Column by John Mattingly
Agriculture – January 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
ORGANIC: Method, Movement, Or Mere Marketing Tool?
“Are you an organic farmer?”
I’ve been asked this question many times in the 40 years I’ve farmed. In the ’70s it was asked by pilgrims of Rodale, The Whole Earth Catalog, and Sir Albert Howard — seeking a source for home-grown vegetables, or feed for small livestock. In the ’80s the question subsided (perhaps overshadowed by a growing concern for fat) while Reagan’s agriculture department, and others in the food industry, denounced organic farming as a hippie fad that could never feed our great and growing nation. As if to confirm this condemnation, most organic produce looked substandard on the shelf, and was presented without finesse. Around this time, products labeled Natural began to appear, but an examination of the content labels usually read like the same stew of ingredients in conventional (presumably unnatural) foods.
After the apple Alar scare in 1990, interest in organic farming suddenly flared to prominence. Once the Alar bubble burst, however, organic had to recover from excessive optimism and rebuild. Despite some fatalities, organic recovered as demand for its products grew slowly, sustainably, due in part to a succession of media-hyped studies warning of carcinogens, neurotoxins, endocrine de-stabilizers, manure, and insects in various foods. Ag trade magazines from the heartland and high plains began to publish articles redeeming organic methods as viable alternatives to the conventional chemical catechism. National and state standards were crafted and fought over for years, and indeed are still being debated.
Despite disagreements over standards, by the mid-1990s organic became Organic, gradually assimilating into the mainstream of U.S. industrial agriculture. Organic family farms became a family of Organic farms. There was money in those organic baby greens and that hormone-free meat. Organic growers joined the corporate marketing stream — and in some cases were aggressively acquired by them. The marriage resulted in an attractive product, stabilized with qualifying synthetics and highlighted with food-bite descriptions on the packaging such as: “our farm nourishes the earth,” or, “our animals are happy,” or even, “we are happy little farmers ourselves.” A new species of supermarkets sprouted up (in effect, super Food Co-ops) that, instead of buying mostly from local growers, were supplied year ’round by about half a dozen Jolly Green Organic Giants.
THROUGHOUT THIS transformation of Organic from the ’60s to the present, I’ve found it hard to calculate my Organic Quotient (OQ) as a farmer, and that’s not only because those in the business (as well as those in the regulatory regimes) still haven’t come down firmly on what “organic” really means. In the early years, organic was more a movement than a method. Organic meant more than substituting compost for ammonium nitrate and lady bugs for parathion. Organic meant small machines, loving care, fresh food, recycling, respect for seasonality, local markets, and a responsible connection between earth, grower, and consumer.
Today, Organic has climbed into the mass market largely by unhitching itself from the pastoral subjectives of the Movement to focus exclusively on Method. Organic now means X, Y, and Z inputs, period. It’s science, not philosophy. It’s a meal, not a lifestyle. Under the rubric of Method, irradiation, inert gases, synthetics deemed harmless, disproportional petrochemical inputs from industrial machines and processes, migrant stoop labor, and cross-continental refrigerated journeys, all qualify as Organic. As Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said in 2000 when national organic standards were initiated, “Organic is a marketing tool.”
As such it conveys nothing as to food quality, and is no guarantee of food purity. But small organic growers, still true to origins, hold tight to the ethic that Organic implies a complex gestalt of responsibilities to earth and eater; they struggle to compete with the Organic Giants, often ruing the triumph of Method over Movement that allowed the broader ethic to dissociate from the product.
AS A FARMER, I never quite locked in on either the Movement or the Method of organic. Sometimes, when people popped the organic question, I’d say, “Of course I’m organic. It’s impossible to be otherwise. Have you ever eaten inorganic food?” It’s a response that expressed my frustration, and ambivalence, over the word “organic.” I’ve always been a little bit organic in terms of method. Chemical pesticides are expensive, their success can be sensitive to weather conditions, and they’re plagued with unintended consequences. Killing off one weed or bug often results in its competitor — now free from predation or competition — creating a new problem requiring a new chemical. And, the residues of the chemicals often kill friendly species in the neighborhood, or drift into the water supply. It always pays to seek a broadband solution to a particular field problem rather than resorting to rescue chemistry.
