Part 1: The Roots of Real Organic and why we must return to them
Over the last several months I’ve been blessed to attend a fantastic trio of ecological farmer conferences– Acres, USA; The Organic Association of Kentucky; and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association; and more recently also The Real Organic Project’s symposium on the future of organic and regenerative ag and the lightning fast evolution of the use of the term “regenerative.” The upcoming Climate Smart Commodities grant has really opened up my capacity to dive into the world of agriculture-as-healthy-ecological-systems and the people who make it happen. I wanted to share some piece of what I learned with you, to bring you into the major questions which these thoughtful people are turning over (or at least incorporating into the top layer of the soil, to lead with a Plowman’s Folly joke).
I have had a hard time starting this series of posts, overwhelmed a bit by everything I’ve taken in. Tonight is the night to just pick one piece and start. I hope you will find useful news from the field if you are interested in this space– as a customer and eater, as a farmer, as a policy nerd or future-minded parent. Be prepared: the SEO AI overlords of google will not approve. I’m going to talk like myself and the robots will give me failing marks in keywordification.
In January my mom and I attended the always-fantastic conference of the Organic Association of Kentucky. It opened with half-day schools on Thursday that allowed for a deep dive, in my case into “Growing and Selling Profitable Greens Year-Round,” a talk about growing salad professionally, organically, through Tennessee summers, while mom looked into Forest Farming. It really made me think about how we can better use our high tunnel now that we have a small direct to consumer farm stop in town. This is new for us, and this is the year we start leaning into the shop, broadening what we have to offer in ways that improves the diversity of our farm yield and improves the experience of the customer. Her foray into forest farming encouraged us in our sense that we can begin to responsibly source high value medicinal plants from our woodlands in the coming years, and we look forward to launching our first medicinal plant tinctures this week!
Back to OAK. The Friday keynote by Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics traced the origin story of the “War on Disease” model back to the recommendations of the Flexner Report, “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” and particularly to the enforcement of those recommendations by licensing regulations. In the 1972 reprint, the Carnegie Foundation congratulated itself on the way that the study of medical education “and subsequent generous grants from the General Education Board and others, provided the impetus for revolutionary advances in the training of physicians.” One of the results of this “revolutionary advance” was that local healers with community relationships knowledge of locally growing plant medicines were all driven out of “approved medicine” and maligned as unscientific quacks. The budding pharmaceutical industry set roots. In short, Carnegie didn’t invest without result, and it was the stick and carrot of licensing and granting funds which solidified the grasp of those trained in medical schools linked to the the highly professionalized “War on Disease” model of “health care” that we see today.
From there, Amen showed how that “War on” approach entered farming, leading to the chemical sterilization (killing off) of the soil and the synthetic feeding of the plants. This approach then triggers the crisis of chronic disease we face today, through links between the microbial life of the soil, the nutrient density (or not) of food, and the microbiome of the gut. And so today, we find ever-increasing external/chemical inputs are needed to maintain the temporary appearance of fertility in the land and health in the body. Amen opened the conference with a beautiful foundational message for all assembled: By using regenerative biological farming systems to offer the people truly nourishing food, we can heal the earth and ourselves.
Saturday’s keynote, “Reclaiming the Roots of Organic Farming” by John Ikerd brought down the house. Here’s the paper which his talk was based on, which I recommend, though it doesn’t have the spirit of his live delivery! He begins in the decades of 1900-1940 with organic pioneers who considered “the possibilities of creating a permanent agriculture: an agriculture that could not only meet the needs of the present but do so without diminishing the agricultural opportunities of future generations.” One of the deepest roots among these early supporters of permanent agriculture in the west was FH King, who brought the knowledge of “Farmers of Forty Centuries” back from China. Others among this group of key thinkers at the turn of the 20th century include Rudolph Steiner, Sir Albert Howard, and JI Rodale. The work of these and hundreds of other authors writing decades ago on these topics is available at the Soil and Health Library, which is a great resource! Ikerd describes an origin for organic farming which was centered on fertility. He flows into the natural food movement of the 60s pushing back against the industrial agricultural model which came out of world war II, but which particularly focused on clean eating and avoiding toxics. This clean-food focus forms the non-negotiable basis of the organic standards that we see today.
