Letting farmers define the standard for their own work
In October 2023, the Real Organic Project held a symposium of farmers, policy leaders, and organic activists from across the country to discuss the topic “Saving Real Organic.” As a new certifier at the organization and a former rice farmer from Louisiana, a place not known for its certified organic production, I was interested to see if the topics discussed in Hudson, New York, would even be relevant to my rural community in the South.
To be honest, “organic” can be a four-letter word in my part of the country. Whether it’s discomfort with government oversight, lamenting the lack of consumer awareness or perceptions of elitism, sentiments run deep, and organic is rarely discussed as a goal or solution for farmers. Yet, year after year Louisianians see farms close their doors. As a community dealing with the first American climate refugees and some of the worst of America’s food insecurity, it’s difficult to figure out how we can support our regional food system. A future that depends on external supply chains is not an ideal option.
And so, I found myself in this group of organic farmers discussing the survival of family farms from a slightly different lens. I was intrigued by how farmers from inside the organic movement were fighting for a solution based on leveraging a national market to build capacity at the local level. They were continuing to ask how the multibillion-dollar organic market that they helped build could continue to keep their farms alive and growing.
Francis Thicke’s speech in particular gave me many thoughts to chew on as I sought to understand why organic in particular was important through the lens of the movement’s history. Here is his story:
I’ve been a dairy farmer, an academic in a land grant university and have worked at the USDA, giving me a unique perspective on organic. Back in 1975, I returned from college to my family’s dairy in Minnesota. I had been a little bit radicalized by the Vietnam War, and my philosophy as a science teacher had taught me to “question everything,” so when I came back home, I thought, “why are we using these chemicals?”
We started trying to farm organically the year I returned home. I simply skipped one of the herbicide applications on one of the fields and, to my surprise, throughout the year, we hardly had any weeds there. In retrospect, I know it was because that field had been in hay for many years, and the weed seed blank was depleted. But I was very excited and my brothers were too, so we decided to put the whole farm into organic the next year.
Of course we had a lot of things to figure out, but we kept at it. My father was not very happy because it didn’t go over well at the weekly card games he had with his other farmer friends. It was my father who was the innovator in his own time. He actually bought the farm we grew up on in 1928, when he was just 17 years old. Shortly after that, the depression hit, and a lot of his friends were going out of business. He said one time he sold a cow and a calf for just $14.
He was about ready to lose his farm as well when FDR came in with the Emergency Mortgage Act. It saved his farm and allowed me to continue farming to this day. In 1935, FDR started the Soil Conservation Service. The farm my father grew up on had been plowed up and down the hills of the Mississippi River bluff lands with slopes of 10 to 20 percent. My father said that on one of the hills, the gullies were so deeply eroded that he could hide a team of horses in the cracks! The Conservation Service was teaching farmers how to prevent this type of erosion with things like strip cropping, and my dad was an early adopter of this. He was innovative in his own time, but organic was a little beyond his reach.
Right off the bat, I related to his words. Farmers are innovators and will make due with whatever is handed to them. Whether it’s the circumstances of a new policy or an accident that turns out to be an opportunity, farm management does not stagnate. In the end, it’s all about survival, and when we look back in our 10,000-year history of being agriculturalists, working with nature is a pretty good strategy.
I, on the other hand, got so excited about organic because I saw that it worked. I decided that I wanted to go back to a land-grant university and give them the good news! I got into the graduate program at the University of Minnesota and was soon surprised at how reductionist the sciences were there. When I had studied philosophy for undergrad, at least everyone’s opinion was heard, but here in the sciences it was a different story.
In the soil sciences I had to pick among five disciplines: soil pathology (how soils originated), soil physics (things like compaction and water flow), soil chemistry and mineralogy, soil biology, or soil fertility. Because of this, I decided on soil fertility as it seemed to integrate all the topics, but all in all, it was astonishing that there really was no soil ecology being taught in the department!
Early on I knocked on the door of one of my soil fertility professors to ask him about organic farming. I started going on and on about what I had experienced on my family farm as I noticed him sitting there, stone faced. I can remember exactly what he said. “Well, it depends upon how far back in the horse and buggy era you want to go.” I learned not to tell anybody that I had been an organic farmer.
All through six years of graduate school and four years working at the USDA in Washington I kept my mouth shut about organic. Whenever there was an opportunity for discussions or debate, I could see the outline of the box they were thinking in, and I just tried to pick a little at the outside of it. I didn’t tell them that I was really way outside of the box. It was such a heretical thing to be involved in. Organic was really a subject of ridicule in seminars; it would bring some chuckles out from everybody. So that’s where I started.
It’s not easy being different. I remember a time I went to a local tractor dealer to buy a new piece of equipment and struck up a conversation with the salesman. I explained to him that I worked on an organic farm down the road, and he told me I must be lying since that wasn’t possible in the Deep South. Hot tip — that’s not the best way to get your tractors off the lot if you’re a salesman! But regardless, it made me realize how controversial it can be to try something different.
In a profession laden with risk, sometimes the decisions we make need to hinge on the demands of predominant systems and principles. Yet conditions always change and learning never stops, so why shun the folks who have the leeway to keep pushing the fold in new directions?