Chemical fertilizers are also expensive and perform erratically. The soil is a huge system with super-human buffering capacity. Without a microscope mounted on a baseball cap, it’s hard for the average farmer to know what’s actually going on in the earth under his tractor, and thus most farmers fall victim to the classic logical fallacy of attributing correlation to causation. For example, application of a certain fertilizer is observed with a certain yield result, so it’s tempting to give the fertilizer credit, while ignoring the far more determining variables of heat units received that season, wind and thunderstorm occurrences, previous crop residues, and a host of others.
Nevertheless, the principal weakness of chemical fertilizers has, over time, consistently revealed itself as a failure to add tilth and humus to the soil. Most chemical fertilizers are salt-based, highly alkaline, and thus tend to disturb osmotic potentials in the soil and neutralize the critical etching by carbonic acid of the inorganic elements that the plant absorbs at the root hair. The obvious is actually miraculous: plants convert inorganic minerals in the soil (such as phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, and iron to mention a few — there are 17 essential elements) into the complex of plant tissue. Dumping a bunch of salt-based fertilizers on this process may stimulate above-ground plant growth (though there is a debate raging as to whether artificially stimulated plant issue is deficient in total food value) while contributing nothing to the soil, and possibly jeopardizing the below-ground root systems.
So, in conjunction with a guarded and spare use of chemical fertilizers, I always included animal manures, green manures, residue management, periodic deep tillage, and simply fallowing a field every seven years in my farming program.
Although I felt aligned in large part with the ideals of the organic movement, such as “keeping it local,” inexpensive petroleum enabled items to move across huge distances and that obscured sources and origins. This cheap mobility allowed for enough mixing and matching of ingredients that searching for “where something came from,” often led to a distributional Black Hole (where did that seed and fishmeal in that organic head of lettuce originate?)
Thus, even organic purists often find themselves bringing things into their operation from unknown sources. The fibers of the world economy knit us together in unsuspecting and sometimes undiscoverable ways.
Not only that, but small isn’t necessarily better, nor is big necessarily worse. Some small operations are horribly inefficient and abusive to the environment, while larger operators, working at economies of scale under regulatory pressure, are often better husbands of their resources.
And, buying local (when you know for sure it’s local) doesn’t make sense if the local product is substantially more expensive, and/or lower in quality. At the same time, energy costs, even though relatively low, often make recycling less cost effective than mining the raw material.
BECAUSE THE EDGES of my experience didn’t line up with the rapidly changing puzzle of either organic or conventional systems, I ultimately took pieces of each and tried to weld them into a common-sense analysis, as follows:
1. Start with the water. Because Organic produce is available year ’round, the lion’s share of it is grown under irrigation in the Western U.S. and Mexico, predominantly California. Irrigation water is the single biggest input — by volume as well as impact — that humans control in the growing process. The sun does the heavy lifting, but water is next in line. A plant may take several days or weeks to respond to fertilizer inputs, be they qualified organic ingredients or conventional chemicals, but a plant responds immediately to water.
Most produce, when it reaches the table, is a high percentage water, some as high as 90%.
Organic standards require periodic testing of water, but allows crops that are “inadvertently exposed to ag chemicals pervasive in rain and ground water due to their overuse during the past 50 years, and due to drift via wind and rain” to still qualify as Organic. In California many organic fields grow side by side with conventional fields. The opportunity for pesticide residues to “inadvertently” migrate to organic fields in the water distribution nexus is significant enough to be a near certainty. Concentrations of pervasive or drifted contaminants may be lower on organic fields, or they may actually be higher, depending on the source of the contaminant, and the extent to which it has magnified in the system. Because water flows downhill, contaminants in the stream can be gaining in the course of their passage. Consequences tend to collect in low places.
Bottom line: The biosphere is covered with a membrane of chemical fertilizer and pesticide residues. Organic standards don’t guarantee that crop irrigation sources qualify as organic because to do so would quite possibly be fatal to most organic operations.
