Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Beyond Organic: What’s Really At Stake
by Fred Kirschenmann
http://ofrf.org/publications/ib/ib15_beyondorganic.pdf

Fred Kirschenmann is a longtime leader in national and international
sustainable agriculture. He currently serves as Distinguished Fellow for
the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in
addition to overseeing management of his family’s 3,500 acre certified
organic farm in south central North Dakota and holding an appointment in
the ISU Department of Religion and Philosophy. Fred offered the opening
keynote at the Organic Summit in Boulder, Colorado on June 21, 2007, an
event co-sponsored by OFRF and New Hope Natural Media. This article is an
edited and abridged version of his remarks, which are available in audio on
OFRF’s website, ofrf.org.

It was such a pleasure yesterday here at the Organic
Summit to shake hands and get hugs and to see some of
you with whom I’ve worked with for 25 or 30 years now.
I got to thinking about all of you, and I thought…this is
a time to speak from the heart.

I will do my best to share what is on my heart in terms of
the challenges we face as an organic community, and for me as
a farmer of 60 years now. The flip side of challenges are always
opportunities—you can’t be a farmer and not see things that
way. I think over the next two decades we’re going to see more
in the way of challenges and opportunities than we’ve seen over
the last two decades.

As you all know, we have some tensions within the organ-
ic community. It’s important to honor this tension, which I
tried to do in choosing the title for my talk. I don’t know who
first came up with the phrase, “beyond organic,” but in my
awareness it was Michael Ableman, in the essays he wrote some
time ago about his passion growing up in the organic commu-
nity, and recognizing some things that were happening that he
didn’t feel were appropriate to our future—it was then that he
began to write about “beyond organic.” Wherever the term
came from, it refers to this tension between those who want to
maintain the original principles of organic agriculture, and
those who feel the need to move the organic community into
the industry and into the mainstream. It’s created a tension
that we still have with us and that we know we want to resolve.
To understand this tension, it’s important to understand a
little bit of history. A recent book by Philip Conford, The
Origins of the Organic Movement, points out the difference
between organic practices and the organic movement. While
organic practices have been around probably 10,000 years since
agriculture began, the organic movement didn’t start until the
early 1900s. It started as a reaction against the industrialization
of agriculture, when we began to use energy-derived, external
inputs as a substitute for soil fertility and for managing
healthy soils, and pesticide inputs as a substitute for manag-
ing good predator-prey relationships. There were intelligent
people at the time who looked at the industrialization of
farming and recognized that this is not the way to have a reli-
able, long-term food system. Sir Albert Howard was one of
those people. He referred to the fact that we have to maintain
soil fertility by maintaining its health because it is critical to
the survival of human civilization. In addition, there were
Lady Eve Balfour, J.I. Rodale, Rudolf Steiner, and in Japan
there was Mokichi Okada. They all had essentially the same
message—that industrialization was the wrong direction, that
we had to maintain these fundamental principles of how
nature renewed and restored itself, and we had to be partners
in that—that’s what organic is all about.

It’s important for us to recognize that value and that pas-
sion which is a part of our history.

