A History of Organic Agriculture
by Mark Keating
Painting by Julien Dupree
© 2011 All rights reserved. Please do not duplicate without attribution
What comes to mind when you see food labeled “organic” at the grocery store or farmers
market? I asked one audience that question years ago, and a gentleman replied emphatically,
“Nuts!” Being in North Carolina at the time, I asked if he meant pecans and walnuts, but he
assured me that it was the people involved in organic agriculture who were nuts, not the food. I
have to wonder, if the subject still crosses his mind, whether he sees organic agriculture’s
surging popularity as a sign that the illness is contagious.
After all the conversations about organic agriculture that I’ve had since then, I’ve found
that the gentleman is far from alone in his misunderstanding of the subject. Interestingly, the
depth of misunderstanding about organic agriculture seems unrelated to whether the individual is
a true believer or a doubting Thomas. This isn’t so surprising, since our dependence on mass
communication exposes us to a typhoon of mis- and dis-information intended more to persuade
than educate us. When we pass along what we think we’ve learned, we inevitably distort its
meaning – our minds are analog, not digital. As a result, our understanding of organic agriculture
is more likely the sum of hundreds of anecdotal impressions than a focused study.
How do we untangle the multiple personalities – healthier, more expensive, safer, less
safe, corrupted by corporations, better for the planet – that organic brings to mind? Let’s start by
treating organic farming and organic certification separately, the latter I will specifically address
in a future post, as part of this ongoing series. As we shall see, organic farming involves an
ancient protocol of crop and livestock production practices embedded in principles of
interdependence and harmony. Organic certification began as a grass roots effort about forty
years ago and is now managed by the Department of Agriculture, where interdependence and
harmony are discretionary. Understanding how organic farming and certification function
separately and together is essential for making wise choices about the source and quality of our
food.
If I were asked to sum up the results of the work of the pioneers of the last twelve years or
so on the relation of agriculture to public health, I should reply that a fertile soil means healthy
crops, healthy livestock, and last, but not least, healthy human beings.
Sir Albert Howard, 1945
Sir Albert Howard is probably the individual most frequently associated with the
establishment of organic farming. Howard was active in research for more than half a century
and in An Agricultural Testament (1940) he carefully detailed the essential organic practices,
especially the addition of composted animal and plant materials to the soil. As renown as
Howard remains for this work, his legacy suffers from our fifteen-minutes-of-fame mindset that
categorizes him as “the compost guy.” Compost was indeed central to his vision, yet a fuller
examination of his career sheds invaluable light on the context in which he worked and the
essential principles he discerned that are inseparable from organic farming’s meaning and
promise.
Growing up on a farm before his academic proficiency launched his research career,
Howard was instinctively skeptical about the modernization of English agriculture. He sensed
that the replacement of draught animals with machinery and manure with synthetic fertilizers
was degrading soil quality by diminishing its microbiological vitality. Howard was a brilliant
scientist in the field and laboratory – his success in breeding wheat varieties adapted to India was
historic – but he explicitly rejected the mechanistic and reductionist model of his Western
contemporaries. To Howard, industrialized agriculture’s increased yields and greater labor
efficiency would inevitably lead to diminishing returns, particularly in the nutritional attributes
of the crops and livestock it produced.
In lieu of the industrial paradigm, Howard embraced Nature as the exemplar of
agricultural productivity and efficiency. Consistent with his youthful experiences on the farm,
this perception crystallized brilliantly during the twenty-five years that Howard conducted
research in India. This work convinced Howard that the carefully balanced and cured
combination of plant and livestock materials we call compost was the foundation of vitality in
individual organisms and long-term resilience in biological communities. Sir Albert Howard’s
summary of Nature’s approach to gardening— he wrote in 1940— articulates the fundamental
principles of organic farming:
The main characteristic of Nature’s farming can therefore be summed up in a few words.
Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great
pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal
wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of
decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the
greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves
against disease.
Howard’s tenet that “both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against
diseases” is noteworthy, especially in the context of his earlier quotation about the linkage
between healthy soils, crops, livestock and humans. Howard saw disease in an organism as an
indication of imbalance with the natural order, most likely due to imperfect nutrition. Nature
visited disease upon poorly nourished organisms to facilitate their passage through the cycle of
life, inviting death to both complete the cycle, and begin it anew. Properly nourished organisms,
meaning those partaking of food produced from vibrant, biologically active soils, would be fit
and inherently resistant to diseases. There was no question in Howard’s mind that organically
produced food was healthier; indeed, it’s the only food he would identify as healthy.
Two more point needs to be made: Sir Albert Howard should not be characterized as the
father of organic agriculture, though perhaps its midwife would be appropriate. He gratefully
acknowledged the generations of Eastern peasant farmers, primarily in China but throughout
South East Asia who handed down organic principles to become, as Howard’s peer F.H. King
noted, “Farmers of Forty Centuries”. These origins and the influence of belief systems that
shaped them – specifically Buddhism and Hinduism – help explain why organic agriculture so
often seems counter-intuitive to Western agriculturalists. Fortunately, Westerners such as
Howard and King (an American) were not put off by the primitive appearance of Asian
agriculture and gleaned its magnificent substance.
Secondly, no study of Howard’s accomplishments should overlook the essential roles that
Gabrielle Matthaei Howard and Louise Matthaei Howard played in their achievement. Sisters
from a Swiss family of merchants re-settled in London, Gabrielle and Louise successively
provided the intellectual and emotional companionship that shaped Sir Albert’s explorations and
discoveries. Gabrielle married Sir Albert prior to moving to India where they collaborated as
research partners for three decades. She co-wrote more than 120 journal articles with him and
was co-equal in planning and running their extensive plant breeding and compost production
research activities. On the eve of their retirement and return to England, Gabrielle passed away
and two years later her younger sister, Louise married Sir Albert. Trained as a classics scholar at
Cambridge University, Louise’s subsequent teaching career there ended when she adopted a
pacifist position on England’s entry into the First World War. She went on to become a writer
and editor for the International Labor Organization and produced what was at the time the
definitive study on agricultural labor around the world. Her communication skills transformed
her husband’s technical writing style into the masterpieces An Agricultural Testament and The
Soil and Health (1947) published under his name.
In dedicating an Agricultural Testament to Gabrielle, Howard honored her passage and
evoked the cyclical nature of all life by quoting Romeo and Juliet:
The Earth, That’s Nature’s Mother, is Her Tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb.
My introductory post on organic farming highlighted Sir Albert Howard’s role in
describing its fundamental practices and principles. Seeing Nature as the most efficient and
enduring of all farmers, Howard portrayed organic agriculture as a holistic endeavor inseparable
from a farm’s environmental conditions. In Howard’s view, an organic farm worked as a selfcontained system comprised of resources both native, such as soil, and those externally
introduced, such as seed and livestock. Farming organically meant to cycle solar energy and
nutrients through the system by replicating natural processes by composting, cover cropping and
rotational grazing. Howard stressed that organic farmers must continuously improve their
production practices to bring their systems into closer harmony with nature.
However insightful it was, the organic vision that Howard and his peers, notably Lady
Eve Balfour in England and J.I. Rodale in America, had outlined by 1950 was incompatible with
the changes then transforming commercial agriculture. The components of this transformation
were not all that new – chemically derived fertilizers and pesticides were introduced in the
nineteenth century and hybrid seeds and mechanized tractors became commercially available
during the 1920s. The agricultural intelligentsia at the publicly funded, university based research
and extension system was solidly committed to this more industrialized approach to farming
before the Great Depression and Second World War impeded the transition. The conditions
during the 1920s that precipitated the Dust Bowl – mono-cultural commodity production (wheat)
dependent on mechanization (tractors to plant, plow and harvest) for foreign markets (Europe)
pointed to agriculture’s future come peace time. After 1945, the United States had the scientific,
educational and industrial capacity and the economic incentive to replace traditional solar and
animal powered agriculture with an industrial model driven by fossil fuels.
Commercial agriculture was part of a broader cultural transformation after the Second
World War as the marriage between the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century and the
scientific discoveries of the twentieth became synonymous with progress. Faith in human
mastery of the environment – reflected in the ability to decode DNA or travel to outer space –
pushed technology to the realm of religion. The new and improved way of doing things
characteristically involved synthetic compounds that interrupted rather than complimented
natural processes. For example, the recently synthesized insecticide DDT seemed capable of
eradicating pest populations that posed grave risks to human health and agricultural production.
Under constant pressure to operate profitably, American farmers embraced the brave new world
of industrial agriculture that academic, commercial and governmental authorities enthusiastically
endorsed. Excluding the great many that subsequently left farming and the relatively few who
have found a viable alternative, American farmers are making that same choice today.
Rachel Carson; Circa 1929, off the coast of what is now Woods Hole Observatory
If Howard, Balfour and Rodale gathered the kindling needed to ignite what we call
organic agriculture, Rachel Carson unquestionably provided the spark. More than that, Carson
brought a depth and clarity of vision that overturned the conventional scientific thinking of her
day in the same way that Darwin and Einstein had in theirs. Born in 1907 and reared in modest
circumstances in the Allegheny Mountains near Pittsburg, Carson’s early flair for creative
writing gave way to a passion for biology that led her to a Masters degree from Johns Hopkins.
Always among the first women in her achievements, Carson started on a PhD but withdrew to
become the breadwinner for her extended family after her father passed away in 1935. She
became only the second full-time professional woman hired by the federal Bureau of Fisheries
and displayed a knack for translating technical material into enjoyable and informative prose for
print and radio delivery.
Carson complimented her federal service with an increasingly well received career as a
freelance writer on marine ecology capped by the phenomenal response to her 1951 book The
Sea Around Us. The work earned the National Book award, remained on the New York Times
best seller list for 86 weeks and was eventually translated into thirty languages. Financially
stable for the first time, Carson relocated to her beloved Maine coast and dedicated herself to
communicating not just her wonder at the natural world but also her concern that humans were
increasingly jeopardizing its survival. Along with an extended network of ecologists,
conservationists and epidemiologists, Carson grew alarmed that the widespread and largely
indiscriminate application of persistent synthetic pesticides threatened to fray and soon sever the
interconnected web of life on Earth.
