Socially and Ecologically Responsible Agriculture Network

[Douglas Hinds <cedecor AT gmx.net>]

Robert el al,

Interestingly enough, we seem to have come to a number of similar
conclusions since your original post.

There are two more points I'd like to make regarding this issue,
however:

Not long ago, my mother mentioned that she was neither feeling well
nor eating well and I decided to send her a box of organic dates, as
complete a food as there is. Logically, I got in contact with the
same source I bought my dates from before moving to Mexico in 1974:
Ehlich's Organic Date Garden, in Yuma, where the son of the lady
that used to take care of my orders answered the phone.

There was another change: The name of the operation is now Ehlich's
Date Garden - they dropped the word organic. When I asked about the
way the dates were grown and handled, I learned that they were as
organic as ever. The difference was caused by the cost of
certification. The owners decided they didn't want to keep paying
thousands of dollars a year in order to get asked the same questions
over and over again.

His word was good enough for me and mine was good enough for him to
ship the box of dates before billing me. The only effect the absence
of the word organic and the certification had was lower prices and
greater trust between two human beings that didn't need more than
that.

Believe it or not, the results of the nutritional impact the dates
provided was noticeable to me over the phone and the sense of
satisfaction was expressed explicitly by the still hard working 85
year old lady that gave birth to this writer quite a while back.

The message: Buy what you what wherever you want but don't forget:
There's no substitute for knowing the grower, even if you have to do
it by phone. Be sure and identify the source of your food and
contact him or her via any method you can.

The second point I want to emphasize relates to the post I made
titled "A Historic Decision" etc.

The decision I mentioned said nothing about the word organic but
rather, referred to a commitment to base the foundations of the
agriculture of the future on natural biological processes that
deserve to be studied in depth, better understood, fully appreciated
and exploited in ways that the present conventional agricultural
productions systems can't accomplish.

That said, that may well be all I'll be contributing in relation to
this particular thread.

Douglas