As food started to be produced in this organic way, out of
this passion, there were consumers who started to say, “I want
to eat that food.” They didn’t all want to eat it for the same
reasons—some felt it had superior nutritional qualities, some
thought it had health benefits. Whether they were right or
wrong about that, that’s not important. Some simply wanted
to support the farmers who were farming this way. So the
question was, how can people identify this food in the market-
place? That brought about the emergence of the International
Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), creat-
ed in the early 1970s, and hundreds of organic certification pro-
grams which have been developed since then. In the 1990s the
Organic Foods Production Act brought the USDA into the sys-
tem to help consumers identify food that is produced this way.
As consumers continued to want this food, it created an
opportunity for industry to step in, and then came the organic
industry. The organic industry quite rationally had a very dif-
ferent set of priorities from the organic movement. As any
industry, it was interested in bringing organic food into the
marketplace in an efficient and a reliable way to meet the
needs of consumers. While the organic movement was philo-
sophically driven—about how we farm and how we relate to
nature—the organic industry was sales driven, quite naturally.
It was predictable and perhaps inevitable that tension
between these two aspects of organic reality emerged. That’s
where we are now. Back in 2002, recognizing this tension,
IFOAM, in their international conference, selected as their
topic, “The Organic Community.” IFOAM was suggesting the
need to move to the point where the organic movement and
the organic industry can become an organic community, so
that we can share these aspects of our values. I don’t know any
farmer who isn’t interested in the industry being successful at
improving sales and making organic products available in a
reliable and efficient way. And I haven’t met anybody in the
organic industry that isn’t interested in seeing those original
organic principles retained. Sometimes we interpret things dif-
ferently and have disagreements, and that is part of the con-
versation that I think the organizers of the Organic Summit
want to start.

While this issue is important to resolve, it pales in com-
parison to other challenges we face as we move into the
next couple of decades. One challenge has to do with what’s
happening in the marketplace. It is no longer adequate for us
as an organic community to rely on the organic label as our
distinction within the market. Because the organic label sim-
ply says to the consumer that the food was produced in a par-
ticular way, and while that’s of interest and it has certainly
enhanced our market, I would argue that our success has
much more to do with what the food industry is not doing,
than with what we are doing.

A good example is the melamine incident, when it hit the
streets and people’s pets were dying. My good friend David
Vetter, an organic farmer near Marquette, Nebraska, has an
organic processing and manufacturing company called The
Grain Place. One thing they produce is organic pet food.
Suddenly his sales doubled overnight because of melamine in
the food system. One reason people seek organic food is not
because of what we’re offering them, but because of what the
rest of the food system is screwing up.

We in the organic industry are not
paying sufficient attention to what the
market is telling us.

The market is telling us a num-
ber of things that are really quite specific. Let me quote, as one
way of expressing this, from Barbara Kingsolver’s new book,
Animal Vegetable, Miracle. It’s about her own family and their
decision to produce all their food from their own little farm in
Virginia, and the struggles her family had with that. In the
middle of the book she talks about organic:

…the paper trail of organic standards offers only limited
guarantees to the consumer. Specifically, it certifies that veg-
etables were grown without genetic engineering or broadly
toxic chemical herbicides or pesticides; animals were not given
growth-promoting hormones or antibiotics. “Certified organ-
ic” does not necessarily mean sustainably grown, worker-
friendly, fuel-efficient, cruelty-free, or any other virtue a con-
sumer might wish for.

The rising consumer interest in organic food has inspired
most of the country’s giant food conglomerates to cash in, at
some level. These big players have successfully moved the likes
of bagged salads and hormone-free milk from boutique to
mainstream markets and even big box stores. But low price
has its costs. In order to meet federal organic standards as
cheaply as possible and maximize profits, some industrial-scale
organic producers (though not all) cut every corner that's
allowed, and are lobbying the government to loosen organic
rules further. Some synthetic additives are now permitted,
thanks to pressure from industrial organics. So is animal con-
finement. A chicken may be sold as “free range” if the house in
which it’s confined (with 20,000 others) has a doorway lead-
ing out to a tiny yard, even though that doorway remains shut
for so much of the chickens’ lives, they never learn to go out-
side. This is not a theoretical example.*

I wanted to share this with you because this is one of our
friends telling us, “Look, something is happening in the mar-
ketplace, something that consumers want, that organic is not
providing.” That’s what we need to pay attention to.
There are other hints about how this is happening. You’re
all acquainted with these. The cover of Time magazine last
March, said, “Forget Organic, Eat
Local.” When Time Magazine spends
six pages on an article telling you you
about that issue, we’ve got to pay
attention. The New York Times
Magazine, on March 30, had an arti-
cle, “Fighting the Tide, a Few
Restaurants Tilt to Tap Water.” It’s a
story about restaurants that are giving
up bottled water because their cus-
tomers recognize that bottled water is
an environmental disaster. On the
same day, The New York Times pub-
lished another article that headlined,
“Is Wal-Mart Too Cheap for Its Own Good.” It’s about the
fact that while price is extremely important in the market-
place, increasingly consumers are saying that’s really not what
they’re after. They want certain quality characteristics that are
more important than price.

