Eve Balfour was the niece of the Conservative prime minister, Lord Balfour. She decided she wanted to be a farmer when she was twelve and was one of the first women to take a degree in agriculture. By the age of twenty, Eve Balfour was running a small farm in Monmouthshire and looking after a team of Land Girls. At twenty-one she used her inheritance to buy her own farm, in Suffolk. She became an expert at ploughing with a team of horses and became fascinated by livestock breeding.
In 1938, inspired by books she'd read, she began to investigate the relationship between food, health and the soil, experimenting with compost on her own farm. In 1943 she published her best-seller, The Living Soil, which promoted organic farming, precipitating fierce debate. Three years later she founded The Soil Association, still the major force in organic farming in Britain.
