John Mackey
Co-CEO
Whole Foods Market
550 Bowie Street
Austin, TX 78703

Dear Mr.Mackey,

As Certified Organic farmers we value our longstanding relationships with Whole Foods Market. Very few businesses have done more to help build our organic movement over the last several decades. We sincerely value your patronage.

However, and we don’t articulate this discontent lightly, we are deeply concerned that Whole Foods’ newly launched “Responibly Grown” ratin program is onerous, expensive, and shifts the cost of this marketing initiative to growers, many of whom are family-scale farmers with narrow profit margins. We have limited amounts of managment and staff time that are sorely taxed to execute the voluminous application your company has developed.

Paying for this program, its required technology, and the labor necessary to participate will be impossible for many of the smallest family-scale farmers and an excessive burden on medium-sized organic operations. We have surveyed numerous growers who have already complied and they estimate their costs ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.

Furthermore, our reatest concern is the devaluation of the organic label in Whole Foods Market stores. The “Responsibily Grown” program allows conventional farmers utilizing lower-cost managment techniques, still incorperating toxic inputs, to unfairly compete with Certified Organic produce in your stores on a level footing with – or even rated better than – organic farmers. Growing ecologically produced food isn’t cheap. And to that we must add the considerable cost of organic certification. Whole Foods has done so much to help educate its customers about the advantages of eating an organic diet. This new rating program undermines, to a great degree, those efforts.