As we all know, Carson’s undertaking produced the crowning achievement of her career
– Silent Spring, published in 1962. In contrast to the lyrically descriptive prose with which she
had written about sea life, Silent Spring was a data intensive, densely footnoted work
constituting the most comprehensive cost/benefit analysis yet conducted on a host of recently
introduced synthetic pesticides. Many a budding environmentalist turning to the book for
inspiration has put it down soon after completing the evocative introduction – “And No Bird
Sang” – that led to the title. Carson advanced the most scientifically rigorous and technically
detailed case possible because she correctly anticipated that challenging the new synthetic status
quo would elicit a withering rebuke from powerful and deep pocketed interests. That criticism
persists to this day and it is possible with contemporary analytical tools to poke holes in some of
Carson’s assertions, though her fundamental conclusions are tragically all too accurate. Of
greater significance than the fine print behind the science in Silent Spring is the spirit within its
vision that launched both the mass organic movement and the sweeping environmental
consciousness of the 1960s.
Like the great naturalists John Muir and Aldo Leopold before her, Carson popularized the
understanding that human beings are an intrinsic part of the natural world which they could
neither dominate nor control. And like those geniuses, Carson warned that extremely adverse
consequences would result from ignoring this principle of universal reciprocity. Specifically, she
documented that the new generation of synthetic pesticides such as DDT, dieldrin and heptachlor
persisted long after their application and accumulated in the fat tissue of organisms exposed to
them. The movement of these toxins through the food chain resulted in their concentration in
longer-lived species and posed severe if unpredictable health risks. Carson was deeply disturbed
that citizens were kept ignorant of these risks with comforting assurances that powerful
technologies in the hands of responsible authorities would necessarily contribute to progress.
Rather than advocating the prohibition of synthetic pesticides, she argued for a more realistic
appraisal of the costs and benefits of specific applications and for an accelerated effort to study
and employ alternative, environmentally friendly, systems-based, biological controls for pest
problems.
The massive public attention that Silent Spring received became an extraordinary catalyst
for Americans to reject the industrial agricultural model and seek out – and grow, if necessary –
chemical-free food. Within a few years, J.I. Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine had several
million subscribers and spurred the back-to-the-land youth movement from which many
pioneering organic farmers emerged. Carson’s powerful message had clear connections to
Howard’s organic paradigm: Nature, not mankind is in charge, and everything is connected to
everything else, in a closed system. However, Carson’s warning cry regarding toxic synthetic
compounds corrupting organic purity was a secondary if parallel concern to Howard whose
primary focus was on the fertility and resilience of the system itself. This divergence in focus has
led to an enduring confusion as to whether organic farming and the certification procedures that
govern it address the process (the production systems) or the product (the food itself). More
about this critical subject when we take up organic certification next time!
I’d like to close by acknowledging another of Rachel Carson’s enduring contributions.
While Americans like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, our propensity to accept
authority and conform to the status quo runs deep. Carson dismantled the presumption that the
people in charge, even in a democracy, would always act with the best interests of the
community at heart. She demonstrated convincingly that the commercial, academic and
regulatory establishment would at best gloss over and at worst sweep under the rug any less than
flattering information about their latest and greatest innovation. Such insight awakened millions
of Americans to consider that perhaps atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was not as safe as
it was portrayed, that our military intervention in Vietnam was not about supporting an ally
yearning for democracy and that the Watergate break was not simply a “third rate burglary” as
the President’s press secretary initially suggested. Asking the right questions qualifies as
“speaking truth to power”, and Rachel Carson inspired millions to start asking questions.
I’ve devoted the first two installments in this series to exploring the dual wellsprings that
gave rise to organic agriculture. Organic Agriculture: Its Origins and Evolution delved into Sir
Albert Howard’s pioneering vision of organic agriculture as a self-regulating system of
integrated crop and livestock production that provides optimal nutrition for organisms, including
humans, on their journey through life. In Industrial Agriculture and the Organic Alternative:
Rachel Carson’s Contribution, I introduced the more contemporary concern, brilliantly
articulated by that noted marine biologist and author, that the reckless release of toxic synthetic
compounds into the environment threatens to undermine the Earth’s ecological balance. The
convergence of these two tributaries by the early 1960s led to a small but spirited torrent of
dedicated farmers and supportive consumers who rejected a mainstream food supply increasingly
driven by mass production, saturation advertising and convenience preparation.
How would consumers seeking chemical-free fruits and vegetables, brown eggs and
bulgar wheat find the precious yet rare commodities they prized? One solution was to grow them
personally and many people tried, with varying degrees of success, to go “back to the land” and
start farming. Another solution was to pool resources with like-minded souls and procure bulk
orders from trusted farmers for communal distribution which fostered the modern cooperative
grocery/health food store movement. But becoming a farmer meant sweaty full-time work and
joining a coop led to messy group dynamics and lots of left over brown rice. Alternative-minded
farmers and consumers alike began imagining a simple yet reliable shorthand that would readily
identify food raised and handled as naturally as possible and ideally with no chemical inputs. J.I.
Rodale had been popularizing the term “organic” to describe such production systems through
his publications and research institute since the 1940s. With this pedigree, “organic” was widely
synonymous with natural farming systems and a numerous regional farmer groups (calling them
“organizations” at this point would be stretching it) were using it as a marketing claim by the late
1970s.
Despite a perpetual cold shoulder from the land grant agricultural establishment and the
commercial food industry, organic agriculture grew steadily if silently during the 1980s. Each
regional farmer group developed its own set of standards that specified the conditions with which
a farmer must comply for their farm and the food it produced to be certified, labeled and sold as
organic. These standards began with the basics of Howard and Rodale – small scale systems
emphasizing natural fertility sources including compost and cover crops, crop rotations, and crop
diversity – and grafted on the Carson commandment – no synthetic inputs, especially pesticides.
The pioneering farmers of this era deserve high praise not only for developing ways to produce
under what were generally thought to be impossible conditions but for also building the
credibility and market value of their distinct brands. By the end of the decade, there were at least
thirty organic certification programs operating across the United States with some – especially in
California, New England and the Upper Midwest – developing sizable consumer loyalty.
How were these nascent organic certification programs capable of guaranteeing potential
customers that certified products had indeed been grown and processed in accordance with the
proclaimed standards? It takes something more than the threat of bad karma to deter us from
acting selfishly when we think no one is listening. The answer then, and to a considerable degree
to this day, was similar to Ronald Reagan’s approach to negotiating nuclear disarmament with
the Soviet Union: “Trust, but verify”. The certification process is predicated upon a
comprehensive and ongoing dialogue between the farmer and their certifying agent. In a nutshell,
the two parties agree on an organic system plan that commits the farmer to managing their
operation in compliance with the standards. Compliance with the organic system plan is
documented through an annual on-site inspection with follow-up as warranted, although the
certifying agent can also conduct unannounced inspections. Detailed paperwork is fundamental
to smooth certification and over time the certifying agents – who then and now tend to be the
exacting types you would imagine would be drawn to this work – became highly efficient. In an
oft-repeated phenomena, a member of the original farmer group who proved the most capable at
the certification process stepped away from farming and took on an independent role in
certifying their former peers. One cannot say that deliberate misrepresentation has not occurred,
but the nearly forty year history of organic certification in the United States reflects has been
overwhelmingly transparent, honest and accurate.
Anyone involved in business (or a relationship, for that matter) knows that success brings
with it a whole new set of challenges and the organic community was clearly experiencing
growing pains by 1990. More and more consumers were drawn to organic foods, but the plethora
of independent certification programs (several states had joined the existing pool of farmer-based
and for-profit certifying agents) created confusion around the generally slight but occasionally
significant differences between their standards. This problem was magnified for food processors
who wanted to combine ingredients certified by different programs into a single certified product
such as corn chips or soup but were constrained by the lack of reciprocity. Amidst growing
concern among established farmers and certifying agents that newcomers could seriously dilute
or outright misrepresent the meaning and integrity of their hard work, organic agriculture
literally went prime time overnight. In late 1989, the CBS news program 60 Minutes covered
findings from the Natural Resources Defense Council that the widely used agricultural chemical
Alar left carcinogenic residues on apples. In pre-Internet days when 60 Minutes was among the
country’s most widely watched and trusted news sources, the story triggered a classic Rachel
Carson backlash and Americans knocked down doors to get “chemical-free food”. Having
become in a sense too big to fail and too small to keep going it alone, the organic community
accepted what many continue to see as a Faustian bargain: they turned to the federal government
to create a single standard and certification program to regulate use of the term “organic”.
My previous column on the history of organic agriculture wrapped up with a look at the
burgeoning national market that emerged during the 1980’s. Counterculture back-to-the-landers
and die-hard traditionalist farmers were raising crops and livestock without agro-chemicals and
growing numbers of consumers were eager to buy, even when the produce had a few spots.
Organic agriculture was becoming pretty big business, considering that the people making it
happen had started out with little more than determination. The organic community – meaning
the extended family of farmers, certifying agents, natural food merchandisers, environmentalists
and consumers – recognized that some harmony and reciprocity between the dozens of regional
certification standards was needed to avoid a Tower of Babel. Even greater was the fear that if
the meaning of organic remained up for grabs, johnny-come-latelies could swoop in and dilute
its meaning or wreck the process through outright fraud.
