About Roger Blobaum

Roger Blobaum Biographical Sketch

Roger Blobaum is an independent consultant providing project design and management, research, and other services to organic and sustainable agriculture organizations and institutions. As an organic farming advocate, he also has served many years on international and national boards, committees, and advisory groups.

He served as an agricultural staff member in both houses of Congress and was co-chair of the Organic Working Group, a coalition of consumer and environmental and other organizations that helped shape the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act and push it through Congress. He has been a public member of USDA’s National Sustainable Agriculture Advisory Council and of the Department of Energy’s Food Industry Advisory Council.

He was a delegate for five years to the Food Labeling Committee of Codex Alimentarius, a UN-sponsored food standards agency, and served on the working group that developed the Codex international organic guidelines. He served five years as the associate director of the World Sustainable Agriculture Association, headed its Washington office, and was its accredited representative to the United Nations.

He served 14 years on the board of the International Organic Accreditation Service, which accredits organic certifiers operating in more than 75 countries. His international work includes consultations with the Green Food Development Center, an agency of the Ministry of Agriculture in China, and with the Institute for Agroecology at China Agricultural University. He also was a consultant to the Regional Environmental Center in Budapest, where he was on a team that developed an organic and sustainable agriculture small grants program implemented in 12 countries.

He is a board member of Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Services (MOSES) and the Organic Field School, serves on the Center for Food Safety’s advisory committee, and is an advisor to the National Organic Coalition. He was a founder of Organic Watch and the National Sustainable Agriculture Dialogue and has served on the boards of Appropriate Technology International, the Organic Alliance, Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, and the Organic Farming Research Foundation.

He grew up on a family crop and livestock farm in Southern Iowa and has a B.S. from Iowa State University and an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His work in organic agriculture began in 1972 when he became a consultant to the Rodale Press and interviewed and photographed Midwest organic farmers and wrote about them for Organic Gardening and Farming magazine and other Rodale publications. He has been cited by Natural Foods Merchandiser magazine as one of the 25 individuals who have done the most to develop organic agriculture in the United States.