What other things does the market want? The Hartman
Group has done a remarkable job helping us put a finger on
the pulse of the market. A recent Hartman report stated: 62%
of the consuming public now wants to buy food that is consistent
with their values. I read that and it struck me…Sixty-two per-
cent of the public is buying food as a values exercise. The fact
that people are now buying food based on values means we
have an enormous market opportunity to respond to those val-
ues needs. And for many of them it has to do with authentici-
ty. That means you can’t just hype these values, they really
have to be there, in the way in which the food is produced
and brought into the marketplace.

About three years ago, I attended a speech given by Rick
Schnieders, who is the Chairman and CEO of Sysco
Corporation, the largest food distribution company in North
America. He said that the cutting edge today in the food serv-
ice business is all about memory, romance and trust. What he
meant was that you want a food product out there that is so
good that when your customer eats it they say, “Wow, where
did that come from, I want that again.” They build a memory
connection to that food.

Secondly, he said, consumers not only want good food,
they also want to feel good about buying it and consuming it.
The story that comes with that food is the romance part.
People now want to know where their food comes from—they
would prefer to know the actual farm family that produced
that food, they want to know there was good environmental
stewardship, they want to know the animals were treated
appropriately.

Finally, he said, consumers who want good food with
that good food story also do not want to be passive recipients,
they want some kind of active engagement and involvement in
the food chain and they’d prefer to have that as a trusting rela-
tionship that goes all the way from their table to the farmer.

Those companies, he said, that
achieve that three-fold purpose, and
bring food into the marketplace with
those characteristics—memory,
romance and trust—will be the most
successful in today’s cutting edge mar-
ketplace.

Everything I’ve seen since con-
firms exactly what Schnieders said. A
survey by the University of Nebraska,
looking at eight mid-western states
asked the question, “When you go to
buy food, what is extremely important or very important in
your food choice?” At the top of the list was taste, followed, in
order, by health, nutrition and price. Price is very important,
but not the most important. Everything below price that con-
sumers chose had to do with the food story—they preferred to
buy it from a family farmer and preferred to buy local—all of
those food story attributes.

Then a year or so ago I read a book by a business design
specialist named John Thackara, who works with CEOs of
major multinational corporations. He wrote this wonderful
book called, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.
Thackara points out that the industrial economy is essentially
over—it’s too exploitive, it’s too heavy on the planet and it
cannot exist much farther into the future. He does a fascinat-
ing job of envisioning what our future food and agriculture
system, and health care and educational systems will look like.
Essentially he says that we will use technology to work togeth-
er within communities to accomplish what we need. That’s the
future he envisions because of changes we’re going to see in the
way our planet functions. Then he says this interesting thing—
at bottom, the future is going to be all about relationship
value. This takes us right back to what Schnieders said about
where we are in the growing edge of the market. And that’s
what the market is telling us—that we are moving into a mar-
keting phase that enables people to be a participant in the food
chain and the future will be about relationship marketing.

Beyond what’s happening in the marketplace, the more seri-
ous challenge is one that’s going to start hitting us within
the next 20 years if not within the next five to ten—and that is
what’s happening in nature. First, our storehouse of concen-
trated energy is rapidly being depleted. That storehouse is in
old growth forests, coal, oil and natural gas, all of which
evolved over the last 3.6 billion years, and we have mined in
the space of about two centuries. And then it’s going to
be…gone! The big issue right now is not running out of oil,
because we are just now at the peak of global oil production.

