In Distrust of Movements: Why Our Farm is not Certified Organic
by Amanda Cather, Waltham Fields Community Farm, August 28, 2005
The title of this essay is taken from a wonderful Wendell Berry article that all of you, if you have a chance to look it up on the Internet, should definitely read, and reminds me of a moment during his keynote speech at the Northeast Organic Farmers’ Summer Conference several years ago. Mr. Berry was asked by a passionate young farmer whether he did not think that all farmland should be certified organic. “Heavens, no,” replied the sage of sustainable agriculture, or something to that effect. “I don’t want the government coming on my land and telling me how to grow my crops. I want local folks to decide how they want local food grown. And I want them to know it firsthand.”
And this, in a nutshell, is the reason that we are not certified organic. We adhere to the National Organic Standards, a set of rules governing organic production put together by a thoughtful group of people at the beginning of the century and now administered by the USDA. We are very much in favor of transparency in agricultural production, the idea that people who eat the food we grow should know what has been done to it and to the land it is grown on. We do not believe in using chemical pesticides or fertilizers, we believe that building good soil makes good food, and we strive to produce the healthiest, most vibrantly alive produce we can grow to give to our CSA shareholders and hunger relief partners. And we support and participate in the Northeast Organic Farmers’ Association, the local folks who are doing so much to promote sustainable agriculture in our region. Simply put, we believe in organic agricultural production as one part—a very fundamental part—of the change that needs to happen in our food system.
BUT. We believe that ‘organic’—the term that no farm is now allowed to use without the seal of approval from a USDA-approved certifying agent—used to mean, or at least to imply, more than simply a set of production practices. To say a farm was organic almost always used to mean that the farm was small scale, often diversified, selling primarily locally. It often meant that farmer and consumer were engaged in a kind of ecological, economic and social symbiosis, sometimes verging on the artistic or the spiritual. It often meant local economies were benefiting from the farm’s sourcing its inputs locally and selling its products locally. It meant that farmland was preserved in small parcels, often including woodlands, pastures, wild meadows and streams as well as cultivated fields. It meant communities of growers and consumers engaged in learning how to grow and purchase food more wisely and how to teach others to do so. It meant a commitment to living wages for farmers and farm workers and to fair prices (which often necessarily reflected the hidden costs not evident in conventionally grown food) for consumers. The ambiguities of ‘often’ and ‘implied’, of course, as well as the differing standards that were set by local certifying agents across the country, are part of what fueled the USDA’s push to set national standards for organic food. And there’s nothing wrong, inherently, in knowing the standards by which the ingredients in a jar of processed salsa or tomato sauce from a company 3,000 miles away were produced. And we all, in our busy lifestyles, eat a jar of canned tomato sauce from time to time, and it might as well be organic, to my way of thinking.
BUT. Imagine knowing firsthand, because you walked the fields and talked to the farmer and put that tomato sauce into jars yourself, how those tomatoes were grown. Imagine the benefits to our communities if we all, collectively, take active responsibility for knowing the economic, social and ecological conditions in which our food is grown instead of relying on the USDA to give us a small fraction of the true picture. That’s why even most organic farmers will tell you that they’ll choose local food over organic food 90% of the time if they have to choose. And that is the most important reason why our farm is not certified organic: to make the complexities of the food system a little more evident, and to make you ask questions and to make us answer honestly, without the benefit of some standards to hide behind. We want our own little community of growers and consumers to set our own standards of what sustainable agriculture really means, and to try our best to live up to those standards.
Enough soapbox. Enjoy your veggies.