The only authority that could provide the national oversight that the organic community
sought was the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The obvious reservations
about strange bedfellows were compounded by memories of an earlier courtship between the two
parties. Bob Bergland was President Carter’s Secretary of Agriculture and wondered what was
behind the anecdotal reports trickling in that organic agriculture was environmentally sensitive
and energy efficient, yet still productive. In 1979, Secretary Bergland appointed a study team of
senior USDA researchers who spent a year doing due diligence with, in their words, “organic
farming leaders, editors, spokesmen and practitioners.” Robert Rodale, who had stepped into his
father’s shoes as editor of Organic Farming served as a key contact and coordinated a detailed
survey of almost 700 farmer subscribers. The study team released their highly favorable
conclusions entitled, Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming (PDF) in July 1980 and
it quickly became the USDA’s most frequently requested publication. After the Reagan
Administration entered office six months later, the publication went out of print and organic
agriculture went back to the equivalent of non-person status within USDA.
The organic community shrugged off Reagan’s cold shoulder – after all, what did they
agree with him about? However, as the value of organic agriculture grew during the 1980s, the
scales began to tip and it became apparent that a working relationship with Washington, DC was
a necessity. As the saying goes in Washington, you’re either at the table or on the menu. Most
fortuitously for the organic community, their initial contact in the quest for official recognition
was a bright and open-minded Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry staffer
named Kathleen Merrigan. (Full disclosure: Dr. Merrigan was later responsible for bringing me
to work both in Washington and at the USDA, but I’ve forgiven her for that.) Over the two
decades that followed, Merrigan (now Deputy Secretary of Agriculture) would lead the organic
agriculture charge inside the Beltway and do more to shape the successes and failures of the
USDA’s role in the process than any other person.
The first fruit of the new partnership between the organic community and the USDA was
the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) of 1990 which remains the legal foundation of the
federal regulations governing organic food. The OFPA was quite a victory because it authorized
the USDA to establish and enforce a consistent national standard for organic crops, livestock and
processed foods while ensuring that the organic community who have a significant voice in the
process. Most importantly, it directed the Secretary of Agriculture to appoint a fifteen member
National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) to include prescribed numbers of farmer, processor,
certifying agent, scientist, consumer and environmentalist representatives. The NOSB is
responsible for advising the Secretary on establishing standards and otherwise implementing the
certification program but has an even greater power. While organic agriculture is predicated on a
systems approach, many day to day decisions that its practitioners face involve working some
type of material into the process, such as fertilizers, livestock medications and even, yes,
pesticides. The rule of thumb in organic agriculture is that natural materials are allowed unless
prohibited and synthetic materials prohibited unless allowed. Courtesy of the OFPA, only the
NOSB can determine which synthetic materials may be allowed and under what conditions,
giving the Board tremendous discretion over how organic agriculture is practiced.
Two other provisions in the OFPA are worth noting. One, the USDA sets the standards
for organic crop, livestock and processed food production, but the responsibility for monitoring
compliance with those standards is delegated to accredited certifying agents. This mechanism
enabled the pre-existing certifying agents (including private non- and for-profit operations as
well as state run programs) to keep their hands in the game; they simply dropped their own
standards and started working with their farmer and processor clients to comply with the new
federal ones. This has proven to be a major attribute of the OFPA since it brought the
tremendous institutional knowledge of the certifying agents (the co-stars of the organic scene all
along) into the federal program without USDA having to train its own certification inspectors
and review committee personnel. To this day, the major present-at-the-creation certifying agents
continue to enforce compliance with the USDA’s standards. Based on the USDA’s performance
of the duties it is responsible for, one could argue that the continuous transfusion of real-world
understanding via the certifying agents has kept the entire program alive.
The second point to note – while allowing specific NOSB approved synthetics in organic
crop and livestock production, the OFPA categorically prohibited the use of synthetic ingredients
in organic processed foods. This provision was agreed upon by the organic community at a time
when the processed foods market was modest and the products available were relatively simple
to work with. However, very quickly certain organic interests realized that it would be
impossible to produce large volumes of commercial grade processed food without the processing
aids, stabilizers, and other neat tools that food technologists (yes, a real term) were adept at
creating. Soon after the NOSB began meeting in 1992 its members began approving synthetic
ingredients for use in organic processed foods and the USDA went along with this blatant
violation of the OFPA in finalizing the organic regulation. For constitutionalists, it is an
insightful lesson in how the Executive Branch (USDA) can readily frustrate the will of the
Legislative Branch (Congress). As with a parent telling a child what to do, the interpretation and
implementation of the order can often veer dramatically from the original intention. A
persnickety blueberry farmer from Maine named Arthur Harvey eventually took the USDA to
court and won a repeal of the offending allowance for synthetic substances in organic processed
foods, but this decision was quickly rendered mute when Congress re-wrote the law to allow
them. Today, the list of synthetic processing aids and additives in organic foods can be just as
long and tongue twisting as you’ll find in the conventional product.
You may be wondering, how did the OFPA get to be so groovy and then survive the great
sausage grinder we know as Capitol Hill? Working with the support of her boss Senator Patrick
Leahy of Vermont, Kathleen Merrigan spent two years in continuous dialogue with the organic
community to craft the bill. Replicating the organic standards themselves was the easy part since
the existing models were simple and succinct. For example, livestock standards were just
emerging and were typically no more detailed or elaborate than good haiku. The real genius in
the OFPA was creating a mechanism to enforce a federal regulation that so meaningfully
incorporated public participation – ever hear of a civilian telling the Pentagon how to fight the
war? However, all this work stood a good chance of being for naught since Representative Jaime
Whitten, Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee responsible for USDA had zero
interest in organic agriculture and refused to let a companion bill move through that chamber.
Courageously, a young Congressman representing Eugene, Oregon named Peter De Fazio stood
up on the House floor and proposed amending the 1990 Farm Bill then under discussion by
tacking the Leahy plan on whole hog. It was audacious to say the least to challenge Chairman
Whitten who was referred to as the permanent Secretary of Agriculture since those appointed by
the President came and went. However, in a sign that the times were indeed a changin’, the
House approved the DeFazio amendment – the only floor amendment to make it into the Farm
Bill that year.
Our previous look at the history behind organic agriculture delved into the grassroots
community’s courtship of federal recognition and the consummation of that relationship with the
Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) in 1990. Today’s discussion will pick up in the light of
the morning after and the reservations – felt to this day – whether hooking up with Uncle Sam
turned out to be as advantageous as hoped. A healthy match between the two has always been a
tricky proposition, given the USDA’s top-down approach to decision making and the organic
community’s commitment to consensus process. The relationship is further complicated by the
fact that though the OFPA affords the organic community considerable influence over the
definition and practice of organic agriculture, it also ensures that the USDA ultimately retains the
upper hand. Ceding ultimate responsibility for organic agriculture to the USDA has yielded a
measure of the consistency, credibility and recognition sought by the organic community.
However, these gains have come at the expense of twenty years of turbulence with a partner at
times prone to indifference and capriciousness, to say the least.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, since the USDA took no meaningful action concerning
organic agriculture after OFPA’s passage until December 1997. (I did mention something about
indifference, didn’t I?). It’s important to consider the internal changes that organic agriculture
underwent during this interval, and especially the significant consolidation in the production,
processing and marketing sectors. For the first wave of self-identified and subsequently certified
organic products that became commercially available during the 1960’s and 70’s, the reputation
behind the name on the label was integral to success. Budding enterprises such as Walnut Acres,
Arrowhead Mills and Eden Foods gained a foothold in the markets for whole grains, rice and
other staples because the people who ran them were recognized as leading practitioners and
advocates of organic management. This process repeated itself during the 1980s for perishable
products and canned and frozen foods as start-up ventures such as Pavich Grapes, Organic
Valley, Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen garnered valuable consumer confidence. Many of these
organic pioneers had been told not long before that they could never grow food without using
agricultural chemicals and now they were supplying such food to national markets! The
association with grassroots producers and processors who were frontline partners in confronting
“the system” was an essential part of the branding that secured a sizable and growing market
share for organically produced foods by 1990.
Two reasons why “the system” became (and remains) “the system” are its ability to
capitalize on new consumer trends and to respond aggressively to competition. These forces
triggered dramatic concentration within the production, processing, distribution and marketing of
organic agricultural products even as the overall market grew rapidly during the 1990s. The
conventional food establishment didn’t set out to beat or join the organic upstarts during this
period; subsuming them was a much more practical business strategy. Their tactics included
wholesale acquisitions, such as the purchase of Horizon Dairy by Dean Foods in 1998 and
Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen by General Mills one year later. In another approach, large
conventional producers – particularly in the cut-throat fresh produce market – ventured into
organic production and used their deep pockets to eliminate veteran competitors. For example,
wholesale produce buyers across the country received a standing offer from a California
agribusiness giant to undersell Pavich on organic grapes by one dollar per box, resulting in the
latter’s bankruptcy. The increasing control over the organic marketplace exerted by corporate
agribusiness coincided with a pronounced increase in sales of highly processed certified
convenience foods such as snacks, “heat and eat” meals and a confectionary concoction redefined as health food called soy milk. Keep in mind that the market growth in these high margin
pseudo-foods depended upon overlooking the OFPA’s prohibition on synthetic ingredients in
processed foods, something in which the most certifying agents, the NOSB and the USDA were
equally complicit.
As a result of this growth and diversification, the organic community of the 1990’s came
to epitomize the big tent metaphor. The traditionalist farmers and the back-to-the-land
newcomers who had launched the movement were well represented as were the experienced
grower-based certifying agents that had grown up to serve them. Senior among these
organizations were California Certified Organic Farmers, Oregon Tilth and the state chapters of
the Northeast Organic Farming and Gardening Association. However, these present-at-the-
creation types found themselves with lots of new company as corporate food processors and
marketers (particularly Whole Foods) and both state and private certifying agents emerged as
both their peers and competitors. Non-profit consumer and environmental groups including
Consumers Union, the Humane Society of the United States and the Environmental Working
Group were also active contributors to grassroots organizing and Washington advocacy. With the
annual growth in organic products consistently hitting 20 percent by the mid-90’s, the
contradictions underlying these alliances – for example, processors and retailers historically
stomp on producers and non-profits rarely cozy up with multi-nationals – were easy to overlook.
Bonds between these new bedfellows were thoroughly galvanized on December 21, 1997 when
the USDA went public with its first proposal for national organic standards and everyone in the
organic community hit the roof over what they saw.
