by Roger Blobaum · Inside Organics · July/August 2010

If you think it’s tough now trying to derail the global campaign by Monsanto and others to mislead the media and convince gullible policymakers that GMOs are the solution to feeding the world, you haven’t seen anything yet. The U.S. Supreme Court has just handed the instigators of this effort a big political gift in its decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case.

This decision has opened the money floodgates, allowing Monsanto and other corporations to spend as much company money as they like to finance all kinds of ads supporting or opposing federal and state candidates identified by name. It’s a direct threat to candidates who promise to do something about GMO contamination of organic farms, for example, or who challenge the government’s campaign to spread GMO agriculture worldwide.

It has swept aside decades of legislative restrictions on the role of corporations and the spending of company money in political campaigns. Congress since 1907 has prohibited domestic corporations from using their money “directly or indirectly” to elect candidates for public office. Congress later made it clear that the ban applied to political advertisements and other independent election spending as well as to direct contributions to candidates.

Worse yet, the new decision allows corporations to contribute company money to political front groups that buy attack ads but are not required to disclose who paid for them. This stealth campaigning puts these corporations in the enviable position of being able to hide from voters their funding of efforts to elect or defeat public officials. You’re not going to see any political attack ads signed off with messages saying “I’m from Monsanto and we approve this message which we paid for with company money.”

The court decision significantly increases the ability of corporations to influence members of Congress and other elected officials who shape agriculture’s future. It also creates even more trouble for organic advocates who are outspent many times over attempting to persuade the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other regulators, elected officials, and the media to support organic farming as the foundation for U.S. food and agriculture production systems.

GMO Contamination of Organic Farms

This threatening new political atmosphere makes it much less likely that members of Congress will step up and sponsor legislation to shift liability for GMO contamination of organic farms to manufacturers and patent holders, for example, or legislation requiring the Food and Drug Administration to institute mandatory labeling of GM foods.

The case of Citizens United v. FEC was not about Monsanto or GMOs or organic farming. It was about involvement of multi-billion dollar corporations in political campaigns and its impact, as a result, is bad news for organic agriculture. It dilutes the influence of farmers and consumers and others who support organic farming and oppose GMOs. It also increases the ability of agribusiness corporations, including multinationals headquartered overseas, to influence public officials who shape and implement farm policy.

Monsanto and other agribusiness corporations had plenty of political money before the court decision. They could spend whatever it took to lobby members of Congress to support biotechnology and the widespread use of toxic pesticides in agriculture. They also could spend unlimited amounts to fight attempts by organic farmers to petition the courts and federal regulators to ban GMO alfalfa and other major crops and to protect their farms and their seeds from GMO contamination.

USDA has been a regulatory pushover for Monsanto and other members of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. It is protecting Monsanto now with a draft environmental impact study on GMO alfalfa that ignores the threat of GMO contamination on organic and non-GMO farming and says consumers don’t care about GMO contamination. It ignores the significant adverse impact GMO contamination will have on organic and non-GMO conventional alfalfa seed and hay growers and on dairy producers who rely on organic and non-GMO hay for feed.

The State Department also is shilling for GMOs worldwide. Jose Fernandez, Assistant Secretary of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, recently stressed the government’s commitment to overcoming obstacles to the promotion of GMO crops at a biotechnology industries conference. He said the government needs help dealing with a wave of regulatory decisions restricting or banning GMO foods and crops in many other countries.

Campaign Spending Limits Eliminated

But lobbying and court fights are skirmishes compared to the threat posed by this decision. This threat is driven specifically by the court’s ruling granting corporations the same free speech rights as ordinary individuals under federal, state, and local election law. This frees them for the first time to target both House and Senate candidates and other candidates for public office and to spend unlimited amounts of company money in campaigns to try to defeat them. It also means they can spend whatever it takes to bully elected officials who support organic agriculture and who propose and support stricter regulation of GMOs and pesticides. If intimidating members of Congress in their offices in Washington fails to get results, these corporations can throw unlimited amounts of money against them in their campaigns for reelection. Do what we want now, they can warn a lawmaker or staff member, or be prepared to face the consequences at the ballot box later.

It is unclear whether the decision will prevent foreign companies from influencing U.S. elections. Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissent said the logic of the majority opinion “would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”

The decision also impacts policy relating to corporate domination of food policy in 2020, for example, or 2050 when some international agencies are predicting the world’s population could reach 9 billion. Will GMO agriculture be the government-forced production model or will organic agriculture eventually become the dominant food production system?

This decision gives a big political boost to important pending legislation that would put organic agriculture at an even greater disadvantage in U.S. foreign aid programs. The proposed legislation, already approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would create for the first time a federal mandate for GMO research as part of future foreign aid programs. Although foreign aid’s main focus is agricultural development, approximately $7.7 billion of the proposed funding would be directed almost entirely to genetically-modified crop research.

Organic Research Left Out of Foreign Aid Bill

This legislation, which does not include any funding for organic research, is supported and promoted by an industry cabal that includes Monsanto and the Gates Foundation. The $7.7 billion is many times more than all the money the federal government has ever spent on organic research.

It also would strengthen the cozy relationship the foreign aid program already has with Monsanto. The aid program partnered with Monsanto, for example, in developing a virus-resistant sweet potato in Kenya that failed to out-perform local varieties. Although this project failed, the partnership helped Monsanto gain Kenyan government approval of a food safety law allowing commercialization of GMO crops.

Although Congress could limit the effects of this radical Supreme Court decision, attempts so far have led to little more than name calling. Democrats have proposed legislation that would do little more than banning foreign-controlled corporations from spending money on ads supporting or opposing candidates. Foreign individuals and corporations are currently prohibited from making direct contributions to candidates for federal office. The Republican line so far is that limiting the impact of the court’s decision would infringe on freedom of speech.

This cowardly approach to reform provides a huge challenge to the organic community and others that support organic food and farming and are directly threatened. It seems clear that any attempt to limit the court’s decision and derail the government’s global efforts to promote GMOs worldwide will require political mobilization of organic farmers and all other citizens who believe our government should not be for sale.

This article was first printed in the July/August 2010 issue of the Organic Broadcaster, published by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service.

by Roger Blobaum · Inside Organics · May/June 2010

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is engaged in a campaign to convince the organic community that its support for organic farming now extends well beyond the National Organic Program (NOP) and includes active involvement of every one of its 27 agencies.

Is it possible to spread organic awareness throughout USDA, a huge bureaucracy with more than 100,000 employees, and get every agency on board and every employee to plant a garden? This was one of Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan’s more ambitious goals when she assumed the No. 2 position at USDA more than a year ago. There is increasing evidence she is getting this done.

This progress was evident at an April 16 organic roundtable where stakeholders ranging from the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and representatives of USDA agencies ranging from the Economic Research Service (ERS) to the Risk Management Agency (RMA) spent a morning comparing notes and providing updates on what they do to support organic agriculture.

Having a long list of USDA agency representatives stand before a roomful of organic advocates to proudly list what their agencies are doing to support organic farming was a hard-to-believe Washington happening. The response of organic observers ranged from mild surprise to cautious acknowledgment of clear signs USDA’s unreliable commitment to organic farming might finally be ending.

The roundtable was organized by the Organic Working Group, which includes representatives of all USDA agencies and meets regularly to coordinate organic programming. It evolved from a small group that struggled for nearly 20 years as an underground organic movement at USDA. This band of organic advocates, led by Catherine Greene of the Economic Research Service, worked unofficially with OFRF and other groups while maintaining a low profile to stay out of trouble with political appointees in the front office.

“A few individuals kept this group going for many years and now we are kicking this effort up a notch,” Merrigan said in remarks opening the roundtable event. “We want every single agency to see organic as part of its mission.”

She also emphasized the need to provide some relief for the NOP. It needs to shed activities other agencies can take over, she noted, so the NOP staff can concentrate on regulations, enforcement, and other organic integrity issues. The President’s budget, she noted, proposes another sizeable increase in funding to help the NOP do a better job.

Bob Scowcroft of OFRF, who led off the stakeholder presentations, cited the “incredible importance” of the Organic Working Group and the significance of having all

USDA agencies working together. “We have wanted full integration of all agencies into this effort for many years,” he said

He reminded the government representatives that progress requires much more than inter-agency coordination. He noted that the Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming, the comprehensive USDA report issued in 1980, included 27recommendations for agency support of organic farming. “After 30 years,” he said, “We have completed only two of the report’s 27 recommendations, although some are being worked on.”

One development that responds to the 1980 report overall is USDA’s recent announcement that it is appointing an organic farming program specialist to “coordinate development of a USDA organic farming plan; and to identify, monitor, and evaluate organic activities across USDA agencies.” This is a huge step in the effort to integrate all USDA agencies into the organic agriculture effort.

A New Organic Farming Coordinator?

Although the job announcement does not refer to the new specialist as the USDA organic farming coordinator that organic advocates have been calling for, the new specialist’s duties appear to cover everything an organic farming coordinator would do. They include providing leadership, information, and ideas “to help in conceiving, formulating, and directing programs, policies, technical standards, and guidelines” as well as coordinating the development of an organic farming plan.

Can an organic farming plan be developed and adopted without a vision of what organic farming programs would look like in five years, or 10 years, or longer? Although a vision seems to be missing so far, it is highly likely organic advocates will insist on seeing how USDA views the role of organic farming in American agriculture in the future. Agency representatives at the roundtable were urged to consider adapting, or even adopting, the organic community’s newly-developed vision for U.S. organic agriculture.

This vision of the future, which includes organic farming as the foundation for American agriculture, was presented by Michael Sligh of Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). He advised agency representatives that this is the focus of the National Organic Action Plan, a 40-page plan that was completed early this year and reflects the input of hundreds of organic advocates. Their views were gathered during a nationwide process coordinated by RAFI and the National Organic Coalition.

The organic action plan articulates a shared vision, sets objectives and benchmarks for measuring organic farming’s social and environmental benefits, and formulates proposals for the future growth of U.S. organic food and agriculture for the next decade and beyond. It also cites “the failure of the U.S. government and the food and farming sector overall to develop goals for the growth of organic beyond market-based growth goals.”

