Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

market-farming - [Market-farming] Article: "GREEN GIANTS"

market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Market Farming

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Pat Meadows <pat AT meadows.pair.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Article: "GREEN GIANTS"
  • Date: Tue, 02 May 2006 08:39:38 -0400



-----------------------

San Francisco Chronicle
GREEN GIANTS
Mega-producers tip scales as organic goes mainstream

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/30/MNGJGII7B21.DTL

San Francisco Chronicle
GREEN GIANTS: Mega-producers tip scales as organic goes
mainstream
By Carol Ness
Sunday, April 30, 2006

Thirteen-and-a-half million servings of organic romaine,
radicchio and baby greens. That's how much Earthbound Farm,
the biggest organic produce company in the country, sends
across America from its gigantic San Juan Bautista
processing plant every single week.

That's one big bowl of salad -- way bigger than when Myra
and Drew Goodman started Earthbound Farm in their Carmel
Valley living room in 1984. They now farm 26,000 organic
acres. This is the yin of the organic food movement as it
plunges headlong into the American mainstream.

The yang is County Line Harvest farmer David Retsky,
steering an orange tractor to sow organic Palla Rosa
radicchio, Easter Egg radishes and Cosmic Purple carrots on
the 6 hilly acres he farms outside Petaluma. Retsky and his
small crew handpick whatever is ready, and sell it the next
day to a few farmers' markets and restaurants, plus a
specialty wholesaler, in Oakland and San Francisco.

Both farms are certified organic. But they couldn't be more
different in scale, in how far their produce travels, in how
much fuel is burned to produce and deliver it, in how fresh
it is when it gets to market, and in how much it costs.

Consumers who think they're buying from a small local farm
may actually be buying from a company moving up to
half-a-million pounds of lettuce a day. Their organic milk
might come from cows grazing on lush spring grass near
Bodega Bay -- or it might come from a barren 5,000-cow
feedlot dairy in Colorado.

Organic convenience foods and snacks might be manufactured
by Northern California companies from local ingredients.
But, increasingly, they're being made from ingredients
bought cheaply from as far away as South America or China.

"I think organic is not quite what people think at this
point," said Michael Pollan, a UC Berkeley journalism
professor whose new book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," takes a
hard -- and ultimately critical -- look at what he calls
"industrial organic."

Whether it's salad -- or milk, or eggs, or cookies -- these
kinds of differences come into play up and down the organic
food chain. And with stores like Safeway and now Wal-Mart
packing their shelves with organic products, which style
consumers buy -- the yin or the yang -- may determine what
organic will look like in the future.

The differences don't mean the food isn't organic. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture's green organic seal means that
it's certified -- that it was grown without chemical
fertilizers or pesticides and processed without forbidden
chemicals.

However, critics of large-scale organics say that while
mega-producers follow the letter of the law, not all follow
its spirit. They worry that the movement is sacrificing its
soul, that it's strayed from its original ideals of creating
a new food system that helps small farms, connects consumers
with producers, and cleans up the environment.

Still, the fact that there's simply more organic food around
is a good thing, according to people like organic pioneer
Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming
Research Foundation in Santa Cruz.

"It's something our own movement hasn't been able to do for
30 years -- bring organic to all economic levels," said
Scowcroft, who has been there from the beginning, advocates
for small farms, and is an activist in keeping the organic
food industry at a high standard.

What's brought things to this point is the spectacular
growth of organic food, especially in the past two years.
Sales are expected to hit an estimated $15 billion this
year, according to the Organic Trade Association, an
industry group. That's still only about 2 percent of the
U.S. food supply. But yearly increases of 20 percent or
so, plus the higher prices organic can command, have proved
a siren song to big business.

The biggest food manufacturers have scarfed up some of the
best-known organic brands and started their own line
extensions. Coca-Cola owns Odwalla. General Mills boasts
Muir Glen and Cascadian Farm. Smuckers bought out Knudsen
and Santa Cruz Organic.

Whole Foods is up to 175 stores, and more conventional
supermarkets are getting into the act, too. Safeway has just
come out with its O Organics line of cereals, salad
dressings and other staples priced barely above its
nonorganics.

Independent companies such as Santa Rosa-based Amy's, which
makes soups and frozen meals, are mushrooming, too. At
Amy's, sales have risen about 30 percent a year for the past
two years, and the company plans to open a second plant in
Medford, Ore., in September.

All of this means more organic foods in more markets and
lower prices. "It feels like the tipping point -- like
organic's time has really come," said Earthbound's Myra
Goodman.

Every day at Earthbound Farm's big, white, refrigerated
plant, semis pull in with tons of romaine and radicchio,
mache and arugula, some from as far away as Mexico. Another
set of semis, 200 to 250 a day, pull away carrying mountains
of plastic-bagged greens to stores from San Francisco to New
York.

And the numbers are going up. Earthbound just bought Pride
of San Juan, its competitor down the road in San Juan
Bautista (San Benito County), which grows and processes
mainly conventional salad greens for food service companies.
That will raise Earthbound's weekly output to 40 million
servings of salad a week, both organic and not.

To help offset the environmental effects of all those trucks
coming and going, the company has planted 400,000 trees to
consume all the extra carbon monoxide. And they track how
many tons of chemical fertilizers (4,200) and pesticides
(135) their operation keeps out of the environment every
year.

"We're feeling good about what we do," Goodman said. "We're
competing with Dole, Fresh Express and Sunkist, not farmers'
markets. Our mission is to give people an organic
alternative -- and working to bring it to people where they
shop meant we had to get big."

