San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Organic farmers’ success causes rifts in the industry
It’s time to safeguard label, leaders say
The way Seguin farmer Pedro Schambon sees it, farming organically is all about his own and consumers’ health.
Paying more now for crops grown without chemicals will be well worth avoiding the costs of illnesses later, he says. But it’s also about farming in healthy soil.
“You hear so many things: what’s going on with the bees” — honeybees are in decline due to lost habitat, pesticides and large farms growing single crops — “and the abuse of chemicals on the land, and it’s depleting the fertility,” Schambon said. “We are a strong believer in the right way that God intended for us to use the land.”
Lee Frankel, executive director of the California-based Coalition for Sustainable Organics, thinks organic farming is more about what’s not used in production — conventional fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides or genetic engineering.
That also means supporting the use of techniques such as hydroponics, which grows plants without soil.
“You end up with kind of the same biology and the same level of biodiversity within the roots,” he said. “Growers are cycling the nutrients from organic sources and not from the artificially created nitrogen-level fertilizers.”
Hydroponic agriculture’s crops can earn organic certification under federal guidelines, but there are plenty of organic farmers who don’t believe they should.
Schambon and Frankel represent two sides in the growing debate over what it means to be organic — in what’s become a $50 billion industry in U.S. alone. As more consumers decide they want cage-free eggs, pesticide-free produce or nonGMO (genetically modified organism) grain, organic producers are embroiled in what some
see as a fight to save the integrity of organics.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sales of certified organic commodities rose 23 percent between 2015 and 2016, with the number of certified organic farms increasing by 11 percent. Organic products are now for sale in three out of four conventional supermarkets.
Texas farmers have been getting into the action big-time. The amount of certified organic land in a state known for conventional cattle and cotton production expanded by 69 percent in a 12month period spanning 2015 and 2016.
Some argue standards are slipping as large produce companies rush to tap the organic market. They say the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act needs tightening and better enforcement. They are seeking new labels with tougher standards.
“I think there is a hostile takeover going on,” said Dave Chapman, executive director of the trade group Real Organic Project. “Rather than change how they farm in order to meet the organic standards, large, moneyed interests are changing what the organic standards are and how they’re enforced. We’re seeing massive changes in what organic means in America.”
To Chapman, who grows organic tomatoes in Vermont, “organic was always about the health of the soil and about the role of the soil in a healthy system.”
What’s more, he said, it’s only in recent decades that people have started to understand the enormous impact agriculture has on the planet’s climate change.
According to the USDA, agriculture accounts for about 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, largely due to soil management techniques that use nitrogen-based fertilizers.
They date back to the early 20th century, when a form of synthesized nitrogen left over from manufacturing World War I explosives began being used as farm fertilizer.
Frankel said pioneers of the organics movement such as Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book “Silent Spring” helped spur a ban on DDT for farming, and Sir Albert Howard, whose research in a remote province of India opened eyes to eons-old nonchemical soil management practices, would be fine growing produce with water and nutrients — but no soil.
The key, Frankel said, should be that growers are using nutrients from organic sources and not “artificially created nitrogenready fertilizers.”
Consumers are fine with soilless farming, too, Frankel said.
“Even when we prompted respondents with the idea of soil health, it still kind of ranked at the very bottom in terms of what’s important for organic consumers,” he said.
Dan Lubkeman, president of the Hydroponic Society of America, said he thinks hydroponics can gain consumer share without sporting the organic label.
“The motivation is greed,” he said. “At this point I believe hydroponics wants to piggyback on all that’s been done by soil farmers, to have a piece of the pie.”
Proponents for tougher standards on organics are still smarting from a Trump administration’s withdrawal of a proposed rule to stiffen animal welfare standards. The administration’s stance is that the existing rules are already effective.
“From my perspective, I think the schism is really not so much within organic as it is between organic and this current administration’s extreme anti-regulatory posture,” said Laura Batcha, executive director of the Organic Trade Association. “They don’t want to regulate, and it’s hurting our market.”
The rule would have required poultry to be able to move freely and stretch their wings and for livestock to have year-round access to outdoor space.
According to Chapman, more than 70 percent of the eggs now certified as organic would not have been under the new rule.
Feelings are mixed about a June 3 USDA National Organic Program (NOP) memo saying that new organic container crop operations, which include hydroponic, must not have had contact with prohibited substances — including pesticides — for three years.
“We see the memo as an essential clarification about requirements for transitioning to organic,” Batcha said.
But Chapman said the memo failed to address things like pesticide use in greenhouses, which increasingly are being used for tomato production.
“What we’re having right now is large hydroponic conventional greenhouses that are transitioning to organics the week after they’ve bombed the house with a pesticide,” he said. “That’s definitely happening and the NOP continues to refuse to answer whether this is allowed or not. It’s just craziness.”
Back in Seguin, Schambon worries that the future of organics will be decided by “whoever has the stronger lobbyist.”
But he says he’d love to see true organics available to more consumers.
“I see a lot of the big guys getting into organic farming because they see the potential to make more money for themselves,” Schambon said. “It takes (business) from the smaller farms, but by the same token it provides lower prices to consumers.”