The roundtable also featured an open mike period where individuals raised organic farming issues that they hoped USDA agency representatives would address. It was similar to the public comment period provided during each meeting of the National Organic Standards Board.

Participants noted that this session was different from most USDA listening sessions, where time is limited and agency officials end up doing most of the talking. Another important difference is that in this organic roundtable session some of the individual speakers received immediate agency responses.

The Risk Management Agency representative, for example, reported the Congressionally-mandated study of crop insurance problems experienced by organic farmers is nearing completion. The National Agricultural Statistics Service representative conceded that much more organic data is needed. He reported, however, that it appears more organic data-gathering funding will be available in the coming year. He also reported that more organic questions are being proposed for the 2012 agricultural census.

Organic Import Data Breakthrough

Miles McEvoy, who directs the National Organic Program, reported that USDA and the Department of Commerce are finally working together to develop product codes to identify and track imported organic products. This is a positive response to long-standing requests coming from organic farmers and consumers alike. Although trade estimates have been available, USDA has been clueless about what kind of organic products are being imported, the amount of organic products being imported, and where these imported organic products come from.

The roundtable wound up with agency representatives making final comments and, in several cases, distributing brief reports on what they do to support organic farming. The Agricultural Research Service report, for example, noted that the agency conducts organic production research at 26 locations across the country. It also noted that its organic action plan includes developing strategies to transition from conventional to organic production and identifying ecosystem service benefits that organic farmers provide.

When USDA converted a headquarters parking lot into an organic garden a year ago, skeptics questioned whether this signaled a change in direction or was just another Washington photo op. The garden looked great the morning the roundtable was held, with peas, lettuce, broccoli, carrots, and beets flourishing in the manicured beds. And the change in direction that was signaled, at least measured by the success of the organic roundtable, also looked very promising. It may be that the transformation of organic policy called for 30 years ago in the 1980 USDA report may finally become a reality.

This article was first printed in the May/June 2010 issue of the Organic Broadcaster, published by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service

by Roger Blobaum · Inside Organics · March/April 2010

At this time 30 years ago the most important organic farming policy document ever produced by the federal government was being edited for the last time and typed up at the U.S. Department of Agriculture so it could be rushed to the Government Printing Office to meet a July publication deadline.

No government report on organic farming since has even come close to being as comprehensive and significant as “Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming,” the official 94-page document that summarized the work and findings of a USDA study team given less than a year to complete its assignment.

Every USDA policy and program with any potential to impact organic farming in any way was scrutinized. This included how the department gathered organic farming information and whether or not it had the administrative capacity to coordinate any organic initiatives taken.

The study team’s work assignment and deadline came straight from Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland, the only secretary of agriculture before or since with the political courage to make an unconditional commitment to organic agriculture. Bergland, a Minnesota farmer before becoming involved in politics, had been impressed and convinced years earlier by a neighbor who was a successful organic farmer.

The 1980 report calling for research and education support for organic farming was published nine years after an infamous statement by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz reinforced USDA’s bad attitude toward organic farming. “Before we go back to an organic agriculture in this country,” he told a network news reporter during a 1971 interview, “somebody must decide which 50 million Americans we are going to let starve or go hungry.”

Butz Statement Unchallenged at USDA

That surprising and highly publicized statement was unchallenged at that time at USDA. It also was unchallenged by the agriculture committees in both houses of Congress that write farm bills and appropriate USDA’s funds, by the land grant university system, and by the agricultural establishment overall. Organic farming had been officially ignored or ridiculed, or both, until the new secretary from Minnesota and his team took over.

Organic farmer complaints that the Farmers Home Administration was requiring loan applicants to use farm chemicals had resulted in a Bergland memo sent to county offices calling for an end to this practice. Other complaints about discrimination against organic farmers focused on unreasonable cosmetic requirements of federal fruit and vegetable marketing orders and policies at USDA’s Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) that required farmers to use commercial fertilizer in order to qualify for its cost share program.

A surprise USDA press release on June 19, 1979, reported that Anson Bertrand, the head of USDA’s Science and Education Administration, had appointed a Coordinating Team for Organic Agriculture to study organic farming. He noted that many conventional farmers questioned whether organic farming could produce enough food to feed the millions of people who must be fed in modern times.

In his statement, Bertrand raised the issue of whether new knowledge had already boosted the productive power of organic farming.

“We’ll find out,” he said. “When the facts are in, we’ll use them to develop a program or policy recommendations for Secretary Bergland. If it appears reasonable to do so, we may suggest additional redirection of USDA research, education, and funding.”

Report Estimates 20,000 Farming Organically

The study team of USDA scientists commissioned on-farm case studies of 69 organic farms in 23 states, cooperated with The New Farm magazine to survey its organic farmer subscribers, interviewed and corresponded with a long list of organic farming advocates and practitioners, and sent teams to Japan and Europe to tour organic farms and research institutes and report back.

The result was the comprehensive report USDA published the following July, which was made available by mail to anyone who wanted a copy. Thousands of farmers wrote in and requested a copy. USDA also discussed the report at a series of well-attended meetings on land grant university campuses in New Hampshire, California, Washington, and Nebraska.

USDA estimated that 20,000 organic farmers were doing well on America’s farms. It recommended development of the full range of research and education programs needed to address their needs and problems. This included the 18 specific recommendations outlined in the report.

But the report also included a clear statement addressing the challenge of implementing all the other recommendations made. “USDA,” it said, “should establish a permanent organic resources coordinator and multi-disciplinary advisory committee on organic agriculture.”

That was the one recommendation in the report that Secretary Bergland could implement right away and he took action immediately by appointing USDA’s first organic farming coordinator.

His responsibility included establishing a working relationship between USDA and organic farmers and their organizations. The job included gathering information on the organic sector and keeping USDA informed “of the problems and needs of organic growers on matters of information, support, and incentive programs.”

The new coordinator also was directed to take the lead in examining public policies that discriminated against organic farmers and that adversely impacted the goals of organic agriculture. Following an analysis of policy issues, the coordinator was given the responsibility of making recommendations “regarding how these policies could be modified to better serve the needs of organic farmers without adversely affecting the interests of conventional agriculture.”

Unfortunately this unprecedented initiative was destroyed politically when the new Reagan Administration took over in 1981. The organic farming coordinator was fired, the remaining copies of the 1980 report were destroyed, and implementation of the many recommendations was abruptly terminated.

Coordinator Recommendation Gains New Life

But one 1980 recommendation that critics had hoped would never be resurrected has gained new life over the last two years. It turned up as an important recommendation submitted by the National Organic Coalition to the new Obama Administration. It was included in recommendations aimed at giving organic agriculture “a greater role and prominence within the Administration relative to previous administrations.”

Specifically it calls for “designation of a point person and/or organic policy coordinator at the White House and in the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture for follow-through and on-going coordination. It also calls for “establishment of USDA cross-departmental and cross-agency cooperation through an organic working group . . . to expedite administrative backlogs and to implement fairly and swiftly the significant organic provisions of the 2008 farm bill.”

A similar recommendation is included in the National Organic Action Plan (NOAP) completed by organic food and farming stakeholders late last year following a series of 11 dialogue meetings held around the country.

The plan, entitled “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Advancing Organic Agriculture in the United States,” calls on USDA “to designate a point person and/or organic policy coordinator within the Secretary of Agriculture’s office to ensure follow-through and ongoing coordination and the solicitation of public input . . . and to establish and fully fund a cross-agency coordination hub whose role will be to facilitate the integration of these NOAP recommendations into government policies.”

Neither the NOC recommendation nor the more general NOAP call for action comes close to the comprehensive organic farming initiative recommended in the 1980 USDA report. But they provide a direct challenge to Secretary of Agriculure Tom Vilsack and the Obama White House.

If Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland could mobilize the entire USDA bureaucracy to rally in turning out the comprehensive 1980 report at a time when the agricultural establishment was filled with organic farming skeptics and critics, why can’t Secretary Vilsack at least take the modest step of appointing a USDA organic farming coordinator 30 years later when organic farming has been established as a farming alternative?

This is a valid question and one that organic farmers and their organizations should be pursuing until they get the right answer.

This article was first printed in the March/April 2010 issue of the Organic Broadcaster, published by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service

by Roger Blobaum

Clarence Van Sant, who farms 135 acres of rolling land in central Iowa, has never put much stock in the advice of economists who insist farmers have to keep getting bigger to make it.

Clarence Van Sant

Nor has he accepted the suggestions from his land grant university and others that you have to apply a wide range of farm chemicals and use medicated feeds to get good crop yields and produce healthy livestock and poultry.

Van San switched to organic farming in the early 1960s, building up his soil by rotating crops and practicing good conservation. The result is a family-type farm that is sufficient, profitable, and ecologically sound.

“At the time we moved on this farm, the east side had a red-looking soil,” he recalls. “The topsoil is black and fertile now and, as I look back, I realize it had a very low humus content at that time.”

The marketing problems faced by many organic farmers also was overcome two years ago when Van Sant and his wife opened a health food store in nearby Grinnell. Their full line of organic foods includes eggs, whole wheat flour, pork, sweet corn, and edible soybeans produced without chemicals on their own farm.

The farm looks and sounds like the family-type units that dominated the Iowa scene in years back. A farm dog announces your arrival, half-grown pigs look up from a cool mud bath, hens sing in the chicken house, and a lonely Charolais bull rattles the sides of his reinforced pen.

Attendance at an organic farming meeting challenged Van Sant’s thinking and convinced him he should consider giving up chemicals. He was most impressed, he says, with statements regarding the buildup of earthworms on organic farms and the part their castings play in developing topsoil.

“I realized that at the rate we were losing soil to erosion we had to find a better way to build fertility,” he recalls. “We had to maintain, and increase if possible, the topsoil on our farm and I knew that we weren’t doing it.”

He said he also had become concerned about the continued use of chemicals when a sample taken from the well on the farm showed a nitrate level well over the danger line. The water was being used for both family and livestock purposes.

Van Sant make the final decision to try the organic method after attending more meetings and learning all he could about it.