A conundrum develops for the discriminating consumer because that bag of lettuce, bundle of green beans, stack of squash, or ear of corn is, after all, mostly water, and there is no meaningful “organic” regulation of that water.
2. No chemicals added. The organic method, for all its virtues, is basically a “no chemicals added” honor system. Inadvertent contamination does not result in disqualification. The question is: how can the testing procedure distinguish between inadvertent and intentional contamination? It can’t.
The only transparency is from the honor system, namely the records kept by the organic grower. So, just because an organic grower didn’t add a forbidden substance in the growing process doesn’t mean the food item is free of forbidden substances. Not only is the biosphere coated with a thin film of pollutants — from prior atmospheric nuclear testing, transcontinental dust storms, and the radical reallocations provided by our daily jet stream — the neighbor next door might use his spray rig when the wind is blowing and many of the targeted bugs might end up dying in the organic field.
A mass spectrometer is needed to verify the purity of any item labeled organic. Either that or the canary-in-the-mine method: feed the item to someone with an established sensitivity to the forbidden substance and see if they react. Hopefully without dying.
Bottom line: The reality of the modern industrial food web is that we are engaged in an adapt-or-perish experiment. There is little doubt that survivors will be capable of tolerating, and metabolizing, the entire chemical cornucopia spilling into the human food machine. To exclude yourself from exposure to the ambient stew of toxins in the food web is to ignore the advantage of low-level exposure as the primary vector of adaptation, and ultimate immunity. On that count, Organic foods at least have a better chance of providing low-level exposure.
3. Grass-fed fallacies. Organic standards require dairy and beef cattle, and chickens, to “have access to grass pasture,” to qualify as free-range or grass-fed. Access, of course, doesn’t have to result in actual passage and presence. A creature can be presented with an opportunity to walk through a gate to a field of grass, but if water and other goodies are inside a loafing shed, most creatures opt for the sofa. This is one of many examples of how industrial lobbying inlays preferential ambiguities into the regulatory regime.
But there’s another, more subtle fallacy in the grass-fed, free-range concept. Many high fidelity organic operations use grass more or less exclusively, rotating cattle, sheep, chickens, and even hogs on pastures, working manure in calculated successions. The strategy is often referred to with the reverence of a perpetual motion machine, powered by free sunlight. Sun makes grass, animals eat and fertilize grass, humans eat animals.
The catch here is that phosphorus leaves the farm in the bones, teeth, and eggshells of the creatures, slowly, but surely, and does not return. Phosphorus is as scarce on the planet as it is essential to photosynthesis. Mine it out, and the system suffers or collapses.
Bottom line: entropy wins. There’s no free lunch, no perpetual anything, and there’s no such thing as long-term sustainable if humans continue at their current rate of resource consumption. It may take a long time to reach the tipping point, or it may happen suddenly, if one of the precarious cogs of our industrial food system wears down or breaks loose. The U.S. stock of open-pollinated seed, for example, is held in relatively few places and in even fewer hands (patented). If something were to happen to this seed, from which the obliquitous hybrids are propagated, a famine could result in a matter of one year. Too, if human amplification of available nitrogen on the planet either became too expensive to continue due to the cost of petrochemical inputs, or resulted in a major disturbance to the planet’s nitrogen cycle itself, massive shortages could result.
4. Petro paradox. Industrial Organic produce can have hundreds, even thousands, of calories of fossil fuels imbedded in their life cycle from seed propagation to dinner table, lettuce being the most dramatic example. A one-pound box of organic lettuce grown in California, with roughly 80 calories of food energy, has an estimated 9,000 calories of fossil fuel energy involved in its production, processing, refrigeration, transport, and storage. That box of lettuce consumes more calories of fossil fuel energy in one day of refrigerated shelf life than it yields the consumer at the table.
Bottom line: If that’s truly Organic, I’ll eat my shovel.
John Mattingly is a recovering farmer who can often be found in the greater Moffat area.
