ABSTRACT
By the autumn of 1947, the Soil Association’s membership had reached 1096, which, although double the figure a year before, disappointed its founders. Always in the background was the question of money: there were permanent staff to pay for and the Haughley experiment was costly.1 The experiment was also contentious, with tensions between Friend Sykes, who argued that the ‘economic factor must necessarily dominate the whole experiment’, and those who argued for scientific investigation of the ‘biological and health aspect of compost farming’ regardless of cost.2