“We want all the way on our whole farm,” he says. “We just decided we had better have faith that this miracle of nature would take place and that we could make it a paying proposition.”

Farming organically meant, among other changes, switching to the chisel plow. Van Sant purchased an eight-foot model and pulls it with a 460 Farmall tractor.

“That was a harder step for me to take than it was to switch to organic farming because I had always used a moldboard plow,” he recalls. “We learned, for example, that chisel plowing should be done in the fall so the ground has all winter to get mellow and to soak in moisture and so the clods break up easy in the spring.”

Van Sant has two crop rotation plans going on the farm–one for the good ground on the ridges and one for the hillsides where soil erosion is a continuing problem. He uses a three-year oats-hay-corn rotation on the hilly ground. Soybeans follow hay on the better fields in a four-year plan that includes oats, hay, soybeans, and corn.

“We found that weeds aren’t nearly the problem in soybeans when they follow hay because the weeds are cut each time a crop of hay is taken off,” he explains. “Soybeans also build nitrogen for the corn crop to follow and you can get tremendous yields that way.”

Van Sant gets good corn and soybeans yields with this rotation. His soybeans have been running around 45 bushels an acre, well above the average in his area.

“Our yields have run as good as the neighbors’–every bit as good,” he reports. “and quality-wise the crops are better.”

Van Sant says the answer to the weed problem, in addition to crop rotation, is timing. That means getting into corn and soybean fields with a rotary hoe to tear up the weeds when they’re small, then with a cultivator to cut off and cover those that are left.

Spring wheat is substituted for oats in the rotation on some fields to provide grain for the whole wheat flour that is a popular item at the store. Wheat normally isn’t grown in central Iowa, but Van Sant’s has made up to 40 bushels an acre.

Hay in a rotation also is important for a livestock-grain operation that is nearly self-sufficient. Van Sant has about 30 stock cows and calves on permanent pasture during the summer and it takes a lot of hay to get them through the winter months.

He gets three cuttings of red clover and alfalfa hay, which is baled and stored in the barn. Normally this yields 3,000 to 4,000 bales of the clover-alfalfa mixture. The hay is fed to the cattle in the field until the snow gets deep. Van Sant said this keeps the manure from accumulating in barn lots during winter months when it is difficult to spread it on the land.

Van Sant is proud of his purebred Charolais herd, which provides a profitable calf crop each year. He sold most of the calves as feeders last December, a sound decision because cattle prices fell a short time later. The calves usually weigh about 500 pounds when winter sets in.

“A neighbor picked out three choice calves and paid $1,000 for them,” he reports. “We sell a lot of calves as breeding stock and have started several farmers in this area with heifers for their stock cow herds.”

The Van Sants had no idea an organic food store was in their future when they changed farming methods. It all started when they were attending a series of meetings in Mason City, Iowa, and started bringing organic food home for themselves and others who had tried it and liked it.

“Before long we had put the first of five refrigerators in our basement and were selling organic foods from our home,” Van Sant recalls. “The trade became so brisk that we decided to locate the store in Grinnell and found a vacant grocery store building that had a parking lot and the large coolers that we needed.”

Van's Health Food Store

This has become Van’s Health Foods, a well-stocked store on U.S. 6 near the Grinnell College campus. Customers who had come to the farm for organic foods or who had been on Van Sant’s fresh egg route in town made it an immediate success.

The store also provides an outlet for Van Sant’s hogs, which are lean and meaty and are fed out without antibiotics on organically-grown grain. They have to be butchered at a local locker plant to satisfy state and federal requirements. Customers place orders for a half or a whole hog at a time.

“We take the hogs to the locker plant to be butchered, the customer tells them how to have the meat cut and packaged, and we get the live weight price plus a premium of $5 or $6 above the market,” Van Sant explains. “We also have organic lambs available from a farm near here and our customers make similar arrangements in buying lamb.”

The Van Sants note that meat, eggs, and other products raised on their organic farm are priced lower than similar items purchased at the supermarket.

“A lot of people object to organic foods because they say the price is too high,” Van Sant notes. “But if you can sell direct from the farm to the consumer, there isn’t anybody going to beat you on price.”

Roger Blobaum interviewed and photographed and wrote about organic farmers in the Midwest in the early 1970s. These organic farmer profiles were initially published during that period in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine or in the Organic Observer. Most were published again later in two Rodale Press publications, the Organic Farming Yearbook of Agriculture published in 1975 and Organic Farming: Yesterday’s and Tomorrow’s Agriculture published in 1977.

by Roger Blobaum

If you’re wondering whether large family-type farmers can kick the chemical habit and still grow plenty of food profitably, you should see the three organic operations just north of State 33 near Fremont in eastern Nebraska.

These up-to-date farms cover more than 1,300 acres of some of the most productive land on the Platte River. They have been farmed without chemicals since the late 1960s by Ralf Rolfs, Del and Van Akerlund, and K.C. Livermore.

In addition to producing good crops, they save energy. Less gasoline and diesel fuel are needed to power tractors in fields that work easier and less propane is needed to dry corn artificially. Besides that, there’s the natural gas that isn’t used to manufacture anhydrous ammonia and other agricultural chemicals for these farms.

Any doubts these farmers had when they decided to make this abrupt switch (all admit they had some) are forgotten. They are anxious to share their experiences and have the kind of enthusiasm that even a farm chemical salesman would find hard to resist.

Important in these operations is a four-year crop rotation that includes two years of corn, one of soybeans, and one of oats with a legume such as sweet clover or hairy vetch. The soybeans and legume crops “fix” nitrogen from the air, adding this natural plant food to the soil, and the legumes also provide green manure to be turned under.

Rotating crops also prevents a buildup of corn rootworms, borers, and other pests that cause serious problems for farmers who do continuous cropping and rely on chemicals to control pests.

All three farmers have some difficulty finding organic markets for their grain and livestock. They have discovered, however, that they get good yields consistently and don’t need special organic outlets or premiums to operate profitably.

Both Rolfs and the Akerlunds have sold corn to a Primrose, Nebraska, cattle feeder who produces organic beef. The Akerlunds usually buy calves to feed out. But their lots are empty now due to low beef prices.

Livermore has a steady list of customers who place orders for the 40 to 50 calves he fattens each year on organically-grown grain. He has stock cows to provide calves for this part of his operation and to utilize roughage on the farm. He also has some sheep.

The economics of farming without chemicals is an eye-opener. While corn farmers spend up to $50 an acre for chemicals, and sometimes even more, it requires only a fraction of that for an organic farmer’s purchased inputs.

Livermore reports his per acre costs since he quit chemicals have averaged about $8 a year. That covers soil conditioners and additives and a liquid fish fertilizer. He also has manure from his livestock operation to spread on the land.

“The first year we dropped chemicals we lost 10 to 15 bushels an acre in yield, but we didn’t have that $30 an acre for fertilizer against it that we had before so we actually were money ahead,” he recalls. “Each year without chemicals our crops get better, and today we are outdoing our chemical neighbors.”

Livermore’s soybeans yielded more than 50 bushels an acre in 1973 while adjacent fields, given the full chemical treatment, were weed infested and yielded only about half as much.

Rolfs said he never spends more than $10-12 an acre for purchased natural products on his cropland.

“I was up to nearly $40 an acre on commercial fertilizer before, at prices that were much lower than they are today,” he reports. “I can’t see where farmers are going to even get back what they are spending for fertilizer now. It’s a hopeless situation.”

He said the biggest corn crop he had on his home 80, using the full range of farm chemicals, was 130 bushels per acre. In 1973 with less than $12 an acre spent for natural fertilizers, he said, his corn on the same land averaged 120 bushels.

How about weeds? Can a farmer get along without herbicides when weeds are a constant problem even to those who use all the latest chemical weed killers?

Livermore says commercial fertilizers feed the weeds as well as the crops and reports his fields and those farmed by Rolfs and the Ajkerlunds are cleaner than those of their neighbors who use weed killers.

“We don’t have the weed problems we had when we were using chemicals,” he declares. “When we dropped chemicals, we found the weeds didn’t grow as fast as the crops did. And so, with our power equipment and the speed we have on tractors, it isn’t hard to control weeds without chemicals.

The message is that it pays to be a good farmer, killing weeds with good practices rather than trying to poison them.

“I like to go over the corn twice with a rotary hoe, and then twice with a rolling cultivator,” Del Akerlund says.

“Sometimes we have to use a sweep-type cultivator if we get a little behind in our work. But we prefer not to use the sweep because it will weave in the row, whereas the rolling cultivator goes perfectly straight.”

How about the energy savings and its implications for the future of American agriculture?

Akerlund points out that experience on their 760-acre farm shows they have been able to cut back in terms of power requirements.

“Our tractors are smaller than what we used to have,” he notes. “Better tilth in the soil makes easier pulling, and we are not using the fuel we used to.”

Livermore said his ground farms easier than it used to, and Rolfs has had a similar experience. Pointing to the chisel plow he has been using the past 12 years, he continues, “The first year I had that I tried to pull it in third gear. Now I can pull it in fifth.”

Although the Akerlunds still dry corn in the fall, they bring it down to only 15 percent moisture. A lot of people, Del Akerlund says, contend you can’t keep that kind of corn in large bins for long periods of time.

“But this year we have 9,000 bushels of shelled corn in one bin and all we have there is a seven-horse aeration fan,” he reports. “If you go up there today you can smell the sweetness of the grain.”

Akerlund feels more should be done to develop corn that ripens in the field so farmers won’t have to invest in drying equipment and pay high prices for propane.

“If things were done right as far as improving varieties is concerned,” he observes, “we could have corn that would ripen naturally and that wouldn’t have to be dried.”

Livermore picks his corn instead of combining it in the field and ends up with several thousand bushels of ear corn. He doesn’t have any drying equipment and says he feeds livestock from the crib year-around without any spoilage.

Organic farmers like to talk about their soil and to pick it up by the handfuls, smell it, and lovingly run it through their fingers.

