Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

   "Organic code stipulates that farmers must use organically produced seeds 
and plants whenever they are "commercially available," meaning they can 
resort to non-organic ones otherwise"

Even Organic Strawberries Are Grown With Toxic Fumigants
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/09/organic-strawberries-not-always-grown-without-toxic-fumigants

Conventionally grown strawberries are hard orbs, bred to endure long-haul 
travel and leisurely stints on supermarket shelves, not to taste good.

Aesthetics aside, their real scandal is chemical. It takes a lot of 
pesticides to keep them healthy and growing in vast monocrops, including some 
of the very most toxic ones available in the US: fumigants that sterilize the 
soil and imperil farm workers.

For years, I've been urging consumers to denounce the use of such poisons by 
buying only organic strawberries. But it turns out, in California at least, 
most organic strawberries have a dirty secret: they come from plants that 
spend time on nurseries that use "millions of pounds of toxic chemicals," 
including methyl bromide, before being transplanted to organically managed 
fields, The New York Times reports.

To be clear, dramatically fewer toxic chemicals are used in the production of 
organic strawberries, because such poisons are banned in the fields where the 
fruit is actually grown. But to me and no doubt to many others, the fact that 
they're used at all is jarring news.

The Times points to a letter signed by three California organic farmers and 
the Pesticide Action Network urging the USDA's National Organic Program to 
clarify rules around organic seed and plant stock. Organic code stipulates 
that farmers must use organically produced seeds and plants whenever they are 
"commercially available," meaning they can resort to non-organic ones 
otherwise. Consumers have shown they want an alternative to fumigant-grown 
strawberries. It's time for the USDA to step up.

According to the Times, the state doesn't have a single organic berry 
industry—hence the the practice of relying on plants that grew on 
fumigant-using nurseries.

But here's the kicker: From 2005 to 2009, the Times reports, the state did 
have a commercial-scale organic nursery, run by farmer James Rickert of 
Prather Ranch, one of the letter's signees. But Rickert's plant-starting 
operation languished and went out of business because farmers were wary of 
paying a premium for organically grown plants that they feared they might 
carry disease, Rickert told the Times:

    "The reality is that a lot of the organic growers want nothing to do with 
organic plants" because it scares them, said Mr. Rickert, who has since gone 
back to herding organically fed cattle at his ranch in Butte Valley. Indeed, 
for many organic strawberry growers, using organic stock amounts to taking a 
big financial risk with little chance of reward.

But the problem evidently wasn't the quality of Rickert's products or some 
inherent difficulty in raising strawberry plants organically. Indeed, 
pioneering California organic strawberry grower Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry 
Farm (briefly profiled on Mother Jones here), who also signed the letter, 
used  Rickerts' plants extensively and found them "always of excellent 
quality," he told the Times.

The problem was that lax enforcement of the "commercially available" rule, 
combined with the risk-averse nature of most farmers, allowed most organic 
farmers to avoid trying Rickert's products. As the whistle-blowing farmers' 
letter to the USDA puts it, "Without clear enforcement we fail to create the 
marketplace for new technologies, especially alternatives to chemical 
fumigation."

If the USDA had enforced the rule in the first place, Rickert's business 
would likely have succeeded—and drawn more organic nurseries into the market. 
And Rickert himself told Pesticide Action Network that he would "jump-start" 
his nursery business as soon as the USDA shows it's serious about enforcement.