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Today organic foods seem as mainstream as frozen waffles, but the United States still lags far behind Europe. It’s time for Washington to give the industry a jolt.

The chuk-chuk-chuk of an old Ford diesel tractor pierces the morning at Joseph Fields Farm on Johns Island, South Carolina. Eight farmworkers make their way up and down rows of crookneck squash. The workers fill their buckets, then empty them into a cast-iron bathtub filled with water that sits atop an open-sided trailer pulled by the tractor. Yellow specimens get packed into boxes. Green ones are thrown overboard to compost. “It’s a pretty green, and you can eat them, but you can’t sell them to the stores because of the color,” Cleveland Brown, the Ford’s driver, tells me.

Joseph Fields, who owns this organic farm with his wife, Helen, shows up a few minutes later. We set out to walk some of the 50 acres he cultivates. Even in October, when more northerly farms are winding down their growing seasons, Fields is producing a prodigious amount of vegetables: eggplant, zucchini, kale, beets, radishes, butter beans, speckled beans, okra, turnips, collards, crowder peas, cucumbers, cabbage, mustard greens, acorn squash, butternut squash. Fields and his workers weed by hoe and hand, and fertilize with poultry manure. They control pests with a biological agent.