Before looking at the USDA’s initial proposal for organic standards, let’s review how
they reached their decisions. True to the requirements of the OFPA, Secretary of Agriculture
Edward Madigan appointed members to the NOSB in 1992 including several organic stalwarts
including Chairman Michael Sligh, Michigan beef producer Merrill Clark and Gene Kahn,
founder of Cascadian Farms. The NOSB met regularly, worked assiduously and by late 1995
submitted a detailed outline to the Secretary for setting organic standards and managing the
USDA’s accreditation of certifying agents. The draft standards and procedures recommended by
the NOSB were a middle-of-the-fairway synthesis of prevailing certification practices. They
included basic requirements for crop and livestock production based on natural principles, room
for give and take between producers and certifying agents to agree on the specifics and a narrow
allowance for synthetic materials in both production and processing. Working with a miniscule
budget, the National Organic Program (NOP) within USDA struggled to keep pace with the
NOSB, though it wisely hired a veteran expert on organic standards named Grace Gershuny to
translate organic speak into federal regulatory language. After the NOSB wrapped up its work,
the NOP spent two years working out a comprehensive draft that included a detailed description
of the context in which various issues needed to be considered. During this period the NOP also
solicited input from federal peers including the EPA and FDA who exercised statutory authority
over key elements of the organic standards such as regulating pesticides and food additives.
As mentioned before, it’s hard to overstate how poorly the organic community reacted to
USDA’s first proposed rule for national organic standards released on December 21, 1997.
“Betrayed”, “A flagrant distortion”, “Written by Monsanto”…there seemed to be no limit to the
vehemence of the criticism. Nothing links people like having a common enemy, and there was
nobody that the organic community (still largely a bunch of outsiders) could more readily
perceive as an enemy than the USDA. Specifically, the organic community saw the crop and
livestock production standards as pale imitations of accepted practice and riddled with
compromises and loopholes. The community also objected to draconian constraints on certifying
agents, the longtime co-stars of organic agriculture who were facing a desultory future
completely under the thumb of federal dictate. Think what Rachel Carson would say about that!
Perhaps the most incendiary aspect of the proposed rule was the consideration it gave to
sanctioning the use of genetic engineering, sewage sludge and irradiation in organic production –
this went unthinkably beyond the pale. The groundswell of public rejection to the USDA’s
proposal began rolling in about 24 hours after its release and about 275,000 negative comments –
more than 100,000 of them unique individual statements and not form letters- were ultimately
received. In an interesting historical footnote, the NOP would receive an internal USDA award
for its efficiency in receiving this mountain of comment and making it available to the public
electronically – it was a groundbreaking success for using the Internet in conducting federal
rulemaking.
The most important political commodity in Washington is cover, or the ability to say that
you did the right thing regardless of how badly the venture you were engaged in turned out. With
275,000 people calling him out, there would be no cover for Secretary of Agriculture Dan
Glickman and to his credit he didn’t try to scamper to find some. Secretary Glickman
acknowledged that the USDA had failed badly and he committed the Department to doing the
right thing before the Clinton Administration came to an end. In his first move to restore
confidence in the Department, he appointed the enormously respected Kathleen Merrigan as
Administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service with a mandate to get the job done right.
The NOSB was reconvened and began meeting three times a year and significant new resources
flowed into the rejuvenated NOP. (Your author snuck into a position with the NOP under the
“new resources” ruse.)
The USDA rolled out its first proposal for national organic standards in late 1997 and
within weeks the verdict was decisive: universal repudiation, to put it mildly. The Department
typically received scores, maybe a few hundred public comments on its draft regulations. The
torrent of comment on the organic standards poured in by the thousands per day and ultimately
exceeded 275,000 with maybe 4 having anything complimentary to say. A realist by nature,
USDA Secretary Dan Glickman found religion and promised to do right the next time around.
Indeed, the Secretary was so sensitized by the backlash that he committed the USDA to issuing a
second draft proposal for additional comment before finalizing the standards.
Reflecting his good faith, the Secretary appointed the widely respected Kathleen
Merrigan as Administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service to lead this initiative. When
asked what made the concert promoter Bill Graham special, Grace Slick of the Jefferson
Airplane commented that “He was one of them and he was one of us.” Merrigan (now the
Deputy Secretary of Agriculture) earned similar standing; she was solidly connected in DC as a
whip smart Hill staffer who gained the trust of the grassroots community while drafting the
Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) (PDF). The USDA also brought in Keith Jones, a savvy
veteran of the Texas Department of Agriculture’s successful certification program to run the day
to day operations of the National Organic Program (NOP). The Secretary made it clear that he
wanted the job done and done right before he left office at the end of the Clinton Administration.
Once he signaled support, the mid- and upper-level bureaucrats who had gone through the
motions for five years on the first proposal became much better at returning phone calls and
solving problems.
What did the organic community find so objectionable in the first proposal? Pretty much
everything. The provisions for managing crops and livestock seemed paper-thin and lacked the
rigor and complexity that people associated with the private and state certification programs. For
example, livestock could receive 80% organic feed and still be certified when existing
certification programs had raised the bar to a 100% requirement. Provisions for confining
livestock were so vague that the public concluded that USDA couldn’t think outside the factory
farm box. The crop standards featured an “order of preference” approach that allowed farmers to
implement less desirable practices if preferable ones proved too difficult. Was USDA suggesting
that organic meant settling for less than the best? The proposed standards also seemed riddled
with deficiencies and loopholes that increased the risk of prohibited synthetic substances slipping
into the system.
Beyond concerns that the standards were flimsy, organic veterans were very disturbed by
what they saw as a power-grabbing USDA exceeding its statutory role, especially at the expense
of certifying agents. The so-called farmer-based certification programs had legitimate Founding
Father/Earth Mother status in the organic community and the OFPA was supposed to protect
their authority and autonomy. Instead, the USDA’s proposal imposed firewalls that would drive
working farmers out of the certification review process. Additionally, certifying agents would
lose the right to use their private seal to certify to additional requirements. This struck many as a
blatant infringement of their registered trademarks and commercial free speech rights but the
USDA insisted that private seals would undermine the principal benefit of a consistent national
standard. All in all, the USDA’s first proposal validated the deep-seated fear that the Department
was incapable of wrapping its mind around the zen nuances of organic production and
certification and was not at all receptive to advice from those who could.
Without a doubt the greatest perceived transgression in the USDA’s first proposal was its
supposed allowance of genetic engineering, irradiation and sewage sludge in organic farming.
The presence of these quintessential bête noires confirmed that USDA had sub-contracted
writing the standards to Monsanto with the intent to either kill organic agriculture outright or
make it a new corporate profit center. Vitriolic references to the “Big Three” came to dominate
public comment and spearhead an avalanche of form letter responses. Working Assets members
alone submitted an amazing 30,000+ comments through the check-off option that the company
included on monthly statements. Much more significant than the form letters, though, were
the100,000+ unique comments, often exceptionally detailed and constructive, that the USDA
received. These comments as well as the reconvening of the National Organic Standards Board
in early 1998 paved the way for unprecedented public participation in the regulatory process as
the USDA began putting together its next attempt at national organic standards.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the exercise in group think that the fallout from the first
proposed standards became. USDA screwed up the job? Sure, that sounds just like them, so
throw out everything they suggested. Who’s in charge now? We’ve got a quarter million experts
to tell us what to do. Power to the people! The first proposal was too loose and leaky? We can
screw those standards down so tight that no prohibited substance will dare show its face on an
organic farm! This unfolding dynamic revealed an especially problematic fact about organic
agriculture and the certification process: not many people understand how they genuinely work,
though a great many people like to think that they do. In a nutshell, organic agriculture entails
the flexible application of biological and mechanical practices that nurture soil, plant and animal
health by mimicking a natural system. Certification attests that the system that the farmer adopts
is consistent with organic principles and will protect the natural resources on and beyond the
farm. However, the public comments demanded a more rigid, absolutist approach with all the
dos and don’ts spelled out in the standards. This mindset risked placing the purity of the product
ahead of the integrity of the process.
Lost in the rush to judgment on the USDA’s proposal was the fact that it more closely
resembled existing certification standards and practices than the imaginary understanding sought
by many commenters. The USDA proposal had some egregious flaws but most were surgically
correctable, such as raising the organic feed requirement to 100%. The crime of the century
known as the Big Three turned out to be over-hyped, too. The USDA had indeed suggested
allowing two genetically modified materials, but dropping them from the subsequent proposal
was sufficient to correct that mistake. Regarding sewage sludge and irradiation, the USDA
wasn’t advocating their use but simply seeking comment on the feasibility of allowing them. The
NOP staff knew well that allowing either would be a non-starter with the organic community, but
other federal entities including the Office of Management and Budget exercised their prerogative
to raise the subject for public comment.
If ignorance drove the public response to the “Big Three”, then denial accounts for its
reaction to the proposal’s crop and livestock production practices. Organic consumers often have
excessively idealistic and pastoral notions about what the standards require and prohibit. While
many groovy things happen on organic farms, there are also practical considerations dictating
that farmers do what is necessary to get their work done, hopefully profitably. That doesn’t mean
that standards are ignored when the going gets tough, but it illustrates why the order of
preference approach was not so alien. It reflects an understanding that if we can’t always do
what’s best, we should at least do the best we can. In the system of continuous improvement
paradigm that supports organic agriculture, doing the best we can at all times is more important
than doing the best thing at any one time. The ongoing relationship between the farmer and the
certifying agent with the standards providing guidance is what allows an organic farm to
progress over time.
