----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 2:54 AM Subject: Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex (was MSOFT versus Open Source movement)
> >Gordon Fitch wrote:
> >
> >>Doug Henwood:
> >>> I remember a quote from Durenmatt's play The Physicists, which I read
> >>> in high school German class long ago, which runs something like:
> >>> "Every attempt by an individual to solve that which concerns all must
> >>> fail."
> >>
> >>Hence, every attempt to solve that which concerns all must
> >>fail, since it would have to start with one individual or
> >>another -- unless you postulate some kind of group mind,
> >>which seems rather in the right-wing bag.
> >
> >No, that's not what it means at all. I pressed it into service to say
> >that there's no way that individual consumption practices can
> >extricate oneself from an exploitative society. You can use free
> >software, but you've got to run it on machines made by evil large
> >corporations. You can shun meat and spare animals, but what about the
> >migrant workers who pick the cucumbers?
> >
> >One of my favorite little factoids: organic produce requires more
> >stoop labor than the ordinary kind. So is it more "moral" to eat
> >organic food?
> >
> >Doug
>
> ***** 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