“Without chemicals there’s a decided difference in how mellow the soil is. We don’t have any cloddy soil like we used to,” Livermore explains. “And we don’t have the green streaks in the field after a rain. We actually saw moss on the top of the ground at times when we used chemicals. We don”t see that any more.”

“We’re putting on some gypsum to lower the magnesium, and we’re putting on 550 to 600 pounds per acre of natural product, a blend of soft colloidal phosphate with a small amount of granite dust and some trace elements,” Akerlund reports. “This is probably good for three years and will keep our ground in good condition.”

All three of these farmers decided to drop chemicals after visiting some organic farms in Iowa. Livermore admits he was a little skeptical.

“But every year it got better, and my fourth year was the big turning point,” he recalls. “We had better crops, we had fewer weeds, and we had easier farming. It was just wonderful to be able to farm that way again.”

Roger Blobaum interviewed and photographed and wrote about organic farmers in the Midwest in the early 1970s. These organic farmer profiles were initially published during that period in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine or in the Organic Observer. Most were published again later in two Rodale Press publications, the Organic Farming Yearbook of Agriculture published in 1975 and Organic Farming: Yesterday’s and Tomorrow’s Agriculture published in 1977.

by Roger Blobaum

Bennie Unruh of Aulne, Kansas, is an organic farmer who has developed health food market outlets for all his grain and beef and bypasses the traditional marketing system entirely.

In additional to producing grain and cattle on a farm that has been in his family since 1872, he has been a registered miller for several years and grinds and packages a wide range of products distributed in Kansas and elsewhere.

He operates this year-around business from a new building at his home in Aulne, a small town about 40 miles north of Wichita. It brings a lot of people to town because one of his specialties is milling flour and cereals to order.

Anyone who has seen Unruh’s farm, which is a few miles northwest of Aulne, can see it is ideally situated for organic agriculture. It is on a hill, where the water drains off in four different directions, ruling out the possibility of chemical pollution from neighboring fields.

The turning point in his operation came during a visit to a health food store in Salina, where he heard the owner tell another customer he was looking for an organic farmer who could provide a reliable supply of whole grain flour.

He had been milling grain for family use since 1937, putting it through a coffee grinder several times. Neighbors and friends who tasted bread made from this whole grain flour began asking for it and he ended up buying his first stone mill. But it wasn’t until that day in Salina that he considered turning it into a commercial enterprise.

In addition to growing up to 150 acres of hard red winter wheat a year, Unruh also produces corn and rye for his milling operation. He gets good yields of up to 100 bushels an acre for corn, which is used for both feed and corn meal, and up to 50 bushels for wheat. He credits the regular application of organic fertilizers for the high productivity of his soil.

He remembers the first time he contacted Hy-Brid Sales Company, an organic fertilizer firm in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and reported that the family farm appeared to be run down. It had been cropped for nearly a century without anything except manure being applied to the fields. A company representative recommended some Calphos, which got results on all but one field. A soil test showed it had a serious potassium deficiency.

Although the company recommended 500 pounds of granite dust per acre in one area and 1,000 pounds in another on that field, Unruh spread a ton on a third area to see what would happen. The response from this heavy application of granite dust was spectacular and he was turned into a granite-dust enthusiast and one of the company’s best customers.

Like most organic farmers, he also uses legumes to put nitrogen back in the soil. He uses a lot of sweet clover, seeding it with wheat in the fall and letting it grow to full maturity before working it into the soil.

His operation also includes a herd of 20 stock cows and about the same number of steers and heifers being fed out on organically grown grain. “They’re all spoken for,” he reported, referring to standing orders from customers for cattle from his feedlot.

He has about 15 acres of alfalfa, which is important in his livestock operation. He noted that alfalfa needs minerals and phosphates and said he normally uses 150 pounds of Calphos and 150 pounds of granite dust per acre at seeding time.

Unruh said he plants seed varieties especially suited to milling and keeps back enough for his own use so he doesn’t have to use chemically treated seed. He emphasized that he has never had any mosaic in his wheat, a problem for chemical farmers in his area.

Roger Blobaum interviewed and photographed and wrote about organic farmers in the Midwest in the early 1970s. These organic farmer profiles were initially published during that period in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine or in the Organic Observer. Most were published again later in two Rodale Press publications, the Organic Farming Yearbook of Agriculture published in 1975 and Organic Farming: Yesterday’s and Tomorrow’s Agriculture published in 1977.

by Roger Blobaum

Several large family-type organic farmers in the Fremont, Nebraska, area have been producing lots of grain and livestock profitably without agricultural chemicals. In 1974 this eastern Nebraska sector was hit by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl days of the mid-1930s. It was turned into a government-declared disaster area by searing heat, hot winds, and weeks without rain.

Only 1.6 inches of rain fell in the Fremont area in June, far short of the normal 5.75 inches, and none fell from June 11 until August 8. Temperatures shot into the 100s for days at a time during the height of the growing season and hot winds punished the crops.

The local newspaper ran front-page drought stories almost daily in July and early August, reporting on disaster meetings, “burned-up” corn, nitrate poison warnings for farmers putting damaged corn in the silo, and statewide crop and livestock losses of more than $2 billion.

A front-page picture on July 25 showed a devastated field in the neighborhood where the three organic farmers live. “This field,” the caption explained, “shows the stunted growth and withered stocks of the sun-ravaged corn crop.”

But the crops did not fail on the 1,300 Platte River valley dryland acres farmed organically since the late 1960s by K.C. Livermore, Del and Val Akerlund, and Ray Rolfs.

Livermore has corn that made 100 bushels to the acre, while Rolfs has two fields he is sure made at least 65. The Akerlunds harvested 115 acres of soybeans that averaged 45 bushels. And Rolfs’ soybeans, planted late and damaged by an early frost, still made 28 bushels.

This oasis is in an area where the Department of Agriculture is making disaster payments to thousands of farmers and has estimated average per-acre yields for dryland corn at 26 bushels (compared to 75.4 last fall) and soybeans at 21 bushels (compared with 30 last fall).

The results are even more significant for Livermore, Rolfs, and the Akerlunds because their farms have light, sandy soils that normally don’t hold moisture well. It is obvious that the humus buildup in the soil by organic tillage was a major factor enabling their crops to better withstand the stress of heat and drought.

Word of their good crops spread throughout the region in September, and they have had a steady stream of visitors ranging from college students to bankers. Livermore says there definitely is an upsurge of interest in organic agriculture. He should know because he has averaged two visitors a day all fall, not counting those brought on tours when he wasn’t home.

He takes visitors into his corn field, pulls a well-formed ear from a stalk, and breaks it in half to show the long kernels and small cob. Chemical fields in the area, he says, are producing big cobs with a few small kernels if they are producing any ears at all.

He also enlists a visitor to help him pull up a stalk of corn to show the extensive root system he says is partly responsible for his excellent yields this fall. He is proud of these tangled root balls that run up to eight inches across.

“The corn in the chemical fields had real fast growth at first and developed a shallow root system,” he explains. “When it turned hot and dry, the corn plants were unable to utilize the subsoil moisture that was still there.”

This was highly important because James Novotny, county extension agent in Fremont, reported late in July that subsoil moisture in the area had dropped to a depth of six feet in places, far beyond the range of most corn roots.

But lack of moisture wasn’t the whole story. Del Akerlund said the drought also damaged fields in the neighborhood that were irrigated day and night during the long, dry period. Trees along irrigation ditches, he said, were scalded by the terrific heat and reflection of sun rays off the water.

“We had fields near us that were almost total losses even though they were irrigated,” he said. “One reason was that they had extensive damage from insects.”

Akerlund said there was no insect damage at all in the fields on the three organic farms, and gives their large population of pheasants, quail, and other birds much of the credit.

“On the last round when we were combining oats, there were about 200 pheasants of all sizes running ahead of the combine, and we had to stop several times to let them get out of the way,” he said.

“We didn’t have any insect problems because of the buildup of wildlife, but we were concerned because the grasshopper problem in particular was real serious in fields close to us.”

He told of taking a visitor into an irrigated chemical field of corn less than a half mile away and examining the nubby ears that had worms competing for the few rounded kernels that had formed on each cob.

“Just about every ear we peeled back had a pollination problem, was diseased, and was heavily infested with corn earworm and other insects,” he related. “In our own fields we had good pollination, almost a perfect ear fill, and no leaf perforation or worm damage or other signs of insect activity.”

Although a lot of people complained that their sweet corn was ruined by earworms and leaf-feeding insects, Akerlund added, they had no problems and sold corn to customers over a wide area.

Rolfs also marketed a big sweet corn crop. “The people from town get started on that corn and can’t leave it alone,” he said. “One customer has already put in an order for 80 dozen ears for next year.”

Extension Agent Novotny reported that farmers short of feed were selling cows for as little as 15 cents a pound.

“Because the alfalfa and pasture feed is just about depleted, farmers have nothing to feed their cattle and are getting rid of them,” he said. “I’ve heard of some actually giving their cows away.”

Organic farmers like Livermore, who has a cow herd, didn’t use nitrogen fertilizer, and don’t have to worry about having their cows clean up stalk fields. Livermore has plenty of feed, including an unusually good cutting of alfalfa from a newly-seeded field.

A custom operator baling hay in the neighborhood told Livermore he’d be lucky to get 300 bales from his 11-acre field. The final county was 840, showing how well the young alfalfa plants survived the severe drought and how quickly they recovered when the rain finally came.

“When the oats were combined off that field last summer it looked like most of the alfalfa seeding had died out,” he recalled. “But the plants apparently sent roots down deep to the little moisture that was available because the field greened up right after it rained in August.”

A significant part of the drought story is the high soybean yields reported by the three organic farmers. Livermore’s soybeans, the best he has ever had, made 40 bushels an acre, roughly twice the eastern Nebraska average.

“The soybeans were almost shoulder high this fall before the frost and so thick you couldn’t see where the rows were,” he said.

Soybeans right across the fence on a chemical farm yielded only 26 bushels per acre. One big difference, Livermore said, was that the pods on his beans were so much closer together than those on the plants in his neighbor’s field.