Retsky, at County Line Harvest, doesn't think he's competing
with Earthbound. But he's not sure consumers know the
difference between what he offers at farmers' markets and
what they find at Costco. He's made an effort, for example,
to grow a lot of crops, side by side -- Walla Walla onions,
gypsy peppers, and Genovese basil -- despite the fact that
his wholesaler buys only his chicories and baby head
lettuces. "We could make it easier on ourselves and just
grow what they want," he said. "But we wouldn't be as
diverse."

Organic milk is another area where differences in production
are profound. Milk produced by smaller Bay Area dairies like
Clover Stornetta Farms and Straus Family Creamery has only a
few things in common with milk from giant processors like
Horizon and supermarket store brands.

On Bob Camozzi's 615-acre Triple C Ranch in the lush Two
Rock Valley west of Petaluma, many of his 720 black and
white Holsteins and a few graceful Jerseys graze in pasture
as high as their bellies. On the other hand, Costco and
Safeway house brands, and Horizon, owned by giant Dean
Foods, which claims 55 percent of the U.S. organic milk
market, buy from many suppliers, including gigantic 3,000-
to 5,000-cow dairies in the Central Valley, Idaho or
Colorado, where the animals are crowded into feedlots and
may never see a blade of fresh grass.

Federal organic rules currently require only "access to
pasture," but not actual pasture time. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture is considering tightening that rule because
of complaints about confinement farms; a public hearing on
the issue was held this month in Pennsylvania.

Consumers care about how the animals are treated, according
to a new survey conducted this month by an independent firm
for the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group in San
Francisco and Washington, D.C. Half of the 1,100 people
surveyed said they would stop buying organic milk if they
knew it came from cows confined to fenced-in feedlots.

The fight over what is or should be organic has been going
on for decades, but the growth of big organics and arrival
of powerful players has upped the ante.

Safeway jumped in big-time this year with its O Organics
line -- 160 products so far with plans for another 50 by the
end of the year. They're identified by the pretty cornflower
blue O on the label, without the name Safeway anywhere in
sight.

On many items, prices are much lower than nonorganic
competitors'. A 15-ounce box of O Organics frosted flakes,
for example, is $2.99 at the Fourth and King store in San
Francisco, while Kellogg's 15-ounce box of nonorganic
frosted flakes is $5.19.

"There's a large part of the population that sees pricing as
a hurdle to organic products, and we wanted to make this
available to a larger consumer base," said Safeway vice
president Doug Palmer. "Because of Safeway's size, it allows
us to be more competitively priced."

Big food companies need to buy huge supplies of organic
ingredients as cheaply as possible -- which some observers
believe may mean going overseas. "If we want to support
organic agriculture in China, it's probably a good thing,"
said Jim Riddle, a Minnesota organic farmer who helped write
the federal organic rules and recently served on the
national board that oversees them.

Already, 10 percent of the organic food sold in the United
States comes from other countries, according to the Organic
Monitor in England. Yet, some companies go out of their way
to buy ingredients from local farmers. Amy's, which has been
making frozen meals and soups since 1988, is one.

"Buying locally has been a natural consequence of being in
the West. Organics grew up here," said owner Andy Berliner.
Amy's is now sucking up 150 truckloads of onions a year, up
from five or six in the mid-1990s, according to its farm
liaison, Tom Mello. It uses 20 different onion growers, big
and small.

"We feel the backbone of the industry is the small family
farm, and we feel indebted and responsible for keeping the
small farms alive," Mello said.

The center aisles of the supermarket, the domain of cereals,
soups, cookies and chips, is a hot spot of organic action.
And processed foods raise a new set of questions.

Nutrition is one. Organic means healthy to many people, but
Marion Nestle, a New York University nutrition authority who
just finished a guest stint at UC Berkeley, points out that
organic junk food is still junk food. "Just because these
products are organic does not necessarily mean that they are
the healthiest options," Nestle said.

Earthbound's Goodman, the mother of two teenagers, has a
different take. "If my kids are going to have a choice of a
conventional Oreo with trans fats or a Whole Foods or
Newman's organic Oreo without it -- I'm thrilled.
I don't have to worry about what's in it and how it's
produced," Goodman said.

Consumers are left trying to figure out which kind of
organic they want to support with their food dollars.

And that can be tough. Supermarkets don't like to say who
makes their store brands. Manufacturers have resisted
efforts to have labels say where ingredients come from. And
marketing creates illusions that everything organic comes
from the picture-perfect small farm.

Another wrinkle is that some organic certifiers interpret
the federal rules more loosely than others, causing
conflicts that end up in court or in Congress. Growing
corporate stakes have meant more big-money pressure on the
USDA and on Congress.

The complications have pushed some farmers, such as Rick and
Kristie Knoll of Knoll Farms in Brentwood, to head "beyond
organic," meaning they don't bother with certification but
deploy systems that go beyond what the rules require.

The notion of eating locally produced foods, too, is gaining
momentum as a fuel-saving, community-building alternative,
or addition, to organic.

The idea is building up steam. This month, more than 700
people answered a challenge from a Northern California group
called the Locavores to eat only foods grown within 100
miles of their home through May.

Ultimately, "What's important is knowing what you're
buying," said Russell Moore, a chef at Chez Panisse, where
organic/local/sustainable is the mantra. One of the best
things about the surge in organics, he said, is that it
makes people think about where and how their food is
produced.

"Everyone," he said, "has to make their own decisions. I
think wherever you are, you can do something that helps."

---------------------------
--
Gardening in northern Pennsylvania.

Eat local food, change the world for the better!




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page