Servants of the Soil 1 Servants of the Soil: The Lonely Furrow of the Soil Association 1946 – 2000 Through the later half of the twentieth century, the Soil Association was the leading organisation in promoting Organic farming in both the UK. Although it established a prominent public profile for itself in the 1990’s few people realised that it was founded in the 1940’s and has been through several profound changes in that time. This transition from the margins to public attention was far from easy or automatic and this paper starts to chart how the Soil Association has changed. Using the tools of critical discourse analysis, it locates these changes in dense knots of documentary discussion out of which a new trajectory emerged. These dense ‘discursive nodes’ appear at irregular intervals in the history of the Soil Association, but every time they appear, the Association has been re-made. Number of words: 8,846 – (including words in the tables) Number of tables: 7 Matt Reed Department of Land Use and Rural Management Newton Abbot Devon TQ12 6NQ Tel 01626 325615 Email – mjreed@plymouth.ac.uk