Burning the USDA’s first proposed rule for national organic standards at the stake didn’t
sink the regulation that ultimately emerged, but it definitely pushed the results away from
process certification towards product certification. The second proposed rule published in March
2000 and the final rule (the one we live with today) from December that same year were solid
organic standards but they became much more prescriptive and restrictive. For example, NOP
staffer Grace Gershuny – an experienced organic certification specialist – contributed a
historically accurate compost standard for the first proposal that was straight-forward and
perfectly workable. Bathwater and baby alike went out the window and the final rule contained
(and still does) a one-size-fits-all quantitative protocol that not one individual commenter
requested or that had ever been used in the history of organic certification. The rule also
incorporated scores of categorical prohibitions against using prohibited substances that have
made material evaluation a nightmare since we know that it’s impossible to prove a negative.
Democracy in action? Yes, and we can only console ourselves with Winston Churchill’s
observation that “Democracy is the worst from of government you can live with, until you’ve
tried all the rest.”
Despite the bumpy ride, Secretary Glickman and the senior leadership of the USDA were
smiling ear to ear at the unraveling on the USDA national organic standards on December 21,
2000. The organic community was smiling, too – leadership from both the grassroots community
and the Organic Trade Association were on hand to praise the standard as the highest in the
world. The general vagueness of the first proposal had been thoroughly clarified, the tangible
shortcomings upgraded and the Big Three, especially any genetically engineered product or
ingredient, were categorically prohibited. The pendulum had swung hard from a process standard
towards a product standard, but the newly collaborative relationship between the organic
community and the USDA augured well for its implementation. It had been a long, hard (though
remarkably entertaining and frequently amusing) slog from the day when an earlier Secretary of
Agriculture had suggested that conversion to organic agriculture would result in mass starvation.
There was little comprehension that day how significantly the outcome of the Gore v.
Bush case that had been decided across town nine days earlier would sidetrack the
implementation of the new initiative.
My previous post outlined the improbable circumstances under which the organic
community found itself the belle of the ball at the tail end of the Clinton Administration. The
combination of vibrant market growth and a national constituency learning how to make its voice
heard commanded the attention of the powers that be in Washington, DC. While recognizably
imperfect, the organic regulations issued by the USDA in December 2000 set high standards for
crop and livestock production and processed foods. Most importantly, the USDA had shown
some willingness to listen to the organic community in finalizing the regulations and committed
itself to an active collaboration during the implementation process. But like Cinderella undone
by the stroke of midnight, the organic community suffered a precipitous decline in its fortunes
once the Bush administration took office.
A quick review of the separation of powers and the structure of the federal government
will help to explain the Bush administration’s impact on organic agriculture. We all know that
the Secretary of Agriculture and the USDA’s senior leadership are appointed by and report to the
President, or executive branch. While obligated to enact the mandates of the legislative branch
and heed the guidance of the judicial branch, these political appointees can be counted upon to
advance the President’s agenda and perspective. Put another way, the Secretary and his team
prioritize and execute their responsibilities in the manner that best serves the interests of their
boss in the White House. Once the political appointees chart the Department’s course, it’s the
senior civil service – the bureaucrats – who grind out the paperwork – the legal foundation, the
regulations themselves and the guidance for implementing them – needed to reach that
destination. When political appointees are insufficiently invested in a program area to provide
direction, the bureaucrats are left to steer it on a course of their own choosing.
The newly established Bush USDA set off in hot pursuit of the same priorities that its
Clintonian predecessor had valued: further concentration of agricultural production, increased
emphasis on technological solutions (especially biotechnology) and breaking down trade barriers
in the global marketplace. There never was and still isn’t any lack of bipartisan support in
Washington for the agribusiness agenda. What did change, however, was the new
administration’s willingness to acknowledge responsibility for the National Organic Program
(NOP). Congressional appropriations of about $1 million annually kept it alive but with no
political patron to push its agenda, the NOP became an official non-person inside USDA.
Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman adopted a see no organic, hear no organic and speak no
organic approach that her successors scrupulously maintained throughout the Bush years.
Queried at a Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Rome about the benefits of organic
agriculture, Secretary Veneman limited her response to the multiple and tangible benefits already
being achieved through agricultural biotechnology! Top that for staying on message!
As noted earlier, bureaucrats inherit responsibility for managing USDA programs that
political appointees choose to abandon. Such was the fate of the NOP and it came at an
especially difficult time since its miniscule staff was barraged with questions about interpreting
the new regulations. The livestock standards were particularly vague; in places they read more
like haiku than enforceable requirements. Major provisions such as how much pasture would be
required for dairy operations had been left unanswered in the federal standards with the
expectation that they would be worked out over time. The NOP faced the very daunting
challenge of fleshing out paper standards into a myriad of real world circumstances at the same
time it undertook the accreditation of the certifying agents who would ultimately apply those
standards in the field. With their political appointee bosses not returning phone calls, the NOP
bureaucrats were left to spin their wheels while repeating “We don’t know” to the critical
questions raised by the increasingly frustrated organic community.
Being leaderless is not the same as being powerless, but it did compel the organic
community to function in a much more reactive and defensive manner. For example, the organic
community found itself a small fish in a big pond in February 2003 when a Capitol Hill
backroom deal put a major dent in the vaunted organic standards. Fieldale Farms, a major
integrated poultry production corporation, had marketed organic chicken for several years prior
to the finalization of the federal standards. Back in those Wild West days, Fieldale was free to
define “organic” as it chose, and it chose not to require organic corn in its poultry ration. This
dramatically reduced their cost of production and allowed them to establish a small market in
conventional grocery stores at a reasonable price point. However, the requirement in the now
superseding federal standard that all agricultural livestock feed ingredients be organically
produced threatened to wipe out their nascent enterprise. Fieldale tried to change the standard
through the routine regulatory process but the organic feed requirement had been a major victory
for the organic community and there was no room for compromise.
Playing DC power politics, Fieldale arranged to have a few sentences inserted into a
3,000 page appropriations bill with no prior notice that exempted producers from the organic
feed requirement when the cost exceeded twice the conventional price. Far from being a surgical
quick fix, however the legislative rider elicited howls of objection about the duplicitous process
and the diabolical intent behind the effort. Traditional organic supporters in Congress including
Senator Leahy from Vermont and Representative Farr from California demanded a rollback
while Speaker of the House Denis Hastert became remarkably unfamiliar with how the rider had
found its way into his appropriations bill. Secretary Veneman weighed in to defend the higher
standard (that must have hurt) and, after extensive media coverage and a successful campaign to
mobilize support in Congress, the rider was removed and the organic feed requirement restored.
The organic community had flexed enough muscle to protect its interests – but only to re-gain a
victory it thought it had already nailed down and after some bad press.
The NOP itself was responsible the next time the organic community got sand kicked in
its face, though once again a grassroots campaign snatched, if not victory, at least the status quo
from the jaws of defeat. In the absence of any interest in the organic regulations from the
political appointees, the NOP bureaucrats decided to start making and implementing policy
pronouncements themselves. In April 2004 the NOP unilaterally issued what it called “guidance”
and “directives” related to some of the most sensitive issues in the standards including antibiotics
in dairy production, livestock feed ingredients and allowable inert materials in pesticides. These
policy interpretations had been drawn up without input from the organic community and were
widely seen as seriously degrading the standards. They would have allowed a host of new
synthetic materials into organic production without review and facilitated the recycling of dairy
animals between organic and conventional operations. Furthermore, the NOP hadn’t run its
proposals past the USDA lawyers, much less taken any of the steps required to establish new
regulations.
Once again the media announced the trashing of organic standards, the usual suspects
from the organic community and Congress denounced (in this case) the USDA’s actions and the
tumult soon penetrated Secretary Veneman’s bubble. The Bush Administration had no interest in
taking credit for what was going right in organic agriculture but they certainly weren’t going to
take criticism when things went wrong with it. Secretary Veneman called a meeting with several
recognized organic community leaders (that must have really hurt) and announced that the
guidance and directives had been arrived upon in error and were forthwith null and void. Once
again the organic community had avoided a potentially catastrophic blow from an unexpected
adversary yet found itself pretty much back where it started. Now neither the political appointees
nor the bureaucrats would substantively address organic policy or standards issues as the NOP
reverted to its black hole approach to information sharing and decision making. Fortunately,
USDA had successfully accredited almost all of the historic certification programs and their
credibility helped to preserve broad consumer confidence in the USDA organic seal. However,
the Bush Administration was only half over and the organic community was in for several more
surprises before it was done.
Back in July, the New York Times published an article entitled “Has ‘Organic’ Been
Oversized?” which joined a string of recent stories in pushing organic certification back into the
media spotlight. The excitation aroused by “Oversized” stemmed from its questioning whether
corporate interests are undermining organic integrity by rigging the certification standards to
allow unwarranted and unwelcomed synthetic ingredients in organic processed food. Some
organic heavyweights including Michael Potter of Eden Foods were blunt in alleging such
corruption and the article alarmed many consumers whose knowledge of certification draws
more on faith than familiarity with federal regulations. Weren’t the organic standards originally
written to prohibit certified foods from containing synthetic ingredients? And doesn’t the
process for establishing and enforcing those standards deter agribusiness interference (along with
government incompetence) by insuring the organic community a commanding voice in the
outcome? The answer to both questions is yes and how we moved from those early intentions to
the realities of today provides the next installment in our serial saga, “Organic Agriculture: Its
Origins, and Evolution Over Time.”
We must travel back to the 1980s to appreciate why and how the anti-synthetic and antiagribusiness provisions were written into the USDA organic certification standards. Private
sector organic certification came into its own during that decade as more than a dozen for-profit,
non-profit and state certification programs grew to commercial significance. Each of these
programs maintained its own set of standards for production (fresh products) and handling
(processed foods) and used a unique seal to identify items certified to those standards. Much as
adolescents everywhere have difficulty explaining themselves, this multiplicity of meanings and
symbols rendered organic certification quite perplexing to many potential consumers. Seeking to
harmonize the meaning behind organic certification, the organic community – meaning the
extended family of farmers, certifying agents, natural food merchants, environmentalists and
consumers – reached general consensus that the benefits of a single standard and label under the
aegis of the USDA outweighed the risks.
