USDA Thinks Organics and GMOs Go Together

by: Jill Richardson

Fri Aug 21, 2009 at 15:09:10 PM PDT

The organic movement rejects biotechnology as inherently contradictory to its fundamental goal of promoting environmental protection in agriculture. European organic promoters in particular stress respect for nature over yield maximization, campaigning for a return to traditional production methods and inputs. [1] In reality, the divide between organics and biotechnology is an artificial construction maintained by ideology rather than science. A governmental decision to change organic regulations to permit the use of biotechnology could have far-reaching policy implications for global agriculture.

Allowing producers to gain organic certification for biotech crops could encourage the development of a new type of environmentally sustainable agricultural production with greater benefits for the consumer.

I go for science - not ideology - and I don't think biotech has a place in organics. For more information on why, I point you to a diary I wrote that summarizes the work of scientist Jack Heinemann and the IAASTD report.

Organics Are On the Rise in China

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Aug 13, 2009 at 17:15:17 PM PDT

Conforming to organic standards when you have no control over neighbors' practices, or what rains down on you, is difficult. But on paper, China's organic farming standards are strict enough, Chen says.

The problem, she says, is making sure that farmers stick to those standards, and ensuring that there are enough authorities to adequately monitor producers who claim their food is organic -- a tall order in a country where toxic, heavy-metal-filled sewage sludge is the cheapest, most easily accessible fertilizer around.

Though one might wonder what could be more organic than excrement, medical waste and factory runoff also make their way into sewer systems. Not limited to China, the use of toxic sludge fertilizer is a widespread problem, seen in the U.S. and elsewhere.

That makes me want to eat food from China even less than I already did. Thank goodness at least some Chinese farmers are waking up.

i am soooooo fed up

by: RiaD

Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 17:57:14 PM PDT

Sampler Platter

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Jul 25, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT

• What happens when a cropduster gets too close to an organic farm? Nothing good.

• Wanna take some action against NAIS? Click on the link and send an email to the USDA.

• Why are artisan producers so important? Read this article on a local salumi company and you'll begin to understand. From the age, breed, and feed of the pigs to the lack of nitrates to the unique recipes, Knight Salumi produces a product that just cannot be obtained through our corporate food system.

• "Three wise men" made a pilgrimage to DC last week: Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Fred Kirschanmann. Here's a Q&A with the trio. I sure hope the politicians who met with them valued their input.

• Organics grew 118% (by acreage) worldwide between 2000 and 2007. Organics are still less than 1% of global agriculture, however. 97% of spending on organics occurs in the U.S. and E.U. I think this is probably only looking at CERTIFIED organics - who knows how much uncertified land is managed organically in developing countries by people who never converted to industrial techniques.

• ACTION: Re-examine our trade agreements. The TRADE Act looks like a great bill to support.

• A Pennsylvania school board didn't want to hear the consequences of allowing a CAFO to locate near where the school buses are parked. You can see the presentation they WOULD have seen at the link.

• Here's a great article on bogus "local" campaigns by major corporations who are anything but.

• Hillary Clinton thinks Indian farmer suicides are due to a need for loans. Well, sort of. If you want to take a really shallow view of it, then yes. But there's a lot more to the story than just that, and I doubt Hillary wants to "go there" because it might involve questioning free trade and industrial agriculture.

• Food stamps are getting easier to use at farmers' markets, says the NYT. GOOD. This is a very hot topic near where I live. We had no markets that took food stamps a little over a year ago. Now we have several, and it really wasn't that difficult to set up (so I'm told). Yet, most markets around here STILL don't take food stamps, because those in charge haven't taken the steps to do so (and presumably either haven't thought about it or don't want to).

• What's going on in California's Central Valley? Well, it's not good. As the water dried up, so did the paychecks. This article calls Fresno "California's Detroit."

• A new study smacks down Monsanto. From the abstract:

  Chronic health effects are increasing in the world such as cancers, hormonal, reproductive, nervous, or immune diseases, even in young people. During regulatory toxicological subchronic tests to prevent these on mammalian health, prior commercialization of chemicals, including pesticides and drugs, or GMOs, some statistically significant findings may be revealed. This discussion is about the need to investigate the relevant criteria to consider those as biologically significant. The sex differences and the non linear dose or time related effects should be considered in contrast to the claims of a Monsanto-supported expert panel about a GMO, the MON 863 Bt maize, but also for pesticides or drugs, in particular to reveal hormone-dependent diseases and first signs of toxicities.

