IV. Down on the Industrial Organic Farm
o farm I have ever visited before prepared me for the industrial organic
farms I saw in California. When I think about organic farming, I think
family farm, I think small scale, I think hedgerows and compost piles
and battered pickup trucks. I don't think migrant laborers, combines,
thousands of acres of broccoli reaching clear to the horizon. To the
eye, these farms look exactly like any other industrial farm in
California -- and in fact the biggest organic operations in the state
today are owned and operated by conventional mega-farms. The same farmer
who is applying toxic fumigants to sterilize the soil in one field is in
the next field applying compost to nurture the soil's natural fertility.
Is there something wrong with this picture? It all depends on where you
stand. Gene Kahn makes the case that the scale of a farm has no bearing
on its fidelity to organic principles and that unless organic "scales
up" it will "never be anything more than yuppie food." To prove his
point, Kahn sent me to visit large-scale farms whose organic practices
were in many ways quite impressive, including the Central Valley
operation that grows vegetables for his frozen dinners and tomatoes for
Muir Glen.
Greenways Organic is a successful 2,000-acre organic-produce operation
tucked into a 24,000-acre conventional farm outside Fresno; the crops,
the machines, the crews, the rotations and the fields were
indistinguishable, and yet two very different kinds of industrial
agriculture are being practiced here side by side.
In place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways's organic fields are
nourished by compost made by the ton at a horse farm nearby. Insects are
controlled with biological agents and beneficial insects like lacewings.
Frequent and carefully timed tilling, as well as propane torches, keeps
down the weeds, perhaps the industrial organic farmer's single stiffest
challenge. This approach is at best a compromise: running tillers
through the soil so frequently is destructive to its tilth, yet weeding
a 160-acre block of broccoli by hand is unrealistic.
Since Greenways grows the same crops conventionally and organically, I
was interested to hear John Diener, one of the farm's three partners,
say he knew for a fact that his organic crops were "better," and not
only because they hadn't been doused with pesticide. When Diener takes
his tomatoes to the cannery, the organic crop reliably receives higher
Brix scores -- a measure of the sugars in fruits and vegetables. It
seems that crops grown on nitrogen fertilizer take up considerably more
water, thereby diluting their nutrients, sugars and flavors. The same
biochemical process could explain why many people -- including the many
chefs who swear by organic ingredients -- believe organic produce simply
tastes better. With less water in it, the flavor and the nutrients of a
floret of organic broccoli will be more concentrated than one grown with
chemical fertilizers.
It's too simple to say that smaller organic farms are automatically
truer to the organic ideal than big ones. In fact, the organic ideal is
so exacting -- a sustainable system that requires not only no synthetic
chemicals but also few purchased inputs of any kind and that returns as
much to the soil as it removes -- that it is most often honored in the
breach. Yet the farmers who come closest to achieving this ideal do tend
to be smaller in scale. These are the farmers who plant dozens of
different crops in fields that resemble quilts and practice long and
elaborate rotations, thereby achieving the rich biodiversity in space
and time that is the key to making a farm sustainable.
For better or worse, these are not the kinds of farms Small Planet Foods
does business with today. It's simply more efficient to buy from one
1,000-acre farm than 10 100-acre farms. Indeed, Cascadian Farm the
corporation can't even afford to use produce from Cascadian Farm the
farm: it's too small. So the berries grown there are sold at a roadside
stand, while the company buys berries for freezing from as far away as
Chile.
he big question is whether the logic of an industrial food chain can be
reconciled to the logic of the natural systems on which organic
agriculture has tried to model itself. Put another way, Is "industrial
organic" a contradiction in terms?
Kahn is convinced it is not, but others both inside and outside his
company see a tension. Sarah Huntington is one of Cascadian's oldest
employees. She worked alongside Kahn on the farm and at one time or
another has held just about every job in the company. "The maw of that
processing plant beast eats 10 acres of cornfield an hour," she told me.
"And you're locked into planting a particular variety like Jubilee that
ripens all at once and holds up in processing. So you see how the system
is constantly pushing you back toward monoculture, which is anathema in
organic. But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it
changes you."
One of the most striking ways Small Planet Foods is changing the system
is by helping conventional farms convert a portion of their acreage to
organic. Several thousand acres of American farmland are now organic as
a result of the company's efforts, which go well beyond offering
contracts to providing instruction and even management. Kahn has helped
to prove to the skeptical that organic -- dismissed as "hippie farming"
not very long ago -- can work on a large scale. The environmental
benefits of this educational process shouldn't be underestimated. And
yet the industrialization of organic comes at a price. The most obvious
is consolidation: today five giant farms control fully one-half of the
$400 million organic produce market in California. Partly as a result,
the price premium for organic crops is shrinking. This is all to the
good for expanding organic's market beyond yuppies, but it is crushing
many of the small farmers for whom organic has represented a profitable
niche, a way out of the cheap-food economics that has ravaged American
farming over the last few decades. Indeed, many of the small farmers
present at the creation of organic agriculture today find themselves
struggling to compete against the larger players, as the familiar,
dismal history of American agriculture begins to repeat itself in the
organic sector.
This has opened up a gulf in the movement between Big and Little Organic
and convinced many of the movement's founders that the time has come to
move "beyond organic" -- to raise the bar on American agriculture yet
again. Some of these innovating farmers want to stress fair labor
standards, others quality or growing exclusively for local markets. In
Maine, Eliot Coleman has pioneered a sophisticated market garden
entirely under plastic, to supply his "food shed" with local produce all
winter long; even in January his solar-heated farm beats California on
freshness and quality, if not price. In Virginia, Joel Salatin has
developed an ingenious self-sufficient rotation of grass-fed livestock:
cattle, chickens and rabbits that take turns eating, and feeding, the
same small pasture. There are hundreds of these "beyond organic" farmers
springing up now around the country. The fact is, however, that the word
"organic" -- having entered the vocabulary of both agribusiness and
government -- is no longer these farmers' to redefine. Coleman and
Salatin, both of whom reject the U.S.D.A. organic label, are searching
for new words to describe what it is they're doing. Michael Ableman, a
"beyond organic" farmer near Santa Barbara, Calif., says: "We may have
to give up on the word 'organic,' leave it to the Gene Kahns of the
world. To be honest, I'm not sure I want the association, because what
I'm doing on my farm is not just substituting materials."
Not long ago at a conference on organic agriculture, a corporate organic
farmer suggested to a family farmer struggling to survive in the
competitive world of industrial organic agriculture that he "should
really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market."
The small farmer replied: "I believe I developed that niche 20 years
ago. It's called 'organic.' And now you're sitting on it."
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