What happens after we hit peak global oil production is that
the amount of oil available starts to drop off quickly. As we
start going down that other side of that peak— particularly as
we’re doing even more industry that is based on oil—it’s going
to deplete very rapidly. We’re going to start seeing oil prices
and natural gas prices escalate very, very rapidly.
So, what I’ve been asking myself on my own farm in
North Dakota—and I would ask the same thing of you in
your farms and businesses—is this: Will your farm or business
be operational when oil hits $250 a barrel? And at the same
time when you have half the amount of water available and
twice the severe weather events? Because as we see these energy
changes take place, we also won’t be able to use as much water
as we’ve used in the past. Our current food system consumes
2,000 liters of water to supply each of us with the food that
we eat each day. We can’t continue to use this amount of
water. The Ogalalla aquifer has been drained by half just since
1960; farmers on the edge of the aquifer already have had to
give up irrigation. Add to this what’s going on in China: 80
percent of their grain production is dependent on irrigation
and they are drawing their groundwater down at the rate of 10
feet per year, in some places pumping from 1,000 feet deep. In
India, 60 percent of grain production is dependent on irriga-
tion, and they’re drawing down their groundwater at the rate
of 20 feet a year, in some places pumping from 3,000 feet
deep. You don’t have to be a farmer or a geologist to know that
this is not sustainable into the future.

The other challenge that’s happening in nature is climate.
I don’t particularly care whether people are still in denial about
climate change—because they don’t think that greenhouse
gases are that big a deal or for whatever reason. The fact is that
the climate we have had over the last 100 years has been
unusually stable in terms of the history of this planet. In 1975
we already knew this. A National Academy of Sciences panel
on climate change studied it thoroughly, and what they said
was that the climate that we’ve had in the last century is
abnormal. This very stable climate is
not the normal situation on our plan-
et. This is important because our
industrial food system, which has been
so successful, has been dependent on
that stable climate as much if not
more than on green revolution tech-
nologies.

So even if you discount green-
house gases, you cannot expect the
future climate to be the same as the
past climate. When you add green-
house gases to that, we’re looking at a
situation where we could be in deep,
deep trouble. As NASA climate scien-
tist Jim Hansen has reminded us, if we continue to do busi-
ness as usual for another 10 years—he said this a year ago so
we’ve got nine years left—we are likely to experience a mass
extinction comparable to our planet’s six previous mass
extinctions, where virtually 90 percent of the species got
wiped out. This is not a situation that we can readily come
back from if we cross the threshold of 500 ppm greenhouse
gases, and we’re at 380 ppm now. This is changing our planet
fundamentally, and that’s going to make it very difficult and
uncomfortable for us. It’s going to be very difficult for us to
survive.

What about all of this hype about alternative energy that
we’re hearing now? It’s not going to solve the problem.
Because with concentrated stored energy, we’re getting 100
kilocalories of energy out for every one kilocalorie of energy
in. That’s the efficiency ratio that we’ve gotten used to and
that is what our industrial economy is built on. With all of
the alternative energy forms we’re talking about, whether it’s
wind or hydroelectric dams or nuclear or biofuels, the effi-
ciency ratios are much, much lower. Corn-based ethanol—
which we are saying is going to wean us from Mideast oil—
provides 1.3 kilocalories of energy out for each kilocalorie of
energy in. Where do you think that kilocalorie of energy
comes from? It comes from the Middle East. Wind power,
one of the more efficient alternatives, provides about 15 kilo-
calories out for each kilocalorie in. But you still have to mine
the ore, turn it in to steel, manufacture the towers and the
turbines, and erect them and maintain them and build the
infrastructure. Where is the energy coming from for all of
that? It’s petroleum. It’s all based on a petroleum platform.
So the question we need to ask ourselves, particularly in
farming and in agriculture, is this—let’s use corn-based
ethanol as the example—if you could only use corn-based
ethanol as the sole source of energy to produce that ethanol,
would you do it? That’s what we’ve got to come to terms
with. How much energy does it take to produce that alterna-
tive energy? This doesn’t mean that we
shouldn’t do alternative energy—we’re
going to need it. But any of us who
believe that it’s going to allow us to
continue to do business as usual, that
all we’ve got to do is switch from oil to
ethanol or from oil to wind or from
oil to solar, then you’re living in a fan-
tasy world. We have in fact been living
in a kind of fantasy world for the last
200 years, because we have had this
concentrated, stored energy that we’ve
been able to mine. But that’s not the
world we’re going to live in.