Is the Organic Label Worth the Paper It's Printed On?

by: Jill Richardson

Wed Jul 22, 2009 at 21:35:49 PM PDT

Unraveling Organic

by: Sophy

Wed Jul 08, 2009 at 14:04:13 PM PDT

Multinational corporations have been gobbling up organic companies since they figured out they could make a buck or two off the $23 billion-a-year business. When you buy Horizon Milk, you're supporting dairy giant and factory farmers extraordinaire, Dean Foods. Boca Burgers are owned by Kraft, Odwalla is owned by Coca-Cola, Stonyfield by Danone. (For some great charts on organic food, click here.) For those who care simply about eating healthier, perhaps it doesn't really matter who owns the brand. For others who care about where their dollars are going, buying conventional organic is just buying into the same old corporate machine.

Granted, there are a good number of successful companies who have managed to remain independent. Organic Valley, Amy's Kitchen and Eden Foods are just a few examples that have managed to stay away from corporate takeover. There are also some serious benefits that come along with organic. Animals are fed vegetarian feed and are not given hormones or antibiotics unless ill. Fruits and vegetables are not treated with pesticides. The organic certification also prohibits genetic modification, sewage sludge and irradiation.  

Breaking: Gates Foundation Does Something Good

by: Jill Richardson

Wed Jul 08, 2009 at 12:50:45 PM PDT

Worldwatch Institute will assess the impacts of a range of farming techniques on the environment and agricultural productivity. The project will provide stakeholders, including policymakers, farmer and community networks, and international donors, with research on practical solutions for creating sustainable food security.

In other words, they are going to try some sustainable agriculture and see what happens. Nice. Here are the specific things they say they will try:

• Adding nitrogen-fixing plants into crop rotations as a low-cost solution for enriching soils and breaking weed and pest cycles;

• Overcoming freshwater shortages with rain harvesting, efficient irrigation, micro dams, and cover cropping;

• Strengthening local breeding capacity, including the use of farmer-run seed banks and genetic markers of important crop traits;

• Tapping international carbon-credit markets to reward farmers for enriching their soils and planting carbon-sequestering tree crops;

• Involving women farmers in decision-making at all levels.

Better yet? They are partnering with groups like World Neighbors, Ecoagriculture Partners, Heifer International, Rodale Institute, Slow Food International, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the Global Water Policy Project. Very exciting! The end result of the project will be the Institute's 2011 annual report "World 2011: Nourishing the Planet," which will share the project's findings.

St. Jude's Food Bank Garden, July 1, 2009

by: paradox

Tue Jul 07, 2009 at 17:18:11 PM PDT

Before I left I snapped the required images of St. Jude's Food Bank Garden for July 1 but couldn't post.  Many things are going well, I decided for the first year I just had try hard, it's been a while since I tried to grow so much. Looks like 300 ears of corn in three weeks, not a bad effort.

[Images below the fold]

Organic CAN Feed the World

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Jun 22, 2009 at 17:58:56 PM PDT

Meanwhile, Kass told the children, the teachers and the press that the garden already had produced lettuce, snap peas, beans, kale, collards and chard. Kass said he has taken 90 pounds of produce from the garden, including broccoli and green beans and "one beautiful eggplant." He also said he has harvested herbs "every night," which are not included in the 90 pounds. The garden has produced only one cucumber, which Kass saved for the children to harvest. It was supposed to be a white cucumber, but it had turned yellow.

Kass said no chemicals - fertilizer or herbicide - had been used on the garden, but that the underlying White House soil had been "amended" with crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, green sand compost and lime powder. A White House spokeswoman also said that only organic fertilizers and insect repellants will be used and that lady bugs and praying mantises will be introduced to naturally control other insect populations. A honeybee hive has been set up nearby for pollination purposes.

Kass said that the only insect problem he had noticed is that "something is nibbling a little bit on the kale."

