Jeff Moyer reflects on over forty years of service at the Rodale Institute
Jeff Moyer is planning to retire next spring after 46 years with the Rodale Institute. J.M. Fortier (The Market Garden Institute and author of The Market Gardener) sat down recently to talk about Moyer’s career and the future of regenerative agriculture.
J.M. Fortier: Jeff, you’re a true pioneer. You’ve been here for over 40 years.
Jeff Moyer: This is my 47th growing season.
Fortier: That’s amazing. Will it be a good one?
Moyer: I’m not in the field as much as I used to be, having so many administrative duties, but I think it’s a good year so far. I mean, we’re getting a little bit dry. And I have a farm of my own as well.
Fortier: So you’re still touching it. I often feel the same, because of all my other adventures. When I got into farming, I came to it not from the countryside. My parents were not farmers; I grew up in the suburbs. I was passionate about the outdoors — the environment — and I wanted to make a difference for the environment. And farming came to be the way I did that. I was aware that growing vegetables organically was super popular. There was a demand for it, so I could make it a business. And that’s what I did, and I my career was successful.
And now I see a lot of young people doing just that. But I’m not sure they understand that the opportunity they have was provided by the work of people like you — who have been fighting for something over the years.
Moyer: It’s really been an honor and a privilege to be part of the growth of the organic community. Part of what the Rodale Institute tries to do — and part of what I try to do — is to inspire young people to do something different. Even existing farmers — we try to inspire them to transition and change by showing them the great potential and possibility of making agriculture exciting and interesting again — versus following a recipe, which is what conventional agriculture does.
It’s a struggle, of course, but there have been a lot of great rewards along the way. What I’ve done here at Rodale Institute is quite a bit different from our farm at home. The idea that we can bring science to the story of organic agriculture has really been the exciting part for me. There are a lot of nonprofits out there that tell stories. But if you want to make a difference, you really have to have science. Agriculture moves on the back of science — and rightly so.
Farmers don’t need to understand all of the science, because they’re busy producing on their farms — but they need to know that the science is there, and that it’s respectable and reputable and well grounded. And that’s what Rodale Institute has been able to bring.
Fortier: Was that always the focus?
Moyer: No — that’s a good question. In the beginning, it was all about the story. Science for us was kind of, like, “That’s expensive. Let’s put that aside. We’ll just keep telling the story.” When I came on the scene in the mid ’70s, it was the tail end of the counterculture of the ’60s — the back-to-the-land movement. That’s what really attracted me to Rodale. My brothers and sisters and I grew up on about 30 acres. It was mostly wooded, but my father was a back-to-the-land kind of person. We had ducks and chickens and we raised big gardens. And that really resonated with me. I went to school for forestry, but when I got out of school, I could not find any meaningful work in the forestry industry. So I gravitated to agriculture and found Rodale Institute very early in my career — when I was 20 years old.
Fortier: And from there, you’ve seen the evolution of this movement.
Moyer: Yeah, telling that story — it resonated with me. But when you talked to established farmers, they were like, “It can work for a garden, but you guys are just a bunch of gardeners.” And I thought, “No, this is biology. This is meaningful.”
So, we came to the conclusion as a team that we really needed to start focusing on science. In the late ’70s, Robert Rodale, Jr. — J.I. Rodale’s son — saw that in order to make the changes that he thought needed to take place in established agriculture, and even in policymaking at the government/agency level, we had to have something bigger and more meaningful. And science was the driver.
We would go to meetings, and people would say, “Okay, you want me to change policy — show me your science. The chemical industry and the fertilizer industries and the universities have their science; where’s yours?” And we were like, “We don’t have any,” and they’d reply, “When you have some, come back and see us.” So, we decided to do that — to buckle down and do the hard work that takes.
When I started here at Rodale, there were many other organizations that were starting up around the country with farms that would be demonstration sites. But nobody really had the resources to buckle down and do the science. So, we spent the last almost-45 years growing this science, and it’s been really exciting and meaningful.
The science from our Farming Systems Trials was part of the driver for the USDA standard for organic that we enjoy in this country. Most of the science came from that project. That’s been very rewarding — to know that we can have that kind of change.
Fortier: Was that work — USDA organic certification — was that in the ’80s?
Moyer: There were certifications in the ’70s. It was a little haphazard — every organization had their own standard. You could be certified by California Certified Organic, or by NOFA in the northeast, but their standards weren’t compatible, which meant that there was no mechanism for interstate trade. If you put a label on something, that really was meaningless. Anybody, theoretically, could put a label on their product and say it was organic, and it was up to someone else to try to prove they were wrong.
Because there was no standard, you could put the word organic on anything. It was sort of like “new and improved.” And unfortunately, that’s also what happened with the word “sustainable.” Marketers used that word, and it came to mean everything and nothing at the same time.
I think the same thing is going to happen with the word “regenerative.” Robert Rodale first used the word in connection with agriculture back in the late 1970s. As he was looking for ways to expand organic, he realized that, like anything in life, if you want it to grow, you have to give it away to the world and let it grow. But when you do that, you lose control.
