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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Bill,

>My impression is that standards are much stricter than they used to be.  
>It's easy to find the evidence of that. 

Unless we are talking at cross purposes, it would be very hard to determine 
that.  Before the USDA definition there were scores of organizations 
certifying 
a farm as organic and each had their own set of definitions.  A few states 
also had definitions.

Now it is illegal for any state or organization to have any standards for 
'organic' that are in any way different from the USDA definition.   Since the 
USDA definition permits inorganic nitate salts, no state or organization can 
exclude that from the defintion of organic, for example.



>I couldn't find the post I wanted to quote.  You were saying that it 
>couldn't be any good unless there were dozens of compost bins.  I think 
>that direct manuring is probably one method they might use to circumvent 
>the composting process. 

To add an inch of finished compost to a growing bed, you need from 20" to 30" 
of  raw organic material.  I'm making these estimates from experience.  For 
example, I shovel out the grass and sod on the permiters of beds and in the 
paths and heap that up over beds as in situ compost piles.  It's dense 
materail 
with a good amount of soil, and yet a 36" pile will reduce to 10" by the end 
of 
summer and then to 4" or 5" by the next spring.  I take half of that off and 
put it on another bed and plant into the other half.

In some piles I don't have sod with a lot of soil.  Grass clippings, weeds, 
sawdust. manure,. garden waste, old hay, etc. in a 3' heap will reduce to 
just 
2" by the next spring.

So when I don't see compost piles on "organic" farms, and it is suggested 
that they direct compost or sheet compost, then at some point the entire farm 
is 
under a 3' layer of organic material.   Unlikely I'm thinking.

And at any rate, adding things bought from a catalog is foreign to the 
original idea of organic which has to do with building the soil, not 
fertilizing the 
plants.

James