PAUL KEENE, EARLY ORGANIC FARMER, DEAD AT 94

Paul K. Keene, a former missionary who founded one of the nation's oldest organic farms and proved that growing natural foods can be good business, has died. He was 94.
Keene's April 23 death at the Messiah Village Nursing Home, where he had lived for several years, was announced by his family.
The Yale-educated son of a minister, Keene ran his Walnut Acres Farm in Penns Creek, about 55 miles north of Harrisburg, for more than half a century until the business was sold in 2000.
Keene and his wife, Betty, borrowed $5,000 to buy their first 108 acres in the mid-1940s. They worked the land without tractors or electricity and grew crops without the man-made fertilizers and pesticides widely used by other farmers.
After the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune sampled Walnut Acres' first product — apple butter — and wrote a glowing review, the fledgling company saw a sharp increase in letters and visits from prospective customers.
By the late 1980s, Walnut Acres had grown into a $5 million-a-year business that covered 500 acres, employed 95 full-time staffers and yielded about 300 organic products that were sold worldwide, including preservative-free peanut butter, granolas and freshly ground, whole-grain flours. The employee-owned company also gave generously to philanthropic causes.
The couple were "missionaries at heart," one of their three daughters, Ruth Keene Anderson, said Wednesday. She helped run the business and still lives on the property, which the family now leases to an organic farmer.
The Walnut Acres Certified Organic brand was acquired in 2003 by The Hain Celestial Group, which also owns Celestial Seasonings teas, according to a Hain spokeswoman.
Keene held a master's degree in mathematics and once taught at New Jersey's Drew University, but his life changed during a stint as a missionary-teacher in India in the late 1930s.
There, Keene became involved in the Indian nationalist movement and met Mohandas Gandhi, who advised him to "give away everything you have," as he told The Associated Press in a 1988 interview. He also met his wife — a British missionary's daughter __ and they spent several years together at organic farming schools before buying the farm. She died in 1987.
In the AP interview, Keene said "food should be — is — the most important thing in life and one should be more concerned about what one eats than anything else."
"All joys and all outreach can only be appreciated if you're healthy and don't have to worry about your insides and your outsides," he said.

Origin: The Associated Press