Pardon the metaphor, but by planting an organic garden, Michelle Obama acted like Toto, pulling back the curtain to reveal the little man pretending to be the almighty wizard. That man - or men - behind the curtain are the biotech, pesticide, and fertilizer industries, who desperately want the American people to believe that they are absolutely necessary to prevent our starvation.

They call for using "science" in agriculture, but they ignore what science actually says. According to a paper called "Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply" published in 2007, a study (referred to by Jack Heinemann as "the largest meta-analysis ever conducted on the relative performance of agroecological and conventional... agriculture") found that organic CAN feed the world. Specifically, on average, organic systems produce 92% as much as conventional agriculture in the developed world. However, in developing countries, organics produces 80% MORE than conventional agriculture. Therefore, the paper concludes:

With the average yield ratios, we modeled the global food supply that could be grown organically on the current agricultural land base. Model estimates indicate that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base.

The reason why there's such a stark difference between the developed and developing world is not because organic magically produces more in developing nations. Rather, it is because the farmers in those countries often lack the crop inputs used in the developed world to obtain such high yields. As the inputs used in the U.S. involve a LOT of oil, a resource we are running out of, this says to me that our best route to maximum yields in the future is going organic now.

Another claim by proponents of chemical agriculture is that we wouldn't have enough nitrogen to produce our food without synthetic fertilizer. The paper addressed that too, stating in its abstract:

We also evaluated the amount of nitrogen potentially available from fixation by leguminous cover crops used as fertilizer. Data from temperate and tropical agroecosystems suggest that leguminous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace the amount of synthetic fertilizer currently in use. These results indicate that organic agriculture has the potential to contribute quite substantially to the global food supply, while reducing the detrimental environmental impacts of conventional agriculture.

In a press release, one of the researchers from the study summed up their findings perfectly:

Perfecto said the idea that people would go hungry if farming went organic is "ridiculous."

"Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies-all have been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food," she said.

Junk Science Study Says Factory Farming is Better

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT

Contrary to the negative image often associated with large farm operations, the U.S. population's requirements for dairy products is best fulfilled and most sustainable through the application of modern agricultural techniques, a just-released study has shown.

The study, conducted by Drs. Jude Capper and Dale Bauman of Cornell University and Roger Cady, formerly of Monsanto and now with Elanco Animal Health, compared the environmental impact of modern (2007) U.S. dairy production with that of dairy systems in 1944...

Among the findings were that modern dairy practices require considerably fewer resources than dairying in 1944 with 21% of animals, 23% of feedstuffs, 35% of the water and only 10% of the land required to produce the same 1 billion kg of milk.

Waste outputs were similarly reduced, with modern dairy systems producing 24% of the manure, 43% of CH4 and 56% of N2O per billion kg of milk, compared with equivalent milk from historical dairying.

What's wrong with this picture? There's another factor that has also led to increased dairy output (per cow) since 1944: breeding. In the past 60+ years, we have been aggressively breeding our cows to produce more and more milk. Therefore, the amount of resources required by a 1944 dairy cow to produce a gallon of milk would almost certainly exceed the resources required by a 2009 cow to produce that same gallon of milk today, even if they were raised in the same way.

UPDATE: According to a recent USDA report, organic cows produced an average of 13,601 lbs of milk per cow in 2005, compared with 18,983 for conventional cows. Approximately 2/3 of organic cows were raised on pasture. Comparatively, the cows of 1944 cited in the study produced an average of 4,555 lbs of milk per year.

Yet, according to the study:

In 1944, the U.S. dairy population totaled 25.6 million cows producing a total of 53.0 billion kg of milk annually. It was a system characterized by pasture-based systems with rations reliant on home-grown forages with few purchased concentrate feeds. Draft horses powered the majority of agronomical operations, with only 1.2 tractors employed per farm. Inorganic fertilizer use was not yet widespread; instead, animal manure was used to fulfill crop nutrient requirements.

The researchers noted that many of the characteristics of 1944 dairy farming (low-yielding, pasture-based, no antibiotics, inorganic fertilizers, or chemical pesticides) are similar to those of today's modern organic systems.