Why is all of that important in terms of how we position
ourselves within the organic movement? The reason I
think it is so important is because we have buried, in those
works of Sir Albert Howard, Eve Balfour, J.I. Rodale, Rudolf
Steiner and Mokichi Okada, principles that we need to pull
into the future and marry them with the best science we have
available now, to create a fundamentally new food system, a
fundamentally new production system, based on those agroe-
cological principles that were identified by these stellar individ-
uals. That’s the wave of the future.

Because the only thing that I can see that’s going to
enable us to produce the amount and the kind of good food
we want and need is going to be through biological synergy—I
had the opportunity yesterday to visit the botanical gardens
down in Denver, which is a wonderful place. One of the
exhibits that caught my eye was about ants and plants, and
their synergy, where the ants provide everything that the plants
need and the plants provide everything that the ants need.
That’s the model.

Fortunately, we have farmers out there, who, on their
own, have begun to develop those kinds of models in their
farming practices. We have Takao Furuno in Japan who has a
duck/rice/fish system that uses no energy inputs whatsoever,
and is more productive than any industrial monoculture I’ve
ever seen. We have Joel Salatin in this country, who has not
just an intensive rotational grazing system which already
reduces energy inputs but also has a series of different species
of animals, each of which contributes something to the health
of the whole. Very little outside energy is needed, because the
animals provide all the energy that’s required. It is the kind of
energy exchange that takes place in nature. These are the sys-
tems we ought to be looking at. Francis Thicke in Iowa is
doing this in his dairy operation. So we have these models.
What we need to do now is to put at least 30% of our public
research dollars in agriculture into exploring these models, see-
ing how we can extend them, and what else we can learn from
the sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology, which agri-
culture has until now paid almost no attention to.
Let me close with this: 1859 was a very interesting year in
our history. It was the year that the first producing oil well was
created in Titusville, Pennsylvania and it was also the year that
Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species. The oil
was so seductive that this was the path we went on—we essen-
tially ignored Darwin. If we had reversed that, and taken
Darwin seriously in terms of how we produce our food and
how we make food available, we’d have a very different kind of
world now, one much better positioned for the future.
But we still have this little space of time, what Thomas
Berry calls “moments of grace,” because they provide us with
the opportunity to bring about the changes we need. That’s
the good news. The other part of the good news is what it will
do for us. If you want to read somebody who’s done a mar-
velous job helping us understand this—because I don’t want
any of you to feel like what I’ve said this morning means we’re
moving into a future of horrible deprivation—author Bill
McKibben has pointed out, after looking at all of the psycho-
logical and economic research, that our well-being has actually
gone down since the 1950s as our wealth has increased. Once
you get out of poverty there is no correlation between wealth
and well-being.

So, we have a wonderful opportunity to actually improve
our quality of life as we move into the future, moving out of
the industrial era into a new era based on agroecological sys-
tems. Cooperating with nature, using and adapting to nature’s
cycles, rather than trying to dominate and control them as we
currently do with our technology. We in the organic commu-
nity have a wonderful opportunity to take global leadership in
this new future, because this is our past. This is the message I
hope to leave with you. ?

*Excerpt from: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille
Kingsolver. Harper Collins Publishers, 2007.