This history is covered in more detail in an earlier installment of this series (Genesis of
the USDA’s National Organic Program) but there are two specific elements which are pertinent
to our “Oversized” discussion. One, the Organic Food Production Act of 1990 (OFPA) – the
ensuing legislation which authorized the USDA certification program – set a very high bar for
allowing synthetic substances in organic production and expressly prohibited them in processed
food. These strict provisions reflected the pristine orthodoxy with which the organic community
embraced its mission and the relatively small-scale and simplistic production and handling
systems that were operational at the time. This was the era when cosmetically challenged
organic fruits and vegetables were still salable and seven grain pancake mix constituted a
certified convenience food. Whether back-to-the-landers or traditional farmers who declined to
get on the chemical treadmill, the organic pioneers were all told that they wouldn’t survive
without using synthetic substances and they prided themselves on proving that guidance wrong.
Additionally, the organic community recognized that partnering with USDA made them
decidedly small fish in a very big pond and insisted that OFPA contain checks-and-balances
provisions to guarantee that their voice be heard and respected. The most significant of these
provisions was the creation of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), a fifteen member
body appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to include a prescribed number of farmer (4),
processor (2), consumer (3), environmentalist (3), certifying agent (1), scientist (1), and retailer
(1) representatives. These categories were loosely defined in the law but the NOSB was clearly
chartered as an extension of the organic community and its champion inside USDA.
Remarkably, OFPA authorized the NOSB to determine which synthetic substances could be
allowed in organic production and which natural but non-agricultural substances (such as salt)
could be added to organic processed foods. The Secretary of Agriculture retains final authority
for determining which substances are allowed in organic production and handling but may only
choose from among those favorably recommended by the NOSB. Can you think of another
federal regulation that affords private citizens such extraordinary regulatory influence?
There is a caveat against generals fighting the previous war over again, and it could be
argued that OFPA was written to certify the previous processed food category over again. By
the time the NOSB ultimately convened in 1992 and started reviewing substances, a new
generation of organic processed foods was emerging that were more fabricated and shelf-stable
than the granola of the early days. Many of the synthetic substances used in the newer processed
products were recognizably innocuous – ascorbic acid, for example – but others such as monoand diglycerides used as stabilizers crossed the legal line drawn in the OFPA. Keep in mind that
the OFPA restriction applied to the eventual USDA standard and while the NOSB and the USDA
deliberated during the 1990s the private certification programs remained free to green light the
more novel processed food formulations made with ever more syllabic, chemical-like sounding
ingredients. Allowing synthetics to slip into certified processed foods, along with the emergence
of ever larger and more specialized organic farms, was part and parcel of organic agriculture
moving from the food cooperatives and mom and pop natural food stores of the 1970s and 80s
into the Whole Foods and Walmarts of the 1990s and today.
The organic community in general and the NOSB and USDA in particular were guilty of
looking the looking the other way regarding the legal prohibition of allowing synthetic
substances in certified processed foods. Beginning with its first recommendations in 1992, the
NOSB simply ignored the law and started forwarding favorable recommendations for such
substances to the Secretary. For its part, the USDA published draft regulations in 1997 and 2000
and the final standards later in 2000 with similar disregard for OFPA’s clear-cut prohibition.
Serving as the NOP crop and livestock specialist in 2000, I vividly recall the senior USDA
official responsible for implementing OFPA acknowledge the legal prohibition on synthetic
substances in processed foods, but declare that the final standards would sanction their use.
There were more behind-the-curtains machinations involved in finalizing the federal organic
standards (described in U.S. Adopts National Organic Standards: Victory For All, but…) at the
time we never thought that allowing synthetics in processed foods would be the first to come
back to bite the USDA…and hard!
In an impressive re-telling of the Emperor’s New Clothes fable, a Maine farmer, organic
inspector and general contrarian named Arthur Harvey called the USDA’s bluff in 2002 by suing
to overturn, among other controversial provisions in the standards, the allowance for synthetic
substances in organic processed foods. In January 2005 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in
Harvey’s favor on the allowed synthetic provision and stayed its finding while USDA worked to
un-tangle the processing standards and another overturned provision involving dairies
transitioning to organic production. However, the big players in organic processing, which by
2005 included some of the largest agribusiness interests in the country, responded quickly and
succeeded in attaching an amendment (less favorably referred to as a rider) on the 2006
Agricultural Appropriations bill that amended OFPA to restore the pre-Harvey conditions. This
move, which reeked of special interest influence on Capitol Hill, stunned the grassroots members
of the organic community who were pleased with the Harvey decision, even if they hadn’t been
earlier champions of the cause.
It’s not difficult to draw the connections between this history and the allegations of
corporate malfeasance, USDA duplicity and watered-down organic standards leveled in “Has
‘Organic’ Been Oversized?” In the aftermath of the Harvey case, the NOSB approved additional
synthetic ingredients for use in organic processed foods, such foods grew as a profit center for
processors and retailers and the connection between organic farmers and consumers grew more
distant. Does this picture start to resemble the conventional food sector that organic certification
was envisioned as supplanting? By contrast, advocates of this “mainstreaming organic” model
contend that every acre converted to organic production is a positive achievement and that
adding a handful of innocuous synthetic ingredients (how dangerous could ascorbic acid be?
People take it as a supplement!) is a small price to pay for reaching millions of eager new
consumers. What is indisputable is that the synthetic substances in processed foods controversy
revealed an identity crisis within the organic community that shows little prospect of healing. In
our next installment of organic history, we’ll examine how dramatic changes in certified diary
production exacerbated tensions and ultimate broke the organic community along similar fault
lines.
Demand for organic foods during the early years of the movement reflected a decidedly
vegetarian bias. Countless sacks of organic brown rice and whole wheat flour were divvied up in
hole-in-the wall natural food stores and co-ops while table grapes grown without pesticides and
Alar-free apples enticed consumers like today’s Smart phones, albeit in smaller numbers. The
certification of organic livestock didn’t come into its own until the early 1990s after a national if
modest-sized market for other certified foods was already in place.
Once widely available, organic dairy including milk and yogurt quickly became among
the most prominent and profitable certified foods. The demand for organic eggs and chicken is
now growing rapidly as they appear on the shelves of mass market grocers where certified dairy
is already established. Despite this significant acceptance by consumers, there are widely held
concerns that livestock certification standards have sacrificed organic principles in favor of rapid
growth in market share. Critics contend that organic livestock farms have been allowed to grow
much too large and while the animals raised there may receive organic feed, their overall quality
of life differs little from the animals trapped in conventional confinement operations. This
installment in our history of organic agriculture will explore the challenges and contradictions of
setting livestock standards using the scandalous abuse of the requirements for pasture to illustrate
the very real limitations of organic certification.
Any consideration of livestock’s role in organic agriculture must begin by acknowledging
the visionary contributions of Sir Albert Howard and his first and second wives, Gabrielle and
Louise (two great women behind this great man). Acknowledging Nature as the first and
foremost agriculturalist, the Howards recognized the essential role of animals in recycling
nutrients and observed that “Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock.” They were
alarmed by the declining soil fertility experienced in European agriculture as synthetic fertilizers
came to replace the traditional use of manure. They also noted how successfully the peasant
farmers of Asia preserved the fertility of their small, intensively managed fields for millennia by
composting and returning livestock manure, including their own.
The Howards’ life work served to establish the skillful integration of crop and livestock
production as the foundation of organic soil fertility and pest management. While non-manure
cropping systems continue to be certified organic and can be highly productive, the long term
success of these systems remains untested. An earlier installment of this series, Organic
Agriculture: It’s Origins, and Evolution Over Time delves further into the monumental
contributions made by Sir Albert, Gabrielle and Louise Howard to elucidating and articulating
the principles of organic management.
Let’s return to examining the dynamics of contemporary organic livestock certification
and specifically the challenge of establishing and enforcing production standards that balance the
biological and economic considerations involved in raising domesticated livestock profitably.
Scale has never been a significant limiting factor in organic fruit, vegetable and grain production
in the sense that crop standards are adaptable to farms of widely divergent sizes. As long as
proper rotational practices are maintained, organic crop standards can accommodate your local
CSA’s quarter acre plot of heirloom tomatoes or a one hundred acre field of a standard canning
variety grown in California’s Central Valley.
This flexibility is not at all the case with organic livestock standards which must delineate
requirements for the animals’ feed ration, living conditions and health care. These provisions are
intimately connected to the number of animals a farm can successfully maintain and that number
largely determines the farm’s economic potential. There has always been pressure for organic
livestock standards to accommodate larger farms because the scale of animal production is
inseparable from commercial viability – you don’t find part-time dairy farmers (unless you count
those working off-farm jobs to pay their bills). One can detect the economic temptation pushing
towards more industrial and less pastoral organic livestock standards when studying how the
connection between dairy cows and the pasture they thrive best on has changed over time.
Organic fluid milk production surged during the 1990s, in part due to the introduction of
genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) which was widely used on
conventional milking herds to increase production. Consumers have always associated organic
products with purity and since conventional dairy labels rarely indicated whether or not the milk
came from cows treated with rBGH, certification became a de facto protection against residues
of the synthetic hormone. Considerations of animal welfare, and especially the belief that
organic dairy cows spent lengthy intervals grazing on pasture, were equally important in driving
consumers to organic dairy alternatives.
Many small and medium-sized family dairy farms with between forty and one hundred
and more cows transitioned to organic production during this period, most successfully through
the Organic Valley cooperative of Wisconsin. A start-up called Horizon Dairy grew even faster
by augmenting its purchases from family dairy farms with milk from an expansive facility it built
in Idaho which housed several thousand cows. This mega-dairy complied with all private and
subsequently federal standards for livestock feed and health care – all organic forages and grains
and no antibiotics, rBGH or other synthetic hormones and prohibited drugs – but its cows spent
considerably less time outdoors, and little if any time actually grazing. Some in the organic
community rationalized the mega-dairy model as simply “bringing the feed to the cows rather
than the cows to the feed” and such operations certainly can produce high volume, low cost milk
when compared to the more decentralized and labor-intensive pasture model.