Another problems faced by chemical farmers in drought areas, Akerlund points out, is the fact that their fields have a heavy carryover of herbicides that didn’t get activated during the dry weather. As a result, these farmers are restricted in their cropping plans for next spring and don’t dare plant grass crops in those fields.

Although this isn’t the worst drought to hit eastern Nebraska, it is by far the most costly because of the huge outlays farmers make for fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemical inputs.

Alan Mulliken, who has farmed 500 acres north of Fremont the last 30 years, said farmers are being hit so hard by the drought this year because they have become too specialized.

In the drought years of the 1930s, he recalled, all farmers had livestock and were able to chop up a damaged corn crop in a bad year and feed it to livestock. He might have added that there was no danger of nitrate poisoning then because farmers didn’t apply nitrogen fertilizers.

Because of the nature of the organic products applied to the soil by the organic farmers, Akerlund explained, everything put in during a dry year and not used by plants carries over for the following season.

“But the insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers applied by the chemical farmers,” he added, “will have to be applied at great expense again next spring.”

Roger Blobaum interviewed and photographed and wrote about organic farmers in the Midwest in the early 1970s. These organic farmer profiles were initially published during that period in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine or in the Organic Observer. Most were published again later in two Rodale Press publications, the Organic Farming Yearbook of Agriculture published in 1975 and Organic Farming: Yesterday’s and Tomorrow’s Agriculture published in 1977. This profile, titled “Beating a Drought, Organically,” also was included as a chapter in Food for People Not for Profit: A Sourcebook on the Food Crisis, edited by Catherine Lerza and Michael Jacobson and published in 1975 by Ballantine Books.

by Roger Blobaum

Ray Juhl is one Midwest farmer who sees production of organically grown grain and stone-milled flour as an emerging agricultural industry with strong demand and unusual growth potential.

He’s so certain of this that he has built and equipped one of the nation’s largest on-farm milling setups. It is located on the 2,500-acre farm near Middle River, Minnesota, where he and his son Douglas produce thousands of bushels of organically grown wheat, barley, oats, and buckwheat.

Main operator of the new mill is Randy Heinbaugh, Juhl’s son-in-law, and initial production is set at two semi loads of flour, corn meal, and rolled oats a week. The output can be doubled with longer days and weekend work.

What has convinced Juhl, a careful businessman, that these large orders will materialize? He says he began getting the message right after buying a used 10-inch stone mill to grind some flour for his wife, Helen, to use in making bread.

Before long he was turning out small bags of flour under a “Natural Way Mill’ label for health food stores in nearby Bemidji and Thief River Falls and for a church youth group selling it as a fundraising project. The word spread almost overnight, he recalled, and he has been overwhelmed with business ever since.

“No one has ever shown this kind of interest in anything we’ve ever done before,” he said. “All I know is that the visitors, the mail, and the phone calls would indicate nearly everybody wants some.”

Although the Juhl farm is 10 miles out in the country in the northwest corner of Minnesota, and only 40 miles from the Canadian border, people from as far away as Minneapolis and St. Paul drive up on weekends to buy organic flour.

Juhl explained that these are individuals who stop by the farm to pick up 25 to 50 pounds of flour to take home. Others, he said, just send a letter with some money in it and say “send me some flour.”

“There has been somebody stopping by almost every day, and every Sunday for sure, and we’ve been trying to get a sign up so people will know when there are tours,” Mrs. Juhl added. “It’s enjoyable but we never know when they are coming.”

Although they have never advertised, the Juhls get dozens of phone and mail inquiries from bakeries, food co-ops, and other volume buyers looking for stone-ground flour. Most of them request samples and that involves putting a lot of flour in the mail.

Juhl is the kind of man who responds to a challenge. When he couldn’t get rail cars three years ago to ship his grain to market, he bought a semi trailer truck. His neighbors wanted some hauled, too, so he bought another. The result is a trucking operation, with three semis and several trailers dispatched regularly from the farm.

The trucks, with their regular runs to far-off places like Florida and California, fit right in with the expanding milling business. Juhl uses them both to deliver flour and other grain products to customers and to bring back organic corn and other grains for the mill.

Although he hasn’t had much time to line up a steady supply of grain, he reported, there apparently is a substantial amount of organic wheat in neighboring North Dakota. This is hard red winter wheat, like he raises on his farm, and is the type used in making bread.

“We’ll have to go to organic farmers in Iowa to get the corn we need and are prepared to reach out as far as we have to in getting the other grains,” he said. “Of course we raise quite a bit ourselves.”

Juhl said he has started raising some hull-less barley, a high-protein cereal variety, for production of stone-milled barley flour. He said there appears to be quite a bit of organic rye and buckwheat in the region. He also has tried making flour from brown rice.

A rodent-proof building 40 feet wide and 104 feet long houses the new equipment, including two 30-inch stone mills that turn out a ton of flour or more an hour. It also has storage space for at least three semi loads of finished product. Other equipment inside includes a high-capacity oats roller, grain cleaners, and hopper bins for cleaned grain.

Grain is brought through one wall into the cleaners from four 2,500-bushel hopper bins alongside the building. Juhl said the bins, plus other storage on the farm, provide enough capacity for between 60,000 and 70,000 bushels of grain of all kinds.

Automatic equipment fills bags to the desired weight and most will carry the “Natural Way Mill” label. It is likely, Juhl added, that printing on the bags soon will include some of his wife’s good bread recipes.

Juhl has been farming without chemicals for three years and applies a humate-type organic fertilizer. The soil is high in organic matter, has not been cropped very long, and its main problem is that it often is too wet in the spring.

“Our yields have been comparable to those of others in the area,” Juhl reported. “I think we’re doing fine with organic methods.”

For many years a large organic garden has supplied most of the food for the Juhl family. They no longer have livestock, and prefer a diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts.

“We’ve been canning for five months, have three freezers full of food, and are ready for the winter,” Mrs. Juhl said. “We practically live on what we raise here on the farm.”

Roger Blobaum interviewed and photographed and wrote about organic farmers in the Midwest in the early 1970s. These organic farmer profiles were initially published during that period in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine or in the Organic Observer. Most were published again later in two Rodale Press publications, the Organic Farming Yearbook of Agriculture published in 1975 and Organic Farming: Yesterday’s and Tomorrow’s Agriculture published in 1977.

By Roger Blobaum

Larry Eggen, like many Midwest organic producers, used to talk about getting state or local marketing setups organized to help farmers sell organically-grown production to buyers in big cities.

That was when Eggen had a small vegetable and hog operation near Walnut Grove, Minn., and was active in signing up organic farmers in southwest Minnesota as members of the Minnesota Soil Association.

Organic farmers in that area usually feed most of their grain to livestock and sell the rest to local elevators even though they know organically-grown production will bring a premium price from the right buyers.

When organic farmers ask Eggen now about getting together to market their own production, however, he is less than enthusiastic. He has found through experience that finding buyers and keeping them happy isn’t much easier than getting a dean of agriculture to say something good about organic farming.

“As an organic farmer, I was always led to believe that organic production was a scarce commodity, that all you had to do was tell the buyers you had it, and that they’d beat a path to your door,” he recalls.

“What we’ve found the last two years is that there’s a surplus of organic production, that the buyers are in a strong position, and that they’ll buy only the best quality production offered at the best price.”

Eggen now manages Living Farms, a fledgling marketing agency set up in 1975 by four Minnesota organic farmers. A continuing demand for capital has left Ardell Anderson of Walnut Grove as the venture’s sole owner. He still produces corn, soybeans, rye, and wheat on his 320-acre organic farm.

The Living Farms operation has offices over a country bank in Tracy, Minn., and is one of a handful of agricultural marketing agencies selling unprocessed organic production on a nationwide basis. Their grain and other commodities end up on the shelves of food co-ops and other retail outlets served by organic food distributors.

“When we started this business, we thought we’ll just put in this phone right here, send out some letters to buyers, and then sit back and wait for the phone to start ringing,” he said. “It never did.”

What it took to make the phone ring was a costly promotion effort that included regular trips to both coasts for sessions with buyers, a stringent certification procedure to assure that all production handled is organic, and quality control to guarantee the kind of shipment buyers demand.

Living Farms is now the marketing agency for farmers in 17 states who are certified as “organic producers,” who are in scattered locations across the country, and who produce a wide variety of organic commodities.

“Obviously we could represent a large number of organic producers right here in Minnesota and ignore other geographic areas if we wanted to,” Eggen points out. “But we’d probably have only corn and soybeans to sell and there’d be no way in the world we could sell all that production to organic buyers.”

He said buyers want to select from long price lists and like to order truckloads of assorted commodities ranging from specialty crops like lentils and pecans to food grains like wheat and corn. They are usually picked up from several farmers at designated points as the trucks head toward destinations like San Francisco or Boston.

Eggen said the agency attempts to expand its offerings regularly, particularly for specialty items, with the most recent addition being organically-grown items for the sprouting industry. He cited the alfalfa seed market as an example of the unpredictable nature of this outlet, which provided a market for only 500 pounds in 1975.

“This year we could have taken orders at the rate of 30,000 pounds a week and did for awhile,” he reports. “This apparently was due mainly to increased sprout production in California.”

One serious problem has been making organic farmers, who are accustomed to growing grain for livestock feed, aware of the need to produce “human consumption” grade commodities. This means grain that is good enough and clean enough to meet U.S. No. 1 specifications, Eggen points out, and that has been stored and handled so it meets close tolerances for things like moisture content.

“In addition to meeting tough buyer standards, we also fall under the jurisdiction of state government health agencies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” he said. “What this means is that farmers who want to market under the organic system will find they have a lot of work to do.”

Farmers who market through an agency like Living Farms usually end up investing in storage facilities and some also acquire their own cleaning equipment. Although grain can be cleaned and bagged on a custom basis, an organic farmer has much better quality control if he does this himself.

Eggen said a good on-farm cleaning setup meeting FDA standards probably would cost around $10,000. However, he said, experience has shown that farmers can pay for this equipment in a short time from premiums received from selling organically-grown production.

