book I wrote, called ‘Retreat’ was about health and counterculture, [exploring] the health modalities that happened in the hippie era. So things like macrobiotic food, transcendental meditation, LSD, psychiatry, those kinds of things. There’s a big dose of Eastern philosophy in that, and I ended up following the guy who coined the term ‘counterculture’ called Theodore Roszak. He went on to coin something called ‘Eco-Psychology’, which is a reasonably well known kind of discipline now, relating to health and well being and how that relates to the environment. I started reading into that, and then immediately I came across growing and farming. So it seemed like it was a natural route out from the health thing. 

The Garden is chronicling individuals, some of whom don’t come from farming backgrounds, but in some ways changed agriculture, or how many people see agriculture. Did you feel there was a core internal driver that was consistent across the people featured in your book?

It’s interesting, because almost all of the people that I talked to weren't from agricultural backgrounds, and they all got involved in it for philosophical reasons, or reasons of rebellion or spiritual reasons. It was quite unusual that, for instance, Patrick Holden (CBE, founder of the U.K. The Sustainable Food Trust and U.S. Sustainable Food Alliance), who I spoke to, became a follower of Gurdjieff (20th Century Mystic and Spiritual teacher born in Russia). Then someone like David Holmgren, who is the guy who coined the term ‘permaculture’ and the permaculture co-originator - he had psychedelic experiences that influenced him. Eliot Coleman (American farmer and proponent of organic farming) is another good example. He came at it through outdoor sports. He was an Olympic canoeist, whitewater rapid canoeist, and he was just interested in being in the outdoors. But there's this kind of underlying idea of health and well being, ecological well being and spiritual ideas were a common thread through all of them. I was thinking, that's great! 

Within those kinds of ideas, are there specific insights that helped frame the kind of narrative of the progress, or in particular that stood out to you, or inspired you?

Absolutely, there is something that's consistently picked up by even the founders of this kind of era or you might say movement, like Rudolf Steiner (Austrian social reformer and esotericist), Masanobu Fukuoka (Japanese farmer and philosopher), and someone like Lady Eve Balfour (British organic farmer and co-founder of the Soil Association). They're all coming to ideas, I would say, through Eastern philosophy of ‘holism’. So, thinking of ourselves and our actions as related to the environment and everything being interconnected. These are fundamental  ideas in Buddhism, the Vedas and Taoism. These ideas came from the east to west through conduits like Herman Hesse (German-Swiss poet and novelist) and the visiting gurus like Mahesh Maharishi Yogi and Prabhupada. And so that idea of holism, and it's something I know that Sadhguru talks about, when he says your pulmonary system is out there hanging on a tree, which is his way of expressing it. That has led people to think, well, what am I eating? How am I making my food? How can I do that in the sort of way that's dharmic, or that embodies right livelihood.

That's wonderful. In our context with Save Soil, Sadhguru relates soil degradation very much to both mental and physical well being. He says that one reason why we’re seeing a global mental health crisis is because we're not getting enough nutrients or micronutrients in our food.

That’s very true. Our environments are degraded. Wendell Berry, who's an interesting American writer, says that the growing alienation from farming as an activity has a root cause behind mental ill health, in the sense that people are not used to physical labor, and that therefore they're not as hardy emotionally.

Perhaps then moving on to a more practical question - a lot of the people in your book have very kind of powerful ideals, or approaches to farming. Are there particular practical hurdles that really stuck out to you that they were encountering when they were trying to manifest these ideals on the ground?

Great question. I mean, the one that immediately springs to mind is how the Hare Krishna movement have adapted dairy farming. People take it for granted in the West, they'll say, “I'm a vegetarian, but I have cheese and milk and butter” - obviously that necessitates killing male calves to make the cow lactate to produce milk. And so the Hare Krishna farms have developed - I think it's a traditional Indian way of doing it - but they brought over with them to the west very careful management of the relationship between the mother and the calves, so that you didn't have to kill a calf. So that's one example of how the spiritual ideas mapped onto a reality. Another very good one would be Masanobu Fukuoka, his Buddhist-influenced idea of ‘do nothing farming’ was actually quite a lot of hard work, his idea of do nothing farming, but implied not tilling and instead using mulches. So that was another practical idea that grew out of a philosophy.

Conventional farming is obviously very profit driven, and we could say success is measured by yield and profit. How did some of the counterculture figures and farmers that you were exploring define success? Was it perhaps more measured by biodiversity, or soil vitality, or community resilience - perhaps personal growth?

These are really, very genuinely interesting questions, and not put to me before. I think that there was an emphasis on self sufficiency. For instance, in something like The Farm in Tennessee (a large community of families and friends living on three square miles in southern middle Tennessee, founded on the principles of nonviolence and respect for the earth), which was this mega commune, the role of the farming was to feed the community. I think it was a 1500 strong population at some point, so it involved a massive amount of food farming. What came through organic pioneers - people like Elliot Coleman would see success is feeding their community. But success could also be defined as sustainability - so not destroying the soil, not taking everything out of it. This idea of the Sustainable Food Trust, which is Patrick Holden's brainchild is leaving the land in good health, having something to pass on, and not just stripping all its assets.

Patrick Holden spoke at one of our panel discussions at the Save Soil pavilion at COP 29. Really wonderful work. For the next question Matthew, beyond the kind of historical narrative that you explore throughout the book, how has researching and writing the garden personally impacted your own connection to food or the land or even spirituality?