The co-existence of the mega- and family dairy models survived the advent of the USDA
organic certification program in 2000 because the federal standards established a rather listless
“access to pasture” requirement for all certified ruminants, including cows. With the incoming
Bush USDA thoroughly disinterested in applying energy or resources to the organic certification
program it inherited, the state and private sector certifying agents exercised considerable
discretion to interpret and enforce the federal standard. (See The Waste Land: Organic
Agriculture During the Bush Years for a fuller description of this era). It’s said that in America
nothing succeeds like excess, and soon mega-dairies housing upwards of eight to ten thousand
milk cows sprouted up like mushrooms across several Western states. This extremely low cost
organic milk was primarily funneled into the private label store brands that mass market grocers
introduced as well as high priced, value added products such as organic ice cream.
Thanks in large part to the persistent muckraking of the non-profit Cornucopia Institute,
the USDA began cracking down on the flagrant abuses among the mega-dairies in 2005. Aurora
Dairy, the country’s largest provider of private label dairy products, signed a consent decree with
USDA to reduce the size of its Aurora, CO dairy from 4,400 cows to 800 while simultaneously
establishing pasture on its former feedlots. Several other mega-dairies either lost their
certification or were severely downsized and in 2009 USDA implemented a new requirement
establishing a minimum amount of time and feed that dairy cows must receive from pasture.
Surprisingly, the negative publicity surrounding the Aurora consent decree and other
mega-dairy abuses did little to slow consumer demand for organic milk, which flattened out
briefly during the downturn of 2009 but has bounced back to eclipse its previous levels.
However, the USDA’s corrective measures have not gone nearly far enough towards correcting
the imbalances caused by the co-existence of pasture and mega-diary operations. In 2011, Texas
ranked as the second largest organic dairy producing state in America with eight dairies (yes,
eight) producing nearly three times the volume and dollar value of the organic milk produced by
the 180 certified dairies in Vermont. Unbelievably, the USDA is also dragging its feet on a
second abuse of regulatory language that the mega-dairies are exploiting to bring new, nonorganic replacement cows into production. Does it sound as if the USDA has effectively
reversed the slippery slope towards industrialized organic dairy production?
While many see the nearly 2,000 certified dairies in the Unites States as indicative of
organic agriculture’s success, there are clear signals that the economics are not likely to save
many family farms over the long term. Many family dairy farmers face through-the-roof feed
prices this winter following last summer’s drought and they have virtually no leverage to secure
a price that reflects their true cost of production. The price they receive is in the hands of the
two national remaining national buyers (Organic Valley and Horizon), the retailers who operate
on razor thin margins and consumers who see the low cost private label alternative sitting next to
the branded product. The tragic irony behind demand for organic milk being at an all-time high
is that many certified family dairy farmers who pioneered its production can no longer survive
on the price which that thriving market will pay.
The challenges of crafting certification standards that respect organic integrity while both
enabling farmers to achieve commercial scale and preserving strong consumer confidence has
proven to be a tricky juggling act for dairy farmers. As organic certification has matured into a
multi-billion dollar internal market, concessions have inevitably crept into the standards which
conflict with the underlying principles of organic agriculture. Mother earth is not inclined to
bring feed to the cows, but there are clear reasons why farmers, whether they milk fifty or five
thousand head, choose to do so. How far can the gap between organic agriculture and organic
certification become and still preserve a meaningful degree of difference from conventional
production? Our next installment in this series will examine how similar production and
marketing dynamics have affected the development of organic poultry production.
Last week, our extended look at the history of organic agriculture delved into the
challenges and contradictions of livestock certification by examining the evolution of the
standards for organic dairy production. How can livestock standards simultaneously
accommodate the animals’ natural behavior, afford farmers the opportunity to operate at an
economically rewarding scale and still satisfy consumers’ price-sensitive demand for production
systems that are genuine alternatives to conventional practice? The history of certified dairy
production reveals that the overlap in these three objectives can be quite limited, and that the
economic pressure to increase the scale of production without disenchanting consumers is
continuous. As a consequence, cartons of organic milk sold by side on the grocery shelf can
originate from certified dairies of 50, 500 and 5,000 cows with nothing in the USDA standards or
organic seal to enable consumers to differentiate between them.
This week, we’re undertaking a similar investigation into the nuances and ambiguities
within the certification standards for organic poultry, especially chicken. What overlap exists in
organic certification between the natural behavior of chickens, the farmer’s ability to earn a
living and consumers’ expectations that the birds won’t be cruelly confined, fed a compromised
diet and medically mistreated? While not as economically significant as organic dairy during the
heyday of private standards, sales of organic poultry have grown steadily under the federal
certification program. New USDA data pegs the organic poultry market in 2011 at $412 million
($275 million for eggs, $115 million for broilers (meat birds) and $22 million for turkeys) while
placing sales of organic milk at $763 million. Raising this many organic chickens also supports
the premium prices organic grain farmers receive for feed corn and soybeans which consistently
run roughly twice the price of the conventional market.
To fully appreciate organic certification standards for chickens, it’s important to go back
to the beginning of the story — way back, in fact. Modern chicken breeds are descended from
wild jungle fowl first domesticated thousands of years ago in Southern Asia. While considerably
calmer than their ancestors — this happens to all of us living in captivity — contemporary
chickens retain the beak, claws and appetite for flesh of an avian predator. Chickens experience
no dilemma whatsoever in being omnivores and will consume insects, small mammals and
reptiles and occasionally each other to satisfy their nutritional demands. The irony behind all
those egg cartons – certified and conventional alike - stating that “chickens fed a vegetarian diet”
is that doing so violates the fundamental precept of organic agriculture, to adhere to Nature’s
model. Interestingly, with their dietary and sanitary requirements satisfactorily addressed, these
once mighty and proud loners of the jungle are comfortable living in exceedingly close quarters
– perhaps more commentary on our own evolution.
Where chickens were once raised as barnyard scavengers, the advent of industrialized
production required farmers to adopt a more systematic approach by supplementing the birds’
grain-based feed with animal protein. Never picky eaters, commercially raised chickens thrived
on supplements including meat and bone scraps, dairy whey, and fish and crab meal. More
recently, synthetic protein supplements have replaced animal-derived sources, thereby
completing mankind’s transformation of the wild jungle fowl from an omnivorous predator to a
captive vegetarian. In one of the more remarkable weak links in USDA organic certification,
there is a continuing allowance for one such supplement - synthetic methionine – which is the
first limiting amino acid for poultry and cannot be easily supplied in the absence of animal
protein in the diet.
For more than a decade, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) – the sanctioned
guardian of organic integrity– has tried and failed to find an acceptable natural alternative to
synthetic methionine. At the insistence of public comment on its draft regulations, the USDA
organic standards prohibit feeding any poultry or mammalian by-products to livestock, so that
option remains legally foreclosed. The NOSB has capped the limit of synthetic methionine and
explored the feasibility of novel replacements from special breeds of high methionine corn to
microbial brews to worms, which the birds relish but impart an off-taste to the eggs and meat.
The second most challenging and ultimately compromising component of the organic
poultry standards has been the requirements for appropriate housing conditions, specifically the
space allocated per bird and the condition in which that space is maintained. Just as the “access
to pasture” provision for ruminants was once manipulated to sanction organic mega-dairies, the
even more ambiguous “access to the outdoors” (containing no vegetative cover or feed
component) 2002 USDA standard for poultry led to virtually continuous confinement in houses
containing upwards of certified 80,000 birds. The USDA improved this standard slightly in 2010
by requiring outdoor chicken yards to have grass cover and the NOSB has gone further by
recommending that poultry flocks must be conditioned to venture outdoors from an early age
(talk about herding cats!). However, the NOSB recommendation is not enforceable until USDA
issues corresponding regulations, and the Department has shown no interest in modifying the
status quo as it did when upgrading the pasture standard. Bearing in mind that existing layer and
broiler standards also permit starting flocks with conventionally raised chicks and removing a
portion of the bird’s beak to suppress aggressive behavior, does organic poultry seem a little too
close to conventional production for comfort?
Beyond the intricacies of the production standards themselves, the story of organic
poultry certification also includes one of the more fascinating sagas in the relationship between
the organic community, the agribusiness establishment and the federal government. The organic
community fought hard to include a requirement in the USDA standards implemented in 2002
that all agricultural ingredients in livestock feed must be organically produced. This left room
for non-agricultural ingredients from natural (salt licks) or synthetic (methionine) sources, but set
the highest bar in the world for the pasture, forages and grains comprising the core of the
livestock diet. This requirement was specifically intended to protect the integrity of the organic
dairy market where the leading brands had already committed themselves to such a standard, but
it also applied to the nascent world of certified poultry, which was much more the Wild West in
terms of who played the game and the rules they followed.
One such player was Fieldale Farms of Baldwin, GA which was among the largest
conventional broiler producers in the United States and had developed a modest market in
organic chicken breasts during the final days of private certification standards. Fieldale had
capitalized on the flexibility of the private standards system by feeding its broilers conventional
feed grains, thereby significantly cutting its costs and price point on the shelf. Fieldale diligently
opposed including the comprehensive requirement for organic agricultural feed ingredients in the
federal standards (I was the USDA staffer they plead their case to) and claimed that short
supplies and exorbitant prices would preclude them from ever complying with it. I explained to
the Fieldale representatives that, with the organic community having crossed this bridge and the
USDA on board with the resulting consensus, there would be no alternative to compliance.
This anecdote illustrates why my career in Washington never progressed very far, as
Fieldale and their home U.S. Representative Nathan Deal had no trouble identifying and
implementing an alternative which never occurred to me. Representative Deal attached a rider to
the 2003 Omnibus Appropriations Bill waiving the comprehensive organic feed requirement
unless USDA produced a report documenting that sufficient organic supply existed to sustain
current levels of production at no more than twice the price of the conventional alternatives. The
structure of the rider allowed certified producers including Fieldale to switch to conventional
feed until and unless that report appeared. In the dark throughout the process, the organic
community awoke to realize its worst fear when accepting federal oversight of organic
certification: the corporate sharks and their political enablers weren’t playing nice.