“The farmer is taking the place of the local elevator in storing the grain, cleaning it, bagging and labeling it, and sending it on its way to market,” he said. “I like to think that the premium that he receives, that extra amount over the local elevator price that he gets, as being kind of a middleman price that compensates him for cleaning and other extra work involved in marketing.”

Living Farms ties its standards to those established by the government, partly because most of its shipments move in interstate commerce and partly to avoid disputes with buyers. This is important, Eggen points out, because no established commercial standards exist for organic production.

“The only way of determining a bad shipment in the past was for the buyer to use the ‘eyeball’ method,” he said. “Although this method can work out as successfully as any other, it may lead to disputes between buyers and sellers.”

Standards for certifying organically-grown production were established by the farmers who set up Living Farms. They require producers to follow strict crop rotation plans that include legumes. The standards do not allow use of any commercial chemically-fortified plantfood-type fertilizers; any anhydrous ammonia, urea or other non-organic chemicals, or any insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, or rodenticides. The standards also do not permit such practices as corn after corn in a crop rotation.

Eggen defends higher prices charged for organically-produced food, explaining that this is due mainly to high transportation costs and the small volume handled on a nationwide basis. He said up to half the price of some Midwest commodities delivered to either coast goes for trucking.

He said most buyers of organic production prefer to purchase by the truckload, ruling out the economics that would result from shipping by hopper car or putting together a unit train like large grain companies do.

“We could ship organically-grown commodities by boxcar for a third of what it costs to go by truck,” he said. “It is because of our smallness that organic foods are still priced higher.”

Eggen said he expects premiums for organically-grown production to disappear over the next few years as people become more aware of the dangers of food additives and the need for better nutrition and as organic farmers become much more numerous.

“I may be an optimist but I would say that within 10 years organic farming may be the rule rather than the exception and that this change will come about mainly because of economic and energy reasons,” he predicted.

“I also feel confident that the organic industry will grow large enough to convince people that they should modify their eating habits to include more whole foods, whole grains, raw vegetables, and semi-processed commodities.”

By Roger Blobaum

A direct linkup between farmers and consumers at Madison, Wis., the last two years has made plenty of lean organically-grown beef available below supermarket prices to thousands of food co-op members.

The meat comes from calves raised by family farmers and fattened without stilbestrol, antibiotics, and other chemicals put in feeding rations in big feedlots where most of the nation’s fed beef is produced.

A typical supplier is Gerald Koster of Waunakee, an organic farmer who coordinates livestock bargaining in the area for the National Farmers Organization (NFO). He procures the fed cattle through NFO’s livestock facility at Windsor under an arrangement with Common Market Co-op in Madison.

He brings his own Holstein steers up to around 500 pounds on roughage, mostly pasture, plus a little grain. Then they go on full feed to put on the weight that will take them to a grade of high good or low choice. This, he said, provides good lean meat with just enough marbling to be tender and tasty.

“These cattle are fed a natural mineral and get soybean oil meal for protein,” he explained. “They also get corn and hay or silage raised right here on the farm.”

Coordinating beef procurement at the consumer end is Elaine Nesterick, Common Market Co-op’s manager, who said the members prefer meat that comes from young animals. She makes this naturally-fed beef available through Common Market, which has about 1,900 members, to other food co-ops in Madison and Milwaukee.

Nesterick, who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm and majored in zoology, said the cattle are usually slaughtered at 950 to 1,000 pounds. Although the farmers involved usually feed out Holstein steers, she said, Angus crosses and other beef-type animals sometimes are included.

“There hasn’t been any difference as far as the members are concerned and they have really been praising the quality of the beef we carry on a regular basis,” she said. “They say it is very lean and very tender.”

The beef has developed such a good reputation that co-op members buy it frozen and wrapped in white paper and don’t see it until after it is thawed. Few would be willing to take that chance at a supermarket meat counter.

“As opposed to the deception that occurs in commercial marketing of beef, we can be assured that the arrangements made with both farmer and butcher will be honestly carried out,” Nesterick said. “We don’t get a cow instead of a steer or an overly-fat animal instead of a lean one.”

The animals have been slaughtered the last two years at Blau’s Meat Market, a small town plant inspected by the Department of Agriculture. Farmers deliver the animals to the plant where they are slaughtered, hung in a cooler to age for about seven days, cut up according to specifications, and packaged in sizes to serve two to four people.

“The cuts are packaged in white freezer paper, stamped with date of freezing, and fast frozen at a very low temperature,” she explained. “This low temperature fast freezing extends frozen storage life and results in a fresh taste upon thawing.”

The beef arrangement is a recent addition to Common Market’s direct buying, launched in 1971 with ads placed in small town newspapers. They listed what the co-op wanted to buy, suggested how this might be done, and invited area farmers in to discuss it. About 15 showed up for a late winter meeting and all took home orders for fresh produce.

“Although we were thinking of meat at the time, we didn’t have the freezers and other facilities needed to handle it and concentrated that first session on buying produce,” Nesterick recalled. “It seemed to be the most manageable because we could begin immediately buying direct from farmers.”

It worked so well that Common Market a year later was coordinating produce buying for all the Madison area co-ops and farmers who had been involved in the first session were delighted to find they had a growing and well-coordinated market.

“Under the system we developed, farmers call in one or two days during the week and we have an order ready for them, a specific day for delivery, and a location where they can unload quickly and head back to the farm,” she said.

The first year most of the farmers were from the Madison area. Buy this year, Nesterick said, the list showed many attending the pre-planting meeting had come from 25 miles or more out in the state.

“Since the start-up of a farmers market in downtown Madison, and because close-in farmers have always had little difficulty finding local outlets for produce, we found we were attracting more producers from much farther away,” she said.

“They are much more interested in contracting ahead for their production so they know that, after traveling up to 60 miles one way, they’ll have a market for everything they bring into the city.”

Nesterick explained that Common Market now makes verbal agreements with farmers for produce, writing up a description of contract terms and specifying how much is to be delivered and when. She said both producers and the co-op have lived up to these agreements without any difficulty.

“On some items that involve a lot more volume, and that we acquire on behalf of a large number of co-ops in the region, we started writing formal contracts last year,” she added. “This includes onions, potatoes, and most grains.”

Common Market members also are looking for farmers who can supply organically-produced hogs, lamb, and poultry.

“We’ve managed to locate some organic pork and lamb but we haven’t carried it on a continuing basis or worked out the type of arrangement we have with beef,” she said. “Our next step will be to incorporate pork and lamb into our buying and to begin distributing it to other co-ops as we have with beef.”

Finding organically-grown chickens has been much more difficult. Nearly all the chicken marketed through co-op restaurants and grocery stores in the area now come from standard provisoners.

“That is a prime product that co-ops are really interested in getting locally and organically because of the knowledge of what’s going on in the broiler industry,” Nesterick said. “However I’ve talked to farmers who raise chickens in other areas and they say it is difficult to do organically at a competitive price.”

She said the tremendous difference in taste between frying chickens fed organically and those raised in broiler setups will have to be stressed with co-op members. Many who have eaten organic chicken, she said, won’t buy normal chicken anymore.

“We get a lot of comments from people who remember what chickens used to taste like and who complain about the tastelessness of the present produce,” she added. “If we do find a source, and we’re actively looking for one, we’re really going to get into that and stress it with our consumer education effort.”

One of the most interesting features of the Common Market approach is the effort made to get input from the farmers who supply vegetables, meat, and other products. The main opportunity comes at a winter meeting, held before they buy seed, where things like delivery and ordering arrangements, organic standards, and transportation fees are worked out.

“The farmers have as much, or more, input into those terms as the co-op and its members, and we really encourage that,” Nesterick said. “In fact the meetings we’ve held with farmers have been some of the most exciting meetings I have ever attended.

She said the co-op’s long term objective is trying to stabilize food costs by paying farmers a price that reflects cost of production plus a profit. But local supermarket prices also must be considered, she said, because people concerned about food costs shop around.

“So we do regular price comparisons with the three major chains here in Madison,” she said. “I did one on beef three weeks ago, and another about six weeks before that, and both times we were selling most of the cuts between 15 and 20 percent cheaper than the supermarkets.”

The price the co-op pays farmers for beef is tied directly to current market prices under the present arrangement and, in recent months, most cattle feeders have had diffuclty even breaking even. Nesterick said it is easy to pay farmers more when prices are down and there is a lot of margin between what the farmers get and what the supermarkets charge for meat.

“Most times when the price drops at the farm level, it is not reflected at the retail level at all. So we’ve got leeway in between and can pay a farmer a better price and still sell at a competitive, or even lower price, than the big chain stores,” she explained.

“But when the market goes up, which is the case right now, what usually happens is that we pay the farmer more and there’s little difference between our price and the price at the supermarket.”

These prices also are reflected in Common Market’s quotations to other co-ops that buy meat from an order sheet of available cuts. These quotations usually include a handling and delivery charge although the Madison area co-ops generally pick up their own orders.

“The co-ops that buy meat from us from other areas, mainly Milwaukee, have it delivered by Inter-Community Cooperative, which is a Madison-based trucking and wholesaling co-op that makes regular runs to Milwaukee, “Chicago, and points in between,” she explained. “So we get meat orders in here by both phone and mail and we put them up and see that they are delivered.”

Organically-grown food is promoted at Common Market when it is available and the co-op’s educationa program includes reports on taste tests of these fresh products. “It’s really important to relate things like taste to method of growing,” Nesterick emphasized. “That’s really the important linkup.”

If the price is roughtly the same, the organically-grown product is the only one offered on the co-op’s food lists. “On those tiems where there’s a sizeable price differential,” she said, “we carry both products so people can make a choice based on all the information we can give them about how and where it’s grown and who grows it.”

By Roger Blobaum

Gary Schmeichel accepted quite a challenge eight years ago when he started using organic methods to put the top soil back on a hilltop scalped by machinery taking fill for a road-building project.

He was assured by local experts, including the county agent, that the 16 acres of heavy yellow clay would never grow much of anything. Few shared his vision of a rural homesite surrounded by fruit trees, berry patches, and a vegetable garden producing more than a family could consume.