Well, my previous book (Retreat) tracked what I describe as the ‘etheric counterculture’ - the use of psychedelic drugs and transcendental meditation - things were very much geared towards being “disintegrated”, in a sense. I think that in a way, the experience of writing that first book and subsequently of writing ‘The Garden’ matches the experience of that generation where they all went very far out, and needed to come back to earth. In 1969 there was this big movement back to the land, and in spiritual terms, it was all about grounding. It was about needing to get connected again, that they’ve been very abstract and etheric, and needed now to get integrated. And so I think that my journey through reading and researching and meeting these people followed that same course. I started gardening on my roof garden, and also visiting a lot of farms, spending time in the countryside. In a way my journey has been a journey of integration. That's why it's so interesting to read Sadhguru’s work, and to come across him, because although he frames himself within the very etheric Vedic tradition, he actually has a lot of currents in his thinking that are very integrated. So he's a very interesting figure for me.


There's such a breadth of different ideas and perspectives and origins of the kind of characters in the book. Do you think there was one particular method, figure, or practice that has come from the counterculture and made the large impact on how we see modern farming or food systems?

Yeah, well, the really dominant thing is permaculture. It's not widely appreciated that David Holmgren, who originated the idea with Bill Molison, was 100% counterculture. How I kind of summarize Permaculture is that it’s about ‘harmonizing efficiencies’. An example is saying, “we've got too many slugs here”. The classic permaculture answer to that is, instead, “you haven't got enough ducks”. The best example of it is - do it the way nature works. Especially how a forest works. Everything is in harmony, working together and feeding on each other's systems and efficiencies. It owes so much to indigenous thinking, but also to Buddhist ideas of holism. I don't think people realize how much that even the word ‘Permaculture’ relates to counterculture

Jumping topics slightly, counter culture is not usually associated with an abundance of resources or necessarily with profit. Obviously farms need resources, and to take a concept to a large scale does take a certain level of resource and visibility. In our context, Sadhguru talks a lot about marrying economy and ecology, and how important it is that ecological solutions need to be economically viable to scale them up. How did the individuals you were looking at for your book approach the economics of their operations, and was there a particular economic model that was pioneered that you found interesting?

One of the one of the things that characterized that era (the early to mid 70s), was that the economics of growing your own food were actually quite good. Then in the Reagan / Thatcher era in the West, a whole generation found they were swimming against the tide. It wasn't economic any more, and so that's why a lot of these communes went bust. But in terms of access to assets and energy, the interesting innovation that the counterculture bought was to put more hands on the land,. You can run a small plot of land, with more labor and closer  management, with a much higher yield than you would otherwise. The model of chemical agriculture is one individual with a lot of machinery and chemicals managing 1000s of acres. But actually, if you reverse that and have more hands on the land, more people essentially interested in agriculture as a profession that is valued, you could have a much greater productivity. 

Furthermore, when you start planting for biodiversity, as Vandana Shiva often remarks, if you have the traditional Indian farm system with all these hundreds of different crops, you actually have much higher yields than if you're just doing rice or wheat. A big reference point of the book is this guy called E F Schumacher (British Statistician and Economist), who wrote this idea of Buddhist economics, which was, again, that same principle of tweaking the understanding of ‘value’, thinking more about sustainability, thinking more about labor and those kinds of ideas.

You just mentioned ‘Buddhist economics’, which perhaps is very particular to certain geographies. In your research, what were the similarities or differences in how different geographies impacted how these sustainable farming movements?

Pretty much every single one of the farming setups that I covered had an individuality to it, and I think it related to geography. So for instance, Patrick Holden started growing vegetables in Wales, but progressively moved more and more to dairy, because of the Welsh climate. But then sometimes the challenges are different. With The Farm, they had terrible soil. So, you know, they pioneered using green manure on a really large scale. In fact, that was larger than, for instance, the Rodale Institute was doing it (a non-profit organization that supports research into organic farming). So it's very different for all of them.

In our own work, something we hear about often from different experts is the immense variety in soil type. Agricultural practices have to be so tailored to the local landscape.

One of the things that did come through, looking at all these different systems, was Albert Howard's (English botanist and founder of the organic farming movement) idea of the “Law of Return” - the idea of bringing organic matter back to the land, which actually works in almost all of those scenarios. So even if you talk to a chemical farmer, and I happen to know some farmers from Gloucestershire in the UK who are chemical farmers - even they will respond to this idea of bringing more organic matter back to the land. It's probably the strongest universal principle that I came across.

Beautiful, that very ties in with our work with Save Soil. Our core ask of policy makers is to help establish policies and prioritize returning organic matter to soil, and maintaining a minimum level of organic matter in agricultural soils.

Well, I mean, that's got to be the absolute most important thing, and I've always admired that in your messaging.

A final question for you on that note, if there was one message or experience you wanted to leave readers with when reading your book?

Because I live on Old Street, in the middle of the City of London in the UK, one of the things that is obvious to me, having done all this research, is how alienated people are from the countryside and the ways of agriculture and the ways in which food is made. So if there was one thing, it’s to try to wear down that rural urban divide, and to encourage people to eat organically, or eat biologically grown food, or maybe try gardening themselves. Just to get in the mindset of it. I grow vegetables like potatoes and cabbages - it's not meaningful in scale - but it is a symbolic gesture. Those kinds of things, a bit of gardening, eating biological food, if you're in the city, just establishes that connection and that understanding.