THE HIJACKING OF ORGANIC AGRICULTURE:
USDA Standards Facilitating Theft

At a conference entitled “Organic Agriculture Faces the Specialization of Production Systems,” held in France in December 1999, John Ikerd, from the University of Missouri, argued that “recent trends are transforming organic foods into just another industrialized food system.”

He predicted that the “demands for consistency and uniformity of product quality and for dependability and timeliness of delivery” will force producers to “standardize, specialize and centralize control of production and distribution processes.”

And that, in order to “meet the needs of a large-scale, mass distribution” food system, organic production systems will have to specialize and become large-scale operations.

In 1997 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) set about to support the trend to industrialization. It proposed a set of rules to establish the national standard for organic production and processing.

The proposal included sewage sludge, GMOs and ionized radiation as potentially acceptable inputs. The use of sewage sludge would have assisted large-scale operations in the procurement of the necessary nutrients without establishing closed nutrient cycling systems.

GMO’s would have facilitated pest control of large operations. And ionized radiation would have enabled the organic industry to use the same mass processing and distribution techniques that characterize the conventional food system.

There was an unprecedented outpouring of public comments that forced the USDA to withdraw its proposed rule and rewrite it. The new rule, released in March 2000, prohibits the use of GMO’s, sewage sludge and ionized radiation.

And while the new rule is a vast improvement over the 1997 version, it still promotes the industrialization of organic agriculture in at least two important respects.

First, the new rule still insists that the national standard is both a floor and a ceiling. Not only will all U.S. produce using the organic label have to certify that they meet all of the requirements of the standard (the floor), they will also not be permitted to certify to a more restrictive standard (the ceiling).

No other government or private organic standard-setting or accreditation body in the world establishes such a homogeneous standard. Second, the new rule still does not provide a satisfactory solution to the high cost of certification and accreditation for the small farmer and the small certifier.

Creating such and undeviating standard plays fully into the hands of the largest industrial operators. Those firms with the deepest pockets can capture market share through price-cutting and market advertising, options not available to smaller less capitalized enterprises.

So if smaller firms and farms are not allowed to exercise their competitive advantage — differentiating themselves in the marketplace through practicing superior ecological field operations and having such practices certified so that consumers can support such practices with their shopping dollars — they will be forced out.

The tragedy of this hijacking of the original organic vision is twofold. First, it will eliminate the small organic farmers, certifiers and processors — the very segment of the food and agriculture system that crafted organic agriculture.

Second, it will provide no incentive for farmers or manufacturers to continually improve the art of organic farming and processing. The result will be that we will never achieve the goals originally envisioned by the founders of the organic movement.

Charting a New Path for Organic Agriculture

All of this is not to denigrate the industrialization of organic agriculture. Certainly, providing an incentive for large farmers to move away from toxic inputs and substitute them with more environmentally benign ones has the potential to benefit both the environment and human health.

But we are losing something vital in the process. We lose the ecological wisdom of the farmers who live close to the land, listen to the land, and consider themselves a member of the land community. We also lose the opportunity to eat more wholesome, less processed foods.

If the exodus of small farmers, certifiers and processors from the organic movement is to be prevented in the USA, and if the ecological wisdom that has characterized the organic food and farming system for the past half century is to be preserved, there are two things that must be accomplished.

First, USDA must be made to recognize the profound implications of establishing a single homogeneous, industrial standard.

Practitioners must be allowed to raise their organic standards through superior, ecological, on-farm practices as well as to pursue other social and ecological goals. And, by being certified to those enhanced standards, they must be able to be recognized in the marketplace for doing so.

To accomplish this, USDA must redraft the proposal so that private certifiers can reserve the use of their seal or logo to designate ecological and social practices which exceed those required by the national standard.

This is not to claim that the product from such operations is “more organic” than those produced by industrial methods. But it is to claim that the production methods of such enterprises are superior from the perspective of organic agriculture.

A farm that has closed nutrient cycles, thereby building the organic matter in its soils without waste, and a farm that uses natural systems for pest management, thereby making pest management largely self-regulating, and a farm that captures solar energy, is superior to a farm that uses input substitution for fertility and natural (as opposed to synthetic) pesticides to control pests.

To suggest that elegant ecological systems are not more organic than input substitution systems, is to miss the whole point of organic agriculture.

Re-crafting the rule to make the national standard a base standard, rather then a floor and a ceiling standard, will provide the organic industry with two distinct opportunities to compete in the marketplace.

Large, industrial enterprises can compete by meeting the base standard, cutting prices and marketing their products through advertising.

Smaller enterprises could compete by differentiating themselves in the marketplace, subscribing to enhanced ecological and social standards that exceed the base national standard, filling niche markets, and marketing more directly to consumers.

Preserving a Community-Based Food System

The second task that must be achieved if the ecological wisdom of organic farming is to be preserved is that a community-based organic food system, which can parallel the industrial-based organic food system, must be crafted.

Bioregionalism and community foodsheds were a part of the original vision of organic agriculture. Currently, most organic farmers in the U.S. are still small.

According to a 1998 Organic Farming Research Foundation survey, 87% of U.S. organic farms are single-family operations or family partnerships, and the average size of an organic farm is 140 acres.

Many of these farms sell their production directly to their customers.

The community-based organic agriculture that has emerged in the organic movement will thrive, whether it can legally use the word organic or not.

The people — both producers and consumers — in community-based organic food systems will not give up what they have found: healthy, delicious, whole, organically-produced food; the reliability of knowing the farmer who grows the food and the small processor who processes it; the ability to be physically present where the food is grown and processed.

It is far from impossible to revisit the rule — and if need be the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 — to expand its scope so that it provides for community-based organic food and agriculture systems.

The people involved in these systems have given a lot of thought about how they want to market their production, how they can ensure their customers that their labels have integrity, and how they can identify the ecological and social criteria that constitute a sustainable community food system.

If they are invited into the dialogue, the rule could be redrafted to accommodate their needs and the needs of small farmers, certifiers and processors.

Information on the references made above is available from the author. Frederick Kirschenmann is the President and part owner of Kirschenmann Family Farms.

A former member of the National Organic Standards Board, he has recently accepted the Executive Directorship of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Iowa.