But Schmeichel followed a soil-building plan that included heavy applications of compost, leaf and wood chip mulches, and granite dust and other commercial organic materials. He also worked sweet clover and other legumes into the soil to provide nitrogen, improve the tilth, and build up the humus level.

The soil responded to this combination of hard work and careful management and before long whatever Schmeichel planted did well. As a result he has become known as the organic gardener who turned the land at the Parker highway intersection into one of South Dakota’s most beautiful areas.

A rustic sign reading “Organic Experimental Acres” now greets visitors to the area, which looks more like an arboretum than a setting for a split-level home. The “experimental” part of the sign recognizes Schmeichel innovations in growing things organically that have attracted the attention of hundreds of visitors.

The first thing you notice coming up the drive is compost piles–really big ones. One, 15 feet wide and 30 feet long, is covered with black plastic so it will capture more heat from the sun and work faster. Another, in a high woven wire enclosure, is near the highway that leads into town.

“One of the first things we did here was start gathering leaves around town to make compost,” Schmeichel recalls. “We wanted this pile near the road so it would be easy for people to dump their leaves here in the fall.”

As he scoops up some of the partially-composted mixture of leaves and manure, a couple of red wrigglers exposed to the sunlight start looking for cover. Schmeichel said he bought several thousand sometime back and now moves them to wherever he wants them to go to work.

“These worms are good in compost piles because they grind up the organic material and provide valuable castings as well,” he explains. “We incorporate the worms into the piles after they cool down and they usually are able to go deep enough when cold weather hits so they can survive the winter.”

He also puts red wrigglers in his cold frames and feeds them kitchen wastes during the winter months. Then in the spring, when Schmeichel wants more of them in the garden or needs them to “push” a compost pile, he transplants them.

One of the first improvements on the hilltop site was an evergreen windbreak, needed for protection against the winds that sweep across South Dakota’s open spaces much of the time. Protection was needed for the house as well as for fruit trees, shrubs, and nearly everything else growing there.

The soil had no organic matter content at this point and needed improvement so it could support young trees. So he roto-tilled in compost, peat moss, and granite dust before planting the first 150 small evergreens.

“We dug the holes with pick and shovel, making them about two feet wider than the balls of the trees,” he recalled. “We also put in as much compost as we could and worked it in around the roots of each tree.”

The following year, he said, a layer of sawdust and wood shavings about six inches deep was spread in the windbreak area to help control weeds and conserve moisture. Bone and cottonweed meal and other organic material was added later to feed the trees.

Today, less than seven years later, many of these trees are 30 feet high, the branches are so full it is difficult to walk between them, and the ground is springy like the floor of a pine forest. In addition to providing protection from the wind and blowing snow, the trees provide protection for wildlife in the winter and a year-around base for hundreds of insect-eating birds.

The background noise provided by wrens and other songbirds makes an immediate impression on a visitor to “Organic Experimental Acres.” Schmeichel said he encourages the birds in the winter months by watering them and putting out lots of sunflower seeds and other home-grown feed.

“I plant trees and shrubs that they like, such as mulberry trees, honeysuckles, cherry trees, and elderberries,” he explained. “I also have a big house for martins and lots of smaller bird houses located all over the area.”

In addition to fruit and berries, Schmeichel has several garden plots that would be the envy of anyone who raises vegetables. He points out that soil for gardening had to be made much richer and looser than was necessary to establish a windbreak.

He said the soil was heavy the first year, the weeds tried to take over, and it was nearly impossible to grow anything. A high PH (7.3 to 7.6) was one problem, he said, and low zinc content in the soil was another.

So the garden areas got the full treatment, first with leaf compost worked in as deep as 15 to 20 inches, then with bone meal, blood meal, granite dust, and other soil-building materials. Even now he turns under cow peas and other legumes in places to enrich the soil and make it work easier.

The garden areas are heavily mulched each year, he points out, mainly with partially-composted leaves and wood chips. This cover is roto-tilled under in the fall to keep the soil rich and productive and easy to manage.

Schmeichel says he prefers to make his own organic fertilizers now, adding bone meal and granite dust and other materials to his compost piles so he comes up with a mixture that gets good results.

Where does he get all that composting material? He watches for waste materials in the Parker area and also gets help from others interested in his organic projects. He uses a light specially-built trailer to haul sawdust, manure, and similar materials.

His wood chips come from a rural electric cooperative crew that trims tree limbs away from power lines and runs them through a portable chipper. The crew occasionally dumps a truck load on a pile near Schmeichel’s driveway.

He saw some big cottonwood trees being felled and cut up recently and got permission to haul away the sawdust and bark. He occasionally gets rotted hay but watches to be sure it isn’t too weedy. If it has some weeds in it, he makes sure it winds up in the center of a compost heap so it will get hot enough to kill the seeds.

He is partial to wood chip mulch for his tomatoes and spreads a heavy layer on when the soil temperature reaches 60 degrees. He considers this good insurance against both heat and dry weather.

“It has cow manure incorporated in it, it has been decayed some, and the red wrigglers have been at work on it,” he explains. “This wood mulch keeps earthworms close to the surface, has wonderful water retention capacity, keeps the soil temperature constant, and releases nutrients as it decays.”

Schmeichel’s interest in organic methods goes beyond developing a beautiful place to live or producing lots of good food to eat. He is in the health insurance business, is concerned about the increasing incidence of cancer, and knows first hand about the steady rise in health care costs.

“There’s no better insurance than going to this natural organic method, working with nature rather than against it, and eliminating some of the reasons why people get sick,” he said. “After all, we are what we eat.”

By Roger Blobaum

The search for more markets for buckwheat and other grains, a continuing challenge to organic farmers in the Midwest, is being met by a group of producers near Winona in southeast Minnesota.

They purchased the Stockton roller mill, a water-powered landmark shut down three years ago when the miller retired, and surprised even themselves when they turned it into a thriving business in less than a year.

This was accomplished with a milling facility that had its last new equipment installed prior to World War I, draws its power from a slow-moving brook, grinds flour like it was ground in the late 1800s, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Sites.

The rustic mill, which has been grinding grain for Stockton area farrers since 1857, is not yet fully restored. But word spread quickly when the wheels started turning last March and the new owners have been overwhelmed with orders for buckwheat pancake mix and other organic products.

These include whole grain flours, some corn meal, and the longtime favorite, flour milled from natural dried buckwheat. This product, carrying the colorful “Stockton Brand” label, once again is reaching a national market. The mill also cleans, bags, and sells wheat, rye, millet, soybeans, and sunflower seeds.

The reason the mill got off to a fast start was the managerial touch of Marc Schwartz, 27, who had experience with stone mills in his native Pennsylvania and had managed a large food cooperative in Pittsburgh.

He left Duquesne University and a career in physiological psychology after becoming convinced Vitamin B deficiency contributed to schizophrenia. He decided whole grain food could remedy the illness and this influenced his decision to learn all he could about milling and to come to Stockton.

Coming from Pennsylvania where the organic movement is well established, he said, he was relieved to find he didn’t have any difficulty obtaining Minnesota-grown organic grains for most of his milling needs.

“I was quite surprised when I attended a dinner shortly after arriving here and found about 300 organic farms from this area were represented,” he said. “I have never seen organic farmers gather like that in Pennsylvania.”

Ed Ellinghuysen, who operates a 339-acre organic farm near Stockton, organized the group that decided to buy and operate the mill. He said he got the idea one night while milking and called together a group of farmers who farmed like he did but had been unable to find organic outlets for their grain.

“With such a demand for natural food, I felt it was a disgrace to let the old mill sit there idle and deteriorate,” he said. “I knew it was a good mill and remember my dad telling about the times he took grain down there.”

The group incorporated the Stockton Realty Co., raised the money that was needed, and purchased the old mill. The transaction covered the wood and stone grist mill, a house for the miller, the concrete dam and mill pond, and several acres along Garvin Brook on the edge of Stockton.

The incorporators, in addition to Ellinghuysen, were Ed Hauck of Millville, Paul Drenckhahn of Minneiska, Marlyn Peters of Lake City, and Fred Giese of Stockton, all dairy farmers; Mrs. Evelyn Rupprecht of Lewiston, widow of a farmer, and Bill Cornforth of La Crescent, a farm owner.

Their first break was finding Ronald Graner, a miller who worked for the Department of Agriculture as a flour inspector, and hiring him to direct the 6-month job of cleaning and repairing the equipment. It was taken apart, rusty duct and hopper linings were replaced, and everything was put in order so it could pass government inspection.

In the beginning it was decided the mill would grind organically-grown grain for its owners and do some custom milling for others to stay busy. But it became apparent almost immediately that it would succeed beyond anyone’s expectations and would be hard pressed just to keep up with incoming orders.

“We do custom grinding to the extent that if a farmer brings in 500 bushels of wheat we’ll exchange flour ground in a certain way for it,” Schwartz explained. “But we can no longer take that specific wheat and grind it for him.”

The immediate challenge was encouraging more production of buckwheat, the mill’s specialty and a traditional cash crop in the area in the past. This was done by putting 500 bushels of seed in the hands of organic producers, who repaid the mill with new crop buckwheat in the fall.

The program was an unqualified success, partly because flooding and an unusually wet spring delayed planting of corn and soybeans. Buckwheat is a late, short-season crop and organic farmers in the area were delighted to have a chance to produce it for a local market.

Ellinghuysen said the mill will push production of wheat and rye this coming spring and plans to put out contracts for varieties of wheat with good milling and baking qualities. Some of the organic wheat needed at the mill this first year had to be shipped in from Arrowhead Mills in Texas.

Small flags stuck in a map on the mill office wall show where the largest shipments have gone. They include natural food warehouses in the Midwest and food cooperatives in cities like Madison, Wis., Lansing, Mich., and Chicago.

“We sell our products from Washington State to the tip of California and from the top of New England into the South,” Schwartz reported. “We’ve had an extremely good response, are even getting orders from foreign buyers, and have twice as much business as we can handle.”

He said the Stockton Mill does not give big discounts to wholesalers or allow exclusive dealerships and tries to avoid selling to outlets that mark prices up too much. This is done, he said, because the mill’s owners feel organic foods should not be priced so high people can’t afford them.

