Market Farming

["Steve Sando" <steve AT mrlucky.com>]

October 14, 2002
Small Organic Farmers Pull Up Stakes
By SAMUEL FROMARTZ


WASHINGTON
A curious thing happened on the way to a national organic standard: the
small farmer, once at the heart of the organic movement, got left behind.

Talk to those who have farmed organically for years and you will find a
surprising number who have decided not to call their produce organic any
longer. The costs - administrative, monetary and philosophical - of using
the government-defined label are too great. Only farms certified under the
United States Department of Agriculture's regime can legally call their
produce organic after Oct. 21. (Farms with annual revenues under $5,000 can
forgo formal certification, though they are expected to follow the rules.)

At local farmers' markets around the country, you'll find many farmers who
say their vegetables are "grown without chemicals" or that their meat is
"free of antibiotics," but many won't use the "O" word. Others are wondering
if they will continue to.

Why are these organic farmers opting out?

The decision stems from the reasons they went into organic farming in the
first place. Rather than relying on chemicals, these farmers worked in
concert with nature and the environment. Rather than sell at depressed
prices to giant agribusinesses, they sold locally. Instead of relying on
crop hybrids capable of being shipped thousands of miles, they picked ripe
produce and sold it the next day.

Organic farmers certainly didn't win consumers over with price. Their
product was attractive because its quality was high and it was grown without
synthetic pesticides in an environmentally sustainable manner. It was better
for the planet and, by implication, for you. The organic ideal was rooted in
a Jeffersonian vision of the family farmer eking out a modest, independent
living from honest toil. The organic marketplace made that ideal viable
because there were consumers willing to pay a premium for the products these
small farms grew.

The success of this organic ideal over the past two decades, however, was
also its undoing. As consumers snapped up organic products, less idealistic
farmers got into the act. In a few well-publicized cases, conventional
produce (that is, grown with chemical pesticides and herbicides) was sold
under organic labels, causing a furor among producers and consumers and
prompting states like California to define organic practices.

By 1990, this regulatory approach was codified in the Organic Foods
Production Act. Now, the U.S.D.A. makes clear, organic is a method of
production, nothing more.

Once a label becomes firmly defined, it also becomes a barrier to entry and
thus politically charged. The initial list of organic practices, for
example, included the use of sewage sludge as fertilizer and allowed
genetically modified crops. Conventional farm interests wanted to be able to
continue these practices. Faced with public protests, regulators scratched
those items.

But even as the rules were refined, small organic farmers had trouble with
the fine print. One farmer told me that an organic certifying agent
inspecting his farm wanted to know the dates on which he had moved his
crates of zucchini into the cooler the previous year and when he had sold
them. "After farming for 12 hours a day, I am not going to spend two hours
doing paperwork," he said.

Considering that small farmers typically grow dozens of crops on small
plots, the paperwork burden could potentially exceed that of a large organic
farm growing one crop on hundreds of acres.

Farmers also chafed at rules that sought to standardize practices that vary
by farm or region. Composting guidelines, for example, proved unworkable for
some farmers; they required such frequent turnings of piles (to kill
potential pathogens) that some actually caught fire. These rules are
expected to be rewritten. But some farmers who had been organic for years,
composting safely without this specific regime, were offended at being told
to alter their methods, especially when they saw only higher costs as a
result.

If larger farmers, however, could work out the business model and the actual
practices, they could grow organic produce on a huge scale and ship it to
the distributors that feed supermarket chains. In an industry where
low-single-digit growth was the norm, the organic segment's growth rate of
20 percent over a decade was unheard of. Organic agriculture might have been
prompted by an agrarian vision, but along the way it also became a growth
business, because that was the most realistic way to sate burgeoning
consumer demand. Now farmers are talking about organic grains and produce
coming out of China, where farms have sought certification to sell in the
American market.

Inevitably, as more land goes into production, prices will come down, and
organic foods will become more widespread. The environmental effect will be
salutary - more acres will be farmed without chemicals - but don't be
surprised if your local farmer has moved on, unable or unwilling to use a
term that once defined his world. Small farmers will still sell bountiful
produce at farmer's markets, but as always, they will be an alternative to
the dominant agricultural motif.


Samuel Fromartz is writing a book about the organic food industry.

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