When we tried to give the word “organic” to USDA, they pulled a lot of things out of it. The idea of continuous improvement was stripped away, because USDA said, “How do we certify continuous improvement?” The components around soil health are really weak in the organic standards — so weak, in fact, that you don’t need soil to grow organically. You can do it hydroponically and just do a one-to-one substitution of an organic-accepted material. I spent the first half of my career telling farmers it’s not a one-to-one substitution, and then USDA came along and goes, “Actually, a one-to-one substitution is fine, by law.” And we said, “But that’s not what we were trying to incentivize people to think about!” and they and the corporate lawyers said, “Well, you can take your intent and do what you want with it.”
Robert Rodale didn’t like the word sustainable. A journalist friend of mine, Greg Bowman, once said to me, “If someone asked you how your relationship with your significant other was, and you said, ‘Sustainable,’ would people be happy or sad for you?” Why should our relationship with soil or with food simply be sustainable — if that’s the best we can hope for?
So Robert Rodale coined the word “regenerative,” because if we farm in an organic way — and he always linked those words — we have to get the chemicals out of the system. But that’s not enough. We have to think about how we regenerate the spirit of a farmer or an ag professional, so that they are in tune with what they’re doing and enjoy what they’re doing and feel motivated and inspired by their own work. And if you can regenerate a farmer, you can regenerate a whole community. It all starts with the soil. If you can regenerate the health of soil, you can regenerate the health of consumers who eat the food, and you can regenerate the spirit of the farmer, and you can regenerate communities. It just grows and blossoms — but it all starts with soil.
When you say the word “regenerative,” you have to explain what that means. Sustainable has a meaning people understand, though — you’re sustaining what you have. But Robert was like, “Why would we want to keep what we have? It’s a broken system. Let’s build a new model and a new system.” So we call that “regenerative organic agriculture.”
Organic is great. It’s the gold standard. But now we need to move to the platinum standard. In our regenerative organic standard, we have language around continuous improvement. We want farmers to keep moving the bar.
Fortier: That’s great. I feel like your generation was fighting for something — but you were also fighting against something. Whereas my generation — I’ve been farming for 20 years — has more just been fighting for something, and developing growing techniques. Do you think that the younger generation of farmers should know more about how all of this evolved?
Moyer: In the beginning, I would go to meetings, and I was brought on as a speaker as someone that they could fight with — almost the laughingstock, like “Why don’t you ask the organic guy to figure it out!”
I remember very pointedly being in a meeting where they were talking about fly control in poultry houses and how we needed new sprays to control flies. I stood up and said, “The reason you have flies is because the chickens are in a building. You need to get the chickens out of the building, and then you won’t have a fly problem.” Everybody just looked at each other like, “Who’s that guy? What’s he doing here?” You have to think outside the box — why do you have the problem?
We’re encouraging industries large and small to rethink the way they’re doing things. We’re pulling back the curtain and letting people see in. And that’s important — we want to have a transparent food production system. We want to have a model that supports human health and planetary health.
I’ve been blessed to be able to travel around the world and visit with many farmers, and I’ve never met a farmer — no matter their production model — who gets up in the morning and says, “My goal is to make people sick, to destroy the health of my soil and to ruin the planet.” No one wants to do that. Unfortunately, though, that’s what’s happening.
One farmer told me, “It’s not my fault — I just do what society tells me to do. Society tells me, ‘I want the cheapest food I can possibly get. I don’t care about the other metrics.’ And that’s what I get paid for.” In his case, he was growing corn and soybeans. He said, “I get paid to grow tons of yellow stuff that you happen to call corn, and the cheaper I can produce it, the more I get paid.” When that’s your incentive, of course you’re going to try to use tools that reduce your costs and reduce your labor. You get highly mechanized so you can produce tons of, in his case, yellow stuff. He said that if he were rewarded for the quality of what he produced, he would. He had no qualms saying organic products were higher quality than his. But nobody ever asked him to produce quality.
We’ve disincentivized farmers to do what, I think, they want to do — and what they know they should be doing. That farmer in particular told me that he knows that the quality of his corn is not as good as his grandfather’s, because his grandfather kept meticulous records on how he fed the livestock, and this farmer has to feed 20 percent more corn to get the same daily rate of gain as his grandfather — because there’s no nutrition in it. Why do we have an obese society? Because people have to eat 20 percent more. With vegetables, it’s probably 300 times more to get the same amount of nutrition they got 40 or 50 years ago. A doctor told me that you’d have to eat 26 apples today to get the same amount of iron as 60 years ago. That’s not even possible. We have a society that is starving for nutrition while we’re producing tons and tons of stuff.
Fortier: Where is this movement going? Is it trending in the right direction? And what are the things that are really encouraging for you right now?
Moyer: Well, let me start with what’s discouraging. I think what’s discouraging is that the pace is too slow. People say they want to change, because they can market that, but they don’t really want to change — because change is hard. The planet keeps heating up; we’re not meeting our carbon sequestration standards; we have to adjust, and we have to do it more rapidly.