I wanted to trace how the attitude toward organic changed from my perspective on both the external pressures and the internal awakening of the scientists. Externally, in 1988, the LISA program was introduced (Low Input Sustainable Agriculture). That was radical at the time, yet it got through Congress because of organizations like the Sustainable Ag Coalition and other environmental groups. The USDA did not like that program. They didn’t want to have to administer it at first, even though it was funded.
Similarly, ATTRA (the Alternative Technology Transfer for Rural Areas) was put into the extension service at the USDA, and they didn’t like that at all either. When the law was passed to create the National Organic Program, no department wanted to administer it, and it was passed around until it finally landed in the Agricultural Marketing Service. As time went on, more money became available and more scientists came on board, which really made a difference.
About that same time, some scientists and renegades in the soil science world were starting to talk about “soil quality.” They included concepts like organic matter, despite still being on the edge of acceptability. One published paper even said that talking about soil quality was like trying to define politically correct soils. “Soil quality” evolved into “soil health,” including robust soil ecology and how to build pools of soil organic matter. Soil health was controversial still, but it was a steppingstone into getting the community more accepting of organic.
In 1992 I decided to leave USDA to buy this little dairy farm in Iowa that was already processing milk on the farm. That was considered kind of crazy. One of my economist friends had taken me aside and said, “You know, everybody’s quitting this farming thing. You’re really going the wrong way here.” Once the industrial food system started coming in, little farms selling locally were no longer profitable. The industrial dairies at the time were so big that smaller dairies with on-farm processing couldn’t compete, especially without differentiating their practices; milk was milk was milk.
I, on the other hand, realized that if you have a specialty product you can compete with the industrial model. In our case, I could identify several things. We were organic, grass based, and didn’t homogenize the milk. We had Jersey milk, which is higher in solids, sold locally, so it was fresh and people know and visit the cows, and we had even switched to A2 genetics and we’re about 90 percent there. You have to have a specialty product. You simply can’t compete with the industrial model head-to-head.
The words from Francis’ economist friend were striking to me — a 24-year-old contemplating my farming future in a radically changing climate. I don’t think humans have the luxury of “quitting the farming thing” at this point. We need good food to survive, and without some level of that production being locally based, we have less and less control of our own futures. Why would our society and systems choose to lose touch with valuing the importance of a community’s ability to feed itself?
Francis is clear that without defining and distinguishing the environmental, social and nutritional role that specialized farms are playing, there is no way for them to survive in our economic system. The National Organic Program finally gave farmers a way to capture the price premium required to sustain their methods of production.
Yet, what happens when commercialization interacts with an opportunity based in integrity? What happens when qualifications for the label continue to be blurred behind a single, unchanging symbol?
Today, organic is a multibillion-dollar industry, and food businesses want a piece of it — being the fastest-growing sector of food. Actually, they don’t want just a piece of the pie — they want the whole pie.
There’s a difference in integrity when you grow for profit over principle, and we’ve seen many try to get the highest price they can, doing as little as possible to get the label. Now, hydroponics and chickens in warehouses are being labeled organic, making programs like the Real Organic Project needed.
When we first started the Real Organic Project, I thought that we could hold the organic standards up and convince the USDA to change. Now I laugh knowing that wasn’t going to happen because of how much money continues to be spent on food and agriculture lobbyists. It’s more than the military, which is incredible. These lobbies have tremendous power in Congress and at the USDA, which gives them a backdoor into policy.
While the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) has fifteen members, with four positions designated for farmers, the USDA and Secretary of Agriculture have put agribusiness representatives in those farmers’ spots. When us farmers complained, the lobbyists went to Congress during the last Farm Bill and moved to change the law, making agribusiness representatives eligible for farmer spots. We may never have the power to control the National Organic Program. The difference between the NOSB and our Real Organic Standards Board is that we are almost all farmers, and we appoint new members democratically as a group.
I think that the Real Organic Project is really important to the future. It’s important for as long as we want to have real organic food, because if we stop our efforts, who’s going to do it? We’re not gonna go back to the NOSB that is run by agribusiness. We all need to contribute what we can. Some of us can’t contribute a lot of money, but we can contribute what we know. And we all should just try to work together to make sure that this important project continues.
And so, a new label arises, founded by the people who run their farms, with standards defined in a way that farmers who are pushing the fold can relate to.
Coming from grain agriculture, our farm often identified ourselves as being “regenerative.” We saw this word as the best way to explain our value-driven efforts and to help us reach the market that we needed to prosper. Seeing that a clear definition to this term is still lacking, with no-till chemical growers, social justice activists, and PepsiCo using it alike, I hold Francis’ words closely on the dangers of regenerative as a marketing claim. If we want to continue supporting the farms that are desperately working to change our agricultural landscape into something more sustainable, we have to be clear in defining and valuing those efforts.
While the Real Organic Project is a new title, the movement is made up of multiple generations of growers holding steadfast to the idea that their efforts should be rewarded and their products must be distinguishable. This is common sense. Real Organic certification is a free, add-on label for organic farmers to continue marketing their businesses in contrast to industrial organic corporations, while being adequately compensated through the organic market that they themselves built. If you would like to join us or learn more about this ongoing journey to save real organic, you can find us at realorganicproject.org.
Iriel Edwards is from Alexandria, Louisiana, and has been a Certification Coordinator with Real Organic Project since 2023.
