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Beyond Pesticides, a public interest organization founded to advocate for healthy air, water, land, and food by eliminating the use of toxic pesticides, and advance healthy practices, has announced the formation of an investigative arm, OrganicEye. The new watchdog agency will focus on defending the “time-honored philosophy and legal definition of organic farming and food production” from USDA’s systemic failure to protect the interests of organic farmers, ethical businesses, and consumers.
Is the National Organic Program (NOP) doing a good job of fulfilling its stated mission: developing and enforcing “uniform national standards for organically-produced agricultural products sold in the United States?”
That’s debatable. And so the question of organic standards enforcement was debated—last month, during the Northeast Organic Farmers Association (NOFA) conference in Amherst, Mass.
The perpetrator of the largest case of organic fraud in U.S. history was sentenced to 10 plus years in prison last Friday. Between 2010 and 2017, court documents show that Randy Constant ran an Iowa grain brokerage, selling $142 million-plus in supposedly “organic” animal feed to livestock farmers throughout the Midwest.
The organic industry just received another harsh reminder — unless we truly deal with our problems, the integrity of the organic seal will only suffer further damage. With The Washington Post’s investigation of Aurora Dairy in the rearview mirror — and largely ignored by the USDA— the dairy scandal that we are now facing is Natural Prairie Dairy, a 14,000-head organic dairy in Texas.
If you’re looking for a great steak these days, you’re not only looking for succulence but also a piece of meat with premium nutrition that didn’t come from an animal-abusing, earth-polluting factory farm. Grass fed beef, from animals that only grazed on grass their entire lives, is unique because it provides all of these qualities in every cut.
As the USDA organic seal becomes ever murkier in its meaning, what choices are left to us?
We want real organic food. We want vegetables and berries grown in the soil. We want cows and chickens raised on pasture. It sounds so simple And it is what the law guarantees us. And it is what most organic farmers in the U.S. provide.
And yet . . . if we look closer, that’s often not what we’re being offered as organic in the grocery stores. If we pull on the thread, the cloth starts to unravel. We see soil farmers and pasture farmers going out of business for lack of demand, even while we’re desperate to buy the food they grow.
In the last 7 years there has been a quiet redefinition taking place in the USDA National Organic Program that oversees organic standards. Large scale industrial producers have insinuated themselves into organic certification to transform what the green and white label stands for.
It’s easy to forget that before there was a National Organic Program, before there was organic certification, before there were genetically engineered crops and industrial factory farms, there were farmers—farmers who grew nutritious food and raised healthy meat, using farming and ranching practices that worked with, and enhanced, the Earth’s natural ecosystems.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program evolved out of the need to define “organic” in order to protect these good farmers in a marketplace increasingly being taken over by industrial food producers. Unfortunately, over the years, industrial food lobbyists have used their financial and political clout to try their best to weaken organic standards.
In the produce section of my local food co-op sit Driscoll’s berries in their neat little rows: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, each in plastic clamshells. No other berry options are present on the shelf. Paging the receivers, I ask, “Do we have any non-hydroponically grown berries?”
Organic farming isn’t new. For as long as people have been growing food, natural and organic methods were the norm. What’s new is organic’s substantial value in the modern marketplace. And that radical change has occurred in just the last 30 years.