He then notes the expansion of “Organic” as an industry in the 90s, leading to a sort of spiritual plateau where the perception was that, “except for restrictions on use of synthetic agrochemicals and food additives, the organic food movement eventually began to seem more and more like other sectors of the industrial food system.” He describes how, at that juncture, “consumers who were concerned about the environmental and social consequences of industrial agriculture then began looking to local farmers to ensure the integrity of their foods. Many organic farmers who marketed locally continued to use organic production practices but no longer bothered with organic certification. Their customers knew them personally and trusted them. The number of farmers markets tripled between 1994 and 2009, increasing from 1,755 to 5,274. Community supported farming operations or CSAs also grew rapidly from virtually none in the 1980s to 12,000 in 2012.
Then the talk took a turn towards the heart of a global question before us all: can industrial farming be reformed to a point that it doesn’t crash the planet? He references the paper “From Uniformity to Diversity” by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. According to the authors, “Based on a review of the latest evidence, the report identifies the major potential for diversified agroecological systems to succeed where current systems are failing, namely in reconciling concerns such as food security, environmental protection, nutritional adequacy and social equity. This report also asks what is keeping industrial agriculture in place, and what would be required in order to spark a shift towards diversified agroecological systems.”
This question of “what keeps industrial agriculture in place?” considering the failures listed above is a critical one for those of us who believe that the farming and health solutions we seek will not be found by tinkering with the edges of the current industrial food and farming model. Thinking strategically about these “lock in” factors holds lessons for all of the challenges we face as People in this supercharged time. I’ll quote here from their discussion of Lock-in 5: Short-Term Thinking.
“Diversified agroecological systems offer major benefits for farmers and for society. However, the advantages will not be immediately visible, given the time needed to rebuild soil health and fertility, to increase biodiversity in production systems, and to reap the benefits of enhanced resilience. Unfortunately, key players in food systems are often required to deliver short-term results:
- *Politicians are locked into short-term electoral cycles that encourage and reward policies that deliver immediate returns.
- *Publicly-traded agribusiness firms are required to deliver rapid returns to shareholders.
- *Retailers are bound by consumer expectations for year-round availability of a variety of foods at low prices.
- *Farmers often face immediate economic pressures (e.g. to pay back investments in equipment, inputs etc.).
These conditions are not conducive to fundamental shifts in production requiring a transitional period in order to bear fruit. This helps to reinforce the status quo of industrial agriculture.”
A bit deeper into the report, it goes on to say that, “the benefits of diversified agroecological farming are still systematically undervalued by the criteria typically used to measure agricultural performance. It is therefore essential to adopt and systematically refer to a broader range of indicators, covering long-term ecosystem health; total resource flows; sustainable interactions between agriculture and the wider economy; the sustainability of outputs; nutrition and health outcomes; livelihood resilience; and the economic viability of farms with respect to debt, climate shocks etc.”
This gets at a tricky point which sits at the heart of my next post: Can agroecological systems be captured by metrics? What should we be measuring? Is it finally as Lady Balfour told us in her 1939 talk, Toward a Sustainable Agriculture: A Living Soil, “I am sure that the techniques of organic farming cannot be imprisoned in a rigid set of rules. They depend essentially on the outlook of the farmer. Without a positive and ecological approach it is not possible to farm organically.”
Either way, now is the time to build coalitions able to advance a policy that supports farmers in transitioning to a new way of living, rather than support them continuing in the same rut on a road to nowhere. Ikerd foresees a time when communities (or perhaps small regions) will have their own locally-based food systems. We share this vision and put it at the heart of our Climate Smart Commodities project– what could be more resilient and gentle on the earth’s climate than food systems that source as much as possible from the region, adapting more closely to the lands that we each live in.
The IPES members’ key message: “Today’s food and farming systems have succeeded in supplying large volumes of foods to global markets, but are generating negative outcomes on multiple fronts: widespread degradation of land, water and ecosystems; high GHG emissions; biodiversity losses; persistent hunger and micro-nutrient deficiencies alongside the rapid rise of obesity and diet-related diseases; and livelihood stresses for farmers around the world.”
They conclude their report with the world-shifting prescription: “What is required is a fundamentally different model of agriculture based on diversifying farms and farming landscapes, replacing chemical inputs, optimizing biodiversity and stimulating interactions between different species, as part of holistic strategies to build long-term fertility, healthy agro-ecosystems and secure livelihoods. Data shows that these systems can compete with industrial agriculture in terms of total outputs, performing particularly strongly under environmental stress, and delivering production increases in the places where additional food is desperately needed. Diversified agroecological systems can also pave the way for diverse diets and improved health.”
Remembering to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, we find our next best steps in this direction.
