***** New York Times 13 May 2001
Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex
By MICHAEL POLLAN
...IV. Down on the Industrial Organic Farm
No farm I have ever visited before prepared me for the industrial organic farms I saw in California. When I think about organic farming, I think family farm, I think small scale, I think hedgerows and compost piles and battered pickup trucks. I don't think migrant laborers, combines, thousands of acres of broccoli reaching clear to the horizon. To the eye, these farms look exactly like any other industrial farm in California -- and in fact the biggest organic operations in the state today are owned and operated by conventional mega-farms. The same farmer who is applying toxic fumigants to sterilize the soil in one field is in the next field applying compost to nurture the soil's natural fertility.
Is there something wrong with this picture? It all depends on where you stand. Gene Kahn makes the case that the scale of a farm has no bearing on its fidelity to organic principles and that unless organic "scales up" it will "never be anything more than yuppie food." To prove his point, Kahn sent me to visit large-scale farms whose organic practices were in many ways quite impressive, including the Central Valley operation that grows vegetables for his frozen dinners and tomatoes for Muir Glen.
Greenways Organic is a successful 2,000-acre organic-produce operation tucked into a 24,000-acre conventional farm outside Fresno; the crops, the machines, the crews, the rotations and the fields were indistinguishable, and yet two very different kinds of industrial agriculture are being practiced here side by side.
In place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways's organic fields are nourished by compost made by the ton at a horse farm nearby. Insects are controlled with biological agents and beneficial insects like lacewings. Frequent and carefully timed tilling, as well as propane torches, keeps down the weeds, perhaps the industrial organic farmer's single stiffest challenge. This approach is at best a compromise: running tillers through the soil so frequently is destructive to its tilth, yet weeding a 160-acre block of broccoli by hand is unrealistic.
Since Greenways grows the same crops conventionally and organically, I was interested to hear John Diener, one of the farm's three partners, say he knew for a fact that his organic crops were "better," and not only because they hadn't been doused with pesticide. When Diener takes his tomatoes to the cannery, the organic crop reliably receives higher Brix scores -- a measure of the sugars in fruits and vegetables. It seems that crops grown on nitrogen fertilizer take up considerably more water, thereby diluting their nutrients, sugars and flavors. The same biochemical process could explain why many people -- including the many chefs who swear by organic ingredients -- believe organic produce simply tastes better. With less water in it, the flavor and the nutrients of a floret of organic broccoli will be more concentrated than one grown with chemical fertilizers.
It's too simple to say that smaller organic farms are automatically truer to the organic ideal than big ones. In fact, the organic ideal is so exacting -- a sustainable system that requires not only no synthetic chemicals but also few purchased inputs of any kind and that returns as much to the soil as it removes -- that it is most often honored in the breach. Yet the farmers who come closest to achieving this ideal do tend to be smaller in scale. These are the farmers who plant dozens of different crops in fields that resemble quilts and practice long and elaborate rotations, thereby achieving the rich biodiversity in space and time that is the key to making a farm sustainable.
For better or worse, these are not the kinds of farms Small Planet Foods does business with today. It's simply more efficient to buy from one 1,000-acre farm than 10 100-acre farms. Indeed, Cascadian Farm the corporation can't even afford to use produce from Cascadian Farm the farm: it's too small. So the berries grown there are sold at a roadside stand, while the company buys berries for freezing from as far away as Chile.
The big question is whether the logic of an industrial food chain can be reconciled to the logic of the natural systems on which organic agriculture has tried to model itself. Put another way, Is "industrial organic" a contradiction in terms?
Kahn is convinced it is not, but others both inside and outside his company see a tension. Sarah Huntington is one of Cascadian's oldest employees. She worked alongside Kahn on the farm and at one time or another has held just about every job in the company. "The maw of that processing plant beast eats 10 acres of cornfield an hour," she told me. "And you're locked into planting a particular variety like Jubilee that ripens all at once and holds up in processing. So you see how the system is constantly pushing you back toward monoculture, which is anathema in organic. But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you."
One of the most striking ways Small Planet Foods is changing the system is by helping conventional farms convert a portion of their acreage to organic. Several thousand acres of American farmland are now organic as a result of the company's efforts, which go well beyond offering contracts to providing instruction and even management. Kahn has helped to prove to the skeptical that organic -- dismissed as "hippie farming" not very long ago -- can work on a large scale. The environmental benefits of this educational process shouldn't be underestimated. And yet the industrialization of organic comes at a price. The most obvious is consolidation: today five giant farms control fully one-half of the $400 million organic produce market in California. Partly as a result, the price premium for organic crops is shrinking. This is all to the good for expanding organic's market beyond yuppies, but it is crushing many of the small farmers for whom organic has represented a profitable niche, a way out of the cheap-food economics that has ravaged American farming over the last few decades. Indeed, many of the small farmers present at the creation of organic agriculture today find themselves struggling to compete against the larger players, as the familiar, dismal history of American agriculture begins to repeat itself in the organic sector.
This has opened up a gulf in the movement between Big and Little Organic and convinced many of the movement's founders that the time has come to move "beyond organic" -- to raise the bar on American agriculture yet again. Some of these innovating farmers want to stress fair labor standards, others quality or growing exclusively for local markets. In Maine, Eliot Coleman has pioneered a sophisticated market garden entirely under plastic, to supply his "food shed" with local produce all winter long; even in January his solar-heated farm beats California on freshness and quality, if not price. In Virginia, Joel Salatin has developed an ingenious self-sufficient rotation of grass-fed livestock: cattle, chickens and rabbits that take turns eating, and feeding, the same small pasture. There are hundreds of these "beyond organic" farmers springing up now around the country. The fact is, however, that the word "organic" -- having entered the vocabulary of both agribusiness and government -- is no longer these farmers' to redefine. Coleman and Salatin, both of whom reject the U.S.D.A. organic label, are searching for new words to describe what it is they're doing. Michael Ableman, a "beyond organic" farmer near Santa Barbara, Calif., says: "We may have to give up on the word 'organic,' leave it to the Gene Kahns of the world. To be honest, I'm not sure I want the association, because what I'm doing on my farm is not just substituting materials."
Not long ago at a conference on organic agriculture, a corporate organic farmer suggested to a family farmer struggling to survive in the competitive world of industrial organic agriculture that he "should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market." The small farmer replied: "I believe I developed that niche 20 years ago. It's called 'organic.' And now you're sitting on it."...
[The full article is available at <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/magazine/13ORGANIC.html?pagewanted=all>.] *****
Food will be, in the foreseeable future, either cheap & industrial or expensive, labor-intensive, & more organic than USDA-organic. Under capitalism there is no other choice. Will there be other choices under socialism or anarchism?
Yoshie