May 18, 2005
New York Times (page B10)
Paul K. Keene, 94, Organic Farming
Pioneer
By Margalit Fox
Paul K. Keene, a pioneer of organic farming in the United
States whose products were among the first commercially available
organic foods in the country, died on April 23 ...
For more than half a century, Mr. Keene ran Walnut Acres
Farm, near Penns Creeek in central Pennsylvania, which produced
and packaged an array of foods including peanut butter, granola
and free-range chicken. Walnut Acres products were grown without
pesticides or chemical fertilizers and were stocked by health
food stores around the country and sold worldwide through
the company's mail-order catalog.
Mr. Keene's company was sold in 2000 and is no longer in
business. A line of foods bearing the Walnut Acres Organic
label is now manufactured by the Hain Celestial Group, a natural-foods
conglomerate.
When Mr. Keene started Walnut Acres in the
mid-1940s,
the agricultural gospel called for using chemical fertilizers
and insecticides, with their promise of cheaper, more efficient
farming. Natural farming was viewed as eccentric, if not downright
un-American.
"It doesn't seem that long ago that everyone thought
we were kooks or Commies," Mr. Keene told U.S. News &
World Report in 1995. "Someone once tossed dynamite on
the property. Another burned crosses."
A former mathematics professor and avowed pacifist, Mr. Keene
never set out to be a commercial farmer. He simply wanted
to go back to the land.
Paul Kershner Keene was born in Lititz, Pa., on Oct. 12,
1910. After earning an underrgraduate degree from Lebanon
Valley College in Annville, Pa., and a master's in mathematics
from Yale, he taught math at Drew University in Madison, N.J.
In the late 1930's, Mr. Keene took a teaching job in northern
India. There, he became involved in the Indian independence
movement and met Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose belief in simple
living greatly influenced him. He also discovered the work
of Sir Albert Howard, the founder of
the organic farming movement, who worked in India for
many years.
In India, Mr. Keene met Enid Betty Morgan, the daughter of
missionaries. They were married in 1940. Returning to the
United States shortly afterward, the couple studied organic
farming at the School of Living in Suffern, N.Y., and later
at Kimberton Farm School in Pennsylvania.
Just after World War II, the Keenes borrowed $5,000 and bought
Walnut Acres, determined to live as self-sufficient organic
farmers. There was no telephone, plumbing or furnace on the
farm. The buildings were falling to pieces. The couple owned
a plow, a harrow, a team of horses and little else.
"Oh, the wonder of it all," Mr. Keene wrote afterward.
"We had a house and barn and outbuildings and a hundred
acres. Did you hear? One hundred acres!"
Their first product was Apple Essence, an apple butter cooked
in an iron kettle over an open fire. They made 100 quarts,
selling them for a dollar each. One found its way to Clementine
Paddleford, the influential food editor of The New York Herald-Tribune,
who was known for waxing rhapsodic over regional foods that
took her fancy. Miss Paddleford rhapsodized, and Walnut Acres
was innudated with letters and visits from eager customers.
The Keenes used manure for fertilizer and botanical pest
controls like ladybugs. They gradually built the farm into
a 500-acre spread, with its own bakery, cannery, flour mill
and retail store. By 1994, the company was making 350 products,
with anual sales of nearly $8 million, U.S. News reported.
...