In a surprise happy ending, a united and vociferous organic community marshaled a
massive public response that led both houses of Congress to overturn the rider within months.
The organic community won the argument both on the merits of the case – the organic feed
requirement was emblematic of the high but attainable standards everyone wanted in the federal
program and the process – no politician wants to stand up publicly for what they will do behind
closed doors. When asked by the press how the Deal rider found its way into the Appropriations
bill, the spokesman for House Speaker Hastert implied that it remained a mystery! Fieldale Farm
went on to replace its organic line with products marketed as all-vegetarian-feed, no-antibiotic
and certified humane treatment. Nathan Deal went on to be elected Governor of Georgia in 2010.
In one sense, the Fieldale Farm episode confirmed the political maturation of the organic
movement much as its similarly successful response to the USDA’s first proposed organic
standards had announced its arrival. The organic community proved that it could flex its muscle
in Washington, but in overturning the rider, had it achieved anything more than restoring the
status quo standard? Would the organic community prove capable of actually advancing its
interests by accessing the power and resources on Capitol Hill and USDA headquarters to which
its surging growth and popularity entitled it? In next week’s concluding installment of this series,
we will examine the performance, progress and ultimate prospects for organic farming in the
future of American agriculture.
“What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been!”
I couldn’t resist this title for the concluding chapter in our history of organic agriculture.
This lyric from the rambunctious odyssey of the Grateful Dead also conveys the myriad twists
and turns that have carried organic agriculture from the countercultural fringe to the White
House garden and shelves of Walmart. Informed institutions including the United Nation’s Food
and Agriculture Organization and agricultural universities around the world now give organic
agriculture serious consideration as a potential solution to crises including global warming, food
insecurity and the obesity epidemic and the disappearance of the family farm. Yet, as we have
discussed throughout this series (http://cookingupastory.com/organic-agriculture-its-origins-andevolution-over-time), the concept of organic agriculture remains remarkably vague and elastic,
with the USDA’s decade old certification program doing as much to cloud as clarify its meaning.
What is the innate meaning of organic agriculture, what makes it different from other
production systems and what promise, if any, does it offer a planet reeling from human-induced
environmental cataclysm? Let’s start by revisiting where, when and how the practices and
principles of organic agriculture first emerged. We must thank countless generations of Asian
and Indian farmers for developing organic agriculture as they improvised agricultural systems in
which every available nutrient resource and most especially animal (including human) manure
was returned to the soil. This exacting commitment replicates the natural order of an ecological
system in which matter is neither wasted nor lost but instead efficiently recycles through
communities and generations of interdependent organisms. Organic agriculture nurtures
microbiological life in soils, life which passes through plants, livestock and people after which
their physical remains are returned to the soil. One can recognize the alignment between these
practices and the cycle of birth, life, death and re-birth which infuses Eastern spirituality.
For all its intellectual and technological achievements, Western civilization has never
approached the enduring productivity achieved through the simple organic practices of the
farmers in Asia and India. Making manure the primary source of agricultural fertility certainly
became common practice in the West, but it was never as scrupulously managed as in the East,
and it was sooner abandoned. Quite to the contrary, Western farmers have characteristically
burned through their physical capital at an alarming rate instead of living off the interest as their
Eastern counterparts were proving possible. This tendency has been most pronounced in the
United States where new land on the frontier and subsequently new fertilizers derived from fossil
fuels have long favored the exploitation of agricultural productivity over its conservation. The
Dead Zone choking out life in the Mississippi Gulf today is really nothing more than an
underwater Dust Bowl.
“Once in a While You Can Get Shown the Light
In the Strangest of Places If You Look at it Right”
Another Grateful Dead insight is ideal for paying tribute to the academic pioneers who
recognized the potential for Eastern agriculture to redress the deficiencies inherent in Western
practices. The first was F.H. King, a noted American agronomist who sojourned to China, Japan
and Korea in1909 and produced a book whose title perfectly conveys organic agriculture’s
unique capacity: Farmers of Forty Centuries. King was soon followed by Great Britain’s Sir
Albert and Gabrielle Howard who dedicated twenty-five years of their joint careers in India to
optimizing agricultural fertility through the proper combination, curing and application of crop
and livestock materials – what we call compost. Accomplished elites in their homelands, these
three visionaries nevertheless recognized the inherent shortcomings of Western agriculture and
saw that what their peers dismissed as the primitive toil of Chinese and Indian peasants were
actually the necessary corrective measures. Sir Albert succinctly characterized this alternative in
his work An Agricultural Testament from 1940:
The main characteristic of Nature’s farming can therefore be summed up in a few
words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops;
great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal
wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of
decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the
greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves
against disease.
I retain special fondness for Sir Albert, who in dedicating An Agricultural Testament to
his deceased Gabrielle found in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet an evocative expression of
organic agriculture’s essence:
The Earth, That’s Nature’s Mother, is Her Tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb
How does Howard’s definition of organic agriculture from An Agricultural Testament
mesh with the most visible contemporary iteration of that concept, namely the USDA organic
certification program? It’s fair to say that the two share a family tree, but as distant cousins, and
sometimes very distant, indeed. In a construct first articulated by Sir Albert, organic agriculture
means producing food in accordance with the fundamental paradigm of healthy soil, healthy
plants, healthy livestock and healthy humans. As described in earlier chapters of this series,
organic certification is a federally operated process verification program based on production
standards that can only loosely approximate the conditions and practices embodied in organic
agriculture. Organic certification standards cover the essential elements of an integrated
production system for both plants (soil, seed stock, fertility, crop rotation and pest management)
and animals (origin of livestock, feed, health care and living conditions). They also categorize
whether material inputs are allowed or prohibited by applying criteria that reflect the enduring
contribution of the brilliant Rachel to the organic movement which was just hatching at the time
of her passing.
While organic certification can be an insightful guide pointing towards organic
agriculture’s full promise, we should also recognize its limitations. Organic standards, especially
managed through the USDA’s centralized regulatory model, are too static and limiting to capture
the site-specific and time-sensitive realities of raising and handling food. Especially with regard
to processed foods, the certification process overlooks the basic boundaries of time, energy and
space that define organic agriculture. Organic certification can affirm certain attributes in food,
including natural soil fertility and safer pest management practices, and small scale, locally
produced certified foods are highly compatible with organic principles. Beyond those benefits,
caution should be applied before substituting certification for the more engaged and informed
approach to procuring food in which we must invest – literally and figuratively – to achieve an
organic food system.
One emerging benefit of the harmonization of organic certification under the USDA has
been that, with an officially sanctioned standard, land grant universities and other agricultural
institutions are increasingly researching organic practices and systems. The land grants and their
county-based service providers, the cooperative extension service, were among the earliest and
harshest critics of the organic movement, yet almost all these universities now conduct some
dedicated organic research. Leaders in organic agricultural research are just beginning to apply
sophisticated analytical techniques to its fundamental elements such as the synergistic benefits of
dynamic soil microbiology, the interactions between soils, plants and livestock living
communally and using traditional plant breeding practices – not genetic engineering – to develop
new plant varieties and livestock breeds adapted to local production conditions.
No history of organic agriculture would be complete without addressing the most
frequently asked question about the subject: Are organic foods healthier for people? I’ll return to
the conclusions of Sir Albert Howard who consistently cited the improvement of public health as
his primary objective in studying organic agriculture. He perceived good health as the birthright
of all living creatures and concluded that disease was inevitably connected to disruptions of the
natural order, most frequently in the form of improper nutrition. Howard stated clearly and
repeatedly that consuming an organic diet would impart human health and fitness in the same
manner that crops raised on properly fertilized soils repel pests of all kinds.
Concern that an industrialized food supply would be nutritionally inadequate to promote
human health drove the organic movement from its inception. For example, Howard’s colleague
Lady Eve Balfour wrote after her coast-to-coast trip across the United States in 1953, “The
overall health picture of America is bad. . . . Food is even more over-processed and sterilized
than in England; much of the soil on which it is grown is more depleted; and there is an even
wider use of poison sprays.” Imagine her reaction to the factory farms and rest stop food courts
along a similar expedition today!
Howard attributed the nutritional superiority of organic food to the abundance of
mycorrhizal fungi found in biologically active soils sustained by compost, crop rotations and
cover crops. These fungi penetrate the fine root hairs of neighboring plants in a mutually
beneficial relationship that facilitates nutrient uptake in both. Howard surmised that soluble,
protein-rich compounds in the fungi were also absorbed by the plant and then incorporated
directly into growing tissue. He saw these compounds as the building blocks for optimal amino
acids and more sophisticated proteins that imbued organically raised plants with exceptional
physical characteristics including resistance to disease. Howard also thought that these characteristics were transmitted through subsequent relationships in the food web, such as livestock
grazing on healthy pasture and humans consuming food from organically raised crops and
animals. Conversely, Howard postulated that a microbiologically weak soil would yield deficient
amino acids and proteins that would invite disease in the plants, livestock and people that
subsequently consume them.
So what if organic agriculture has an ancient pedigree, preserves productivity and the
environment over thousands of years and produces the most nutritious food - what use are
basically subsistence farming practices on a hot and crowded planet? As the realistic yet ever
optimistic Will Rodgers noted, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” It is daunting
to grasp or convey just how enormous a hole the human race is digging on this beautiful planet
we inhabit. Where our food comes from and how it is produced will be the defining issue of the
human condition in the twenty-first century. We desperately need an agricultural future that runs
on solar power (beginning with pasture!), decentralizes production, damn near eliminates
processing with synthetic substances and rewards farmers for being the true stewards of public
health and the environment. Organic agriculture embodies all of these principles and its current
achievements and future promise is unfolding brilliantly on thousands of farms all across the
world – please seek them out and support them as your means and abilities allow!