The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s “life of the day” is Lady Evelyn Barbara Balfour founder of the Soil Association, long-time promoter of organic farming. (That link will only work for a few days – but if you find this after that contact me and I should be able to help.)
She sounds like a formidable woman:
In 1915 Eve Balfour went to Reading University to study for a diploma in agriculture. In 1918, claiming to be twenty-five, she secured her first job working for the Women’s War Agricultural Committee, running a small farm in Monmouthshire. She managed a team of land girls, ploughing the land with horses and milking the cows by hand. In the following year, in conjunction with her elder sister, Mary Edith Balfour, she purchased New Bells Farm, Haughley, near Stowmarket, Suffolk. During this period she played an important role mobilizing local opposition to the unpopular tithe tax levied on agriculture by the church and presented evidence to the royal commission.
…
During the 1930s Lady Eve, as she was commonly known, became critical of orthodox farming methods, being particularly influenced by Lord Portsmouth’s text Famine in England (1938), which raised doubts about their sustainability. His book inspired her to contact Sir Robert McCarrison, whose research into the Hunza tribesmen of India’s north-west frontier had shown a positive relationship between their impressive health and stamina and methods of soil cultivation. Her interest in organic farming can also be traced to her contacts with Sir Albert Howard, a British scientist who developed the Indore process of composting based on eastern methods.
Of course she was a woman before her time, but it is still astonishing that she only received an OBE weeks before her death, “while the very next day Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government announced the first ever British grant enabling farmers to convert to organic methods”. (It is – note to editors – not entirely clear if this was a day after the OBE or the day after her death.)
About