A letter to our customers, Spring of 2005
We never use any chemicals on our farm, so why can’t we say we’re “organic”?
When we first started our farm, we knew we would grow organically. Mike had been farming conventionally all his life, but Shelley was new to farming and couldn’t see the reasoning behind putting chemicals on food that we wanted to feed our own family and share with others. At that time Washington State’s department of agriculture did the certification of organic farms here.
In order to qualify for certification, the land being farmed had to have been chemical-free for at least three years prior to the first harvest of organic crops. There was quite a bit of paperwork involved, mostly in the form of a farm plan outlining the farm’s growing practices, records of fertilizer and pesticide application, if any, and seed purchase receipts. Livestock farms needed to show evidence that all the feed purchased was from certified organic sources, and the animals were raised organically and treated humanely. Upon approval of written records, an inspector visited the farm, made measurements to verify buffer zones, inspected all the records on site, and walked the farm to make sure we were doing what we claimed.
There was a very short list of products that were allowed on our crops, governing even the potting soil that we used. And stringent indeed was the list of soil amendments and few were the pesticides that could be used. Basically we could use rowcovers and Bt or garlic spray for insects, and not much else—no “-cides”.
The rules followed the way we believed farming should be done, but we felt pressured into certifying in order to call our produce “organic”. We gave in because the certification program represented what we were doing and we felt that the “O” word was important in marketing our produce. But now, the USDA has taken over organic certification. We never have had a lot of respect or trust in the government, especially in the USDA, which has a pretty dismal track record in rule-making and enforcement, in our opinion. This is how we came to question another year of organic certification.
The rules have been changed to suit large, make that huge producers, with a lot of emphasis on processed foods and exports. This means the rules fit corporations that manage hundreds or thousands of acres comprising just a handful of crops—monocrop farms. The new rules are clearly designed to help corporations, not family farms. They are geared toward exported, mass-production of produce rather than farms like ours that run CSA programs or sell their produce directly to their customers less than one hour’s drive from the farm.
The new rules specify a number of impracticalities for smaller farms:
• Specific recordkeeping for each individual crop, including fertilizer rates, seeding rates, and yield (not a huge task if only one or two crops are being produced, but an ordeal if repeated plantings of over 100 individual crops are produced during a growing season). This kind of diversity keeps small farms alive when weather and markets are uncertain. We don’t even have time to pay our bills during the summer, much less keep track of all that farm data.
• The use of only certified organic seed. This is not a problem if the farm only grows major crops for which organic seed is available, like lettuce or beans, but this rule eliminates the possibility of growing any minor crops, and heirloom varieties that are grown by individuals or smaller seed companies that can’t justify certifying their crops as organic. We do applaud the rule that eliminates GMO seed and we use no GMO seed ourselves, but there is a constant threat of this rule being overturned. (What can be expected when the USDA has bent over backwards to help biotech corporations develop GMO seed varieties and technology?)
At the same time, the new rules allow a number of practices that we don’t believe in:
• The use of blood and bone meal from non-organic livestock as fertilizers. We don’t feel safe using these products because of the BSE risk.
• A long list of allowed substances, including broad-range botanical pesticides. We choose not to use pesticides as a general rule because they are mostly non-specific in nature. These botanical chemicals may have a short life but they still kill beneficial insects as well as the pests.
Even with all these rules, it is still easy to cheat while remaining certified:
• Soil tests are required for nutrient purposes only. There are no mandatory tests done to check for toxic substances or pesticide residues in the soil prior to growing organic crops on them. Random tests are done on organic crops, but they are few and far between. We voluntarily tested our soil prior to farming on it four years ago.
• Many chemicals can be applied after the certifying agent has visited the farm in the spring, as there is only one inspection per year, with only sporadic, random crop sampling. (We know of “organic” farms that do this now.)
We feel that our customers should buy from us because they know and trust us, not because a federal agency gives us a label. We don’t have a lot of faith in the USDA, and we don’t want to certify as USDA ORGANIC because their idea of “organic” is so different from ours. We welcome everyone to visit our farm and see for themselves how we do things. And, when the USDA decides to pay more attention to small "organic" farms, we may decide to be proudly and officially Organic once again.
If you want a good idea of the quality of USDA inspection, just ask a farm that IS certified organic about their most recent inspection.