We have to bring in other partners to help us with this story. We’re working diligently right now with the medical profession. Many healthcare providers don’t provide much healthcare. They provide medication to treat symptoms; they’re not really looking at the problem. We know we can do so much more with diet — so much more with lifestyle. We’ll always need doctors and medications — it’s not that diet alone can solve all the world’s problems. But we can solve 80 percent of them. And that’s huge.
We also have to get to young people more. The millennials are really the shoppers of today and the future. The future is organic. They understand and are aware of social justice issues. That’s part of the way we farm — the way we treat agricultural workers. Part of our standard in regenerative organic certification is centered around social justice. We need to take care of farm workers. We can’t have organic cotton that is hand-picked overseas by school-aged children. That’s not right. That’s not what somebody who’s buying an upscale garment made out of organic cotton thinks they’re paying for. We’re pulling back the curtain on those things.
Fortier: And the lens for all of this is the ROC — regenerative organic certification?
Moyer: Yeah, it gives us a window into that; it helps steer people in a positive direction. As I mentioned, farmers are only going to do what they’re incentivized to do, so we have to give them an incentive. The marketplace is the very best incentive. Yes, we can do things with government policy — with crop insurance and tax incentives and EQIP dollars. But we also have to support them in the marketplace. We can’t expect farmers to make a living taking care of these large swaths of land, in a way that’s good for society, if we’re not going to reward them in some way. They can’t do it for free. I think there’s an opportunity to bring more people onto the land — to get more people farming — if we do it right.
Fortier: What are you most proud of in your career in farming?
Moyer: Probably my work on organic no-till and the tool we designed for it — the roller-crimper. To see that being adapted and adopted across large pieces of the landscape and in many different countries is really rewarding. I can’t claim credit for all of it — it’s always a team that does those things. But I was really pushing that hard and leading the way on that. I am proud of leaving that behind as a tool and as a part of a system that is being used.
Fortier: You were thinking outside of the box — looking for a way to handle cover crops.
Moyer: Yeah, and it kind of came as an accident — you know, just being observational. I was looking at what was happening on some research plots and noticing things, and I thought we could probably create mulch right there in the field. We didn’t have to bring in mulch — we could grow it. Right where it was — right where we needed it.
Fortier: You’d be proud of me — I have a roller-crimper on my walk-behind tractor.
Moyer: I am proud of you! You know, most people who say, “It doesn’t work in my system,” they just need to tinker with it more. I’ve worked with several farmers who said that, and then their son dragged it out of the barn and started playing with it. And they go, “You know, Dad, I think we can make this work.” And then they realize that if they just tweak the system, it actually does work. And it has to work, because it’s biology.
Fortier: I’ve observed that tools should not necessarily following the lean theory — where everything needs to be discarded if it isn’t being used. I think that’s bad advice. Because the tools that you put in storage — at some point, you’re like, “Oh, that thing!” Then you take it out and you play with it, and then you figure out how to use it. That’s happened to me so many times.
Moyer: I agree. Not everybody on this farm agrees with that! But at our farm at home, we all agree with that.
I’m an amateur woodworker, and I do some construction on our farm at home. I can put up the frame of a building with two tools: a cut-off saw and a nail gun. But if I want to build a table or a cabinet, I need dozens of tools. They’re both working with wood, but they require different types and numbers of tools. Agriculture is the same way. When you’re an organic farmer, it’s more of a craftsman sort of thing — you need more tools. Each tool has its particular purpose. One year, the roller-crimper works great. The next year it doesn’t. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
Whenever we try to create a recipe that’s 100 percent successful, that’s a recipe for disaster — because that’s not how biology works. In conventional agriculture, we focus almost entirely on chemistry. It’s not that chemistry is easy, but it is very predictable. If I mix two chemicals together right here, I get a reaction. If somebody mixes the same two chemicals in Brazil, they get the same reaction. It’s very predictable. That’s what’s allowed chemical ag production to flourish and be adopted so quickly — because it’s adaptable. Roundup works everywhere.
Biology is different. What works biologically today on this farm won’t work next year. What works for me won’t work for my neighbor. You have to tweak it and learn. We want to inspire farmers to be in love with their occupation — to pursue a lifetime of learning. You never stop learning. I’m learning every day.
How do we get there? We need to reward good farmers. We need to reward good stewards, who are trying to build healthier soil for the next generation and the many generations to come.
And so that’s maybe where a legacy of a roller-crimper comes into place. Someday down the road, maybe somebody will pull that out of their shed and go, “Oh yeah, I remember hearing about this! Let’s try it again.”
Fortier: I want to thank you for all that you’ve done through the years on my behalf. I’m really excited about everything I’ve seen here at the Institute, and I’m really proud to be part of it.
Learn more about the Rodale Institute at rodaleinstitute.org, and find out more about J.M. Fortier and his market gardening courses at themarketgardener.com.