Again, they are comparing today's modern organic farming to outdated practices of yesteryear. Even in the practices specified here, obviously the vast majority of organic farmers use tractors instead of horses today. What a slap in the face to today's organic dairy farmers who - like Iowa dairy farmer Francis Thicke - hold PhD's in modern scientific fields and run their organic operations according to the latest scientific & technological innovations. Also, I'd love to see a comparison of the nutrition of 1944 milk compared to the milk of today. Productivity isn't the be-all and end-all goal when you are sacrificing nutrition at the same time.

Organic Farming is 21st Century

by: Francis Thicke

Wed Jun 10, 2009 at 19:06:15 PM PDT

Please, Uncle Sam, Leave Our Salad Alone!

by: Jill Richardson

Wed Jun 10, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT

The part where this analogy breaks down is that E. coli comes from manure, and spinach doesn't poop. Cows do. Also, E. coli dies at 165F and whereas we (usually) cook beef, we don't always cook leafy greens. At the time of the spinach/E. coli outbreak, somebody jokingly said to me that this was meat-eaters way of killing off the vegetarians (i.e. having their food taint our food, which we would then eat uncooked while they would cook theirs and avoid getting sick).

Obviously, having repeated E. coli outbreaks from leafy greens isn't acceptable. But it's no more acceptable to put in place measures that are bad for organic producers and the environment, which appears to be a distinct possibility in our near future.

Our next step on this will be to wait for a post on the Federal Register from the USDA, and we can send comments there. For now, the only action we can take is to inform ourselves and spread the word.

Organic Statistics

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Jun 09, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PDT

Organic sales may have quintupled, but between 1997 and 2005, organic acreage in the U.S. only doubled. Just to give you an idea of how American agriculture is keeping up with that demand, consider these stats from the 2007 Census of Agriculture:

Organic Farms: 18,211
Total Farms; 2,204,792

Organic Farm Sales: $1,709,111,000
Value of All Agricultural Products Sold: $297,220,491,000

Organic Cropland: 1,288,088 acres
Organic Pastureland: 975,380 acres
Land under Organic Conversion: 616,358 acres
Total cropland in America: 309,607,601 acres

(While obviously a very small percent of land is organic, the numbers differ from food to food... 5% of vegetable acres are organic, as are 2.5% of fruit and nut acreage, 0.5% of pasture, and 0.2% of corn and soybeans.)

So it's no wonder why 44% of organic handlers reported a shortage of organic ingredients or products in 2004... we're just not producing enough! To solve the supply problem, we're getting more and more organics from overseas. As the report notes, the USDA is working to fix the supply program by providing incentives for farmers to convert more land to organic. You may remember the recent announcement of $50 million in conservation grant funding (under the EQIP program) for farmers converting to organic production... that's part of what they are doing to increase our organic production.

Another nice detail is that government spending on organics has gone up five-fold between 2002 and 2008. See below for more numbers and facts about organics...

Organic Farming Is Not 19th Century Agriculture

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Jun 08, 2009 at 14:00:00 PM PDT

"We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century."

Dr Fedoroff, who wrote a book about GM Foods in 2004, believes critics of genetically modified maize (corn) and rice are living in bygone times.

"We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production."

Federoff's got a PhD and I don't, but I'm going out on a limb here to say that she doesn't have a freaking clue what she's talking about. Why? Because nobody who advocates for sustainable or regenerative agriculture is actually advocating "Grandpa-style" farming. Even the modern day Amish farmers are more sophisticated than that!

USDA Pledges Integration of Organics Across All Agencies

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 14:00:00 PM PDT

The latest news is that Merrigan pledges integration of organics across the entire USDA:

Merrigan stated that, "here is where I'd like to fulfill a promise I made to many of you...and that is, organic should be integrated across all the agencies, not just the NOP, but each and every agency at USDA should have some engagement with the organic sector." In addition to the integration, Merrigan said, "Organic can no longer be stove-piped at USDA."

Additionally, she spoke about an Organic Production Survey that USDA is conducting - the "first ever wide-scale survey of organic farming in the United States." The survey results will be used to "shape policy and priorities with an eye toward helping small organic producers grow their operations into mid-sized farms and ranches."

Another great bit of news about Merrigan and organics? She wants to strictly uphold and enforce organic standards:

"We spent a lot of time developing standards, and now let's make sure they have the teeth and that they are followed and adhered to," said Merrigan.