Why doesn’t the Stockton facility put on a night shift like the big mills in Minneapolis or operate on weekends to meet the growing demand for its organic products? There’s a simple answer: Garvin Brook was running through Stockton long before the mill was built, has always given the mill a good night’s rest and the weekend off, and has no intention of working any harder.

“We’ve been able to run the mill up to 16 hours a day in the summer for four days and for eight hours on the fifth day,” Schwartz said. “This winter we expect to have enough power to go 10 hours a day for five days.”

Water backs up in the mill pond overnight and on weekends, then delivers power as it rushes through a sluice box into a head box and through two vertical turbines. One is rated at 80 horsepower and the other at 45, providing ample power to lift grain three stories high and operate the obstacle course of rollers, shakers, sifters, purifiers, and hoppers as it is fed back down.

The mill is an ecological marvel–no dust or smoke or noise–and blends in with the other buildings in the little valley hamlet (pop. 346). It is a block off U.S. 14, a quiet highway since most if its traffic was diverted to a new interstate road nearby, and shares the Stockton business district with a grocery store, two taverns, and a cycle and snowmobile shop.

Schwartz said it is believed the Stockton mill has the first set of rolling mills installed in this country. Working with them has changed his attitude toward steel rollers, he said, because he had always been told that stone grinders turned out a superior product because they heated the flour less.

He takes an intense interest in this because of his concern over the Vitamin B that is lost when flour gets hot. The slow-moving rollers at Stockton, he said, run cooler than most stone mills.

“We can run 16 hours a day here and the flour is always cool–it never gets hot,” he declares. “I’ve worked with modern stone mills that turn so fast the flour will heat up so you can’t hold it in your hand.”

However, to meet the growing demand for stone ground flour, a large stone flour mill is on order for installation in the Stockton facility before spring.

Only two of the old mill’s six grinders have been used so far by the new owners. The others, plus the new stone mill and other equipment being restored, will increase milling capacity substantially in the next few months. Two 5,000-bushel steel bins also have been installed to provide organic grain storage.

“We’ll pretty much stay where we are regarding what grains we are buying but we will increase our capacity with the new stone mill and with the restoration of other parts of the mill as we go along,” Schwartz said. “The mill is here to get good food to people at a decent price and we have no interest in starting a big flour empire here in Stockton.”

By Roger Blobaum

Setting up some alternative crop management plots at an agricultural field laboratory hardly qualifies as a major research event. But to Midwest organic farmers, accustomed to getting the cold shoulder from agricultural college researchers, it ranks as a significant breakthrough.

A report on these new plots by Dr. Warren W. Sahs was warmly received at a recent meeting at Boys Town, Neb. This might seem routine except that Sahs is assistant director of the Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Station, most of the producers in the audience were organic farmers, and the occasion was a day-long workshop on biological agriculture.

At a time when policymakers in the Department of Agriculture and at most colleges of agriculture still refuse to work with organic farmers in developing betters ways to farm without chemicals, the experiments set up by Sahs and other University of Nebraska scientists stand out.

Sahs reported that more than 50 plots, each with 13 different treatments repeated four times, are now in their second year. The series is tilled like an organic farm with manure applications, no chemicals, and a 4-year rotation of oats and clover, corn, soybeans, and corn.

The soil was limed and sampled when the series of plots was set up, he said, and will be sampled again at the end of the 4-year cycle for such things as organic matter content, phosphorus availability, zinc and potassium levels, and soil compaction. The land is a silty clay loam a good uniform soil, and was in alfalfa for four years before the experiments were started.

Sahs began his workshop report by introducing several staff members from the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the new name adopted by the college of agriculture at the University of Nebraska. He emphasized that the three long-term alternative management experiments now underway are the work of a committee involving scientists from several disciplines.

“This work began about two years ago,” he said, “when we had renewed interest at the experiment station–and you people helped us on this–in taking a look at where we had been and we we might need to be going in agriculture in the future.”

These are believed to be the first genuine organic farming experiments initiated by a land grant university since long before farmers started using nitrogen fertilizer and other chemicals. Many of the early field experiments were discontinued in the 1950s. At least two, those at Sanborn Field at Missouri and the Morrow Plots at Illinois, are still maintained.

Nebraska has conducted rotational experiments since 1912 at its Panhandle Station, with corn grown continuously until 1942 with no fertilizer or manure added. From then on, half the plots were manured at the rate of 12 tons per acre.

Panhandle Station reports show that hybrid corn yields on the manured plots increased steadily for more than 10 years, leveling off at about 99 bushels per acre. It said adding nitrogen fertilizer on part of the manured plots over a 20-year period did not significantly increase corn yields. In addition to increasing and maintaining yields, the reports show, manuring each year built the soil’s nitrogen content back to 90 percent of its original virgin priairie level and increased its ability to take up and hold moisture.

At least one other Midwest university set up plots for organic experiments but the reported results set off a lively controversy. This was a series at experiment stations at Morris and Lamberton in Minnesota that showed corn grown with conventional fertilizer yielded more than corn grown with organic fertilizer. A number of organic farmers questioned the published results, however, when they discovered in checking out this work that the organic plots had not been cultivated to control weeds.

“It became clear that since the weed control practices were not the same on all plots that what the university really tested was whether or not the presence of weeds affected crop yields,” one farmer suggested in a biting letter to the editor. “The Morris and Lamberton Experiment Stations should be complimented in their findings that ‘the more weeds, the less yield’.”

Sahs, however, seems to have won the support of organic farmers in Nebraska, who made suggestions for the project in the beginning, can visit the Mead station to see how the plots are turning out, and are given regular reports. Questions asked at the end of his report were searching, but friendly, suggesting mutual trust had been established.

Along with the 4-year organic rotation started in 1975, which uses feedlot manure and no insecticides or herbicides, the plots include continuous corn with synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, and insecticide. They also include two sequences using the crop rotation with and without insecticide, no manure, and with chemical nitrogen and herbicide.

Two additional experiments are underway with irrigated corn, one to see how much feedlot manure the land can handle without damaging effects and another to test different levels of actual nitrogen applied in the form of composted paunch manure, semi-composted feelot manure, and commercial nitrogen fertilizer. Grain produced under these various systems also is being analyzed for nutritional content and quality.

Although funding is thin for the organic-type research at the Mead station, Sahs reported, it also plans to begin work on land application of sewage sludge. He said he detects a growing interest among the various disciplines in finding ways to use recyclable resources in agriculture.

Reports of lack of interest at USDA and most land grant universities in organic farming research was explored recently by two subcommittees of the House Science and Technology Committee. Assistant Secretary Robert Long was questioned at length by Rep. Ray Thornton of Arkansas, who wanted to know whether USDA had been exploring the possibilities of using more rotations and organic materials and cutting back on chemicals.

“It’s only been relatively recently that there’s been a serious challenge to the crop systems and cultural practices that have been generally applied in this country,” Long responded. “The challenges have not reached a level of acceptance, I might add, among economists, agronomists, and others.”

Thornton and others, dissatisfied with the testimony, asked long to submit a written report for the record. It is not surprising that the report Long filed later failed to mention research like the Sahs project at Nebraska because that is not the kind of research USDA has been funding.

It also is not surprising that his report sounded very much like what Secretary Earl Butz has been sahying for years about organic farming. Any drastic reduction in chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, Long wrote, would lead to less food produced, higher food prices, few exports, and “the spectre of hunger” in the rest of the world.

What the subcommittee heard from several other witnesses, however, was more along the line of what the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University concluded after one year of studying Midwest organic farms. It found that organic farming methods have received much less research attention than methods based on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and that agronomic research on organic methods could result in farming alternatives that will become increasingly attractive as energy costs go up.

“It is important to recognize that the performance level achieved by the organic farmers in our sample has been accomplished without some of the aids used by conventional farmers, including a strong research effort to discover and test new production methods within the conventional system, and a network of extension specialists to help individual farmers apply these developments to their own farms,” the report said.

“It seems plausible that a comparable effort for organic farming methods could result in an even higher level of performance than we have observed in our sample.”

It may be that help is on the way and that Congress will insist on some basic changes in agricultural research. The preliminary report of the two subcommittees concluded that the agricultural research systems has failed to prove it is responding fully to problems of future energy shortages and the need to maintain a quality environment.

“A thorough integration of energy and environmental concerns into the agricultural research systems seems vital for the assurance of long-term agricultural productivity,” the report concluded.

“Alternatives to current agricultural practices need to be developed either for use in conjunction with existent methods, or in anticipation of future developments which assure the balance among agriculture, energy, and the environment.”

by Roger Blobaum · Inside Organics · Jan/Feb 2010

Recent trends in organic research suggest Midwest organic farmers may want to consider some new questions: Who are the scientists doing organic research in your state? What kind of research is being done? Are these researchers reaching out to involve you in their work? And are they making a special effort to share the results?

You may be interested in meeting the scientists at your land grant university and in helping shape the organic research being done. But the scientists doing the research also may be interested in meeting you and finding out what kind of research you think they should be doing. It’s no longer unusual for organic researchers and organic farmers to get together and compare notes.

A significant increase in organic research in the Midwest, and in the funding supporting it, is focusing new attention on farmer-friendly research approaches and on ways farmers and researchers can benefit from working together. Organic research proposals that include farmer involvement get extra points in the competition for government and foundation research grants.

Midwest Organic Researchers

Organic farmers may be surprised to learn that more than 200 university scientists and graduate students are involved in organic research in the 12 North Central states. Several of the region’s land grant universities have developed strong organic programs and organic research capacity. A recent survey identified 35 organic researchers at Michigan State University, 32 at the University of Wisconsin, 30 at the University of Minnesota, and 27 at Ohio State University.

It is becoming increasingly important to organic researchers to have access to certified organic land, either university owned or on organic farms, and to develop working relationships with certified organic farmers. These new partnerships make it possible for researchers and farmers to work together in developing organic research agendas, designing research projects, and conducting research on organic farms.

The relationship between organic farmers and extension specialists also is changing. There is a shift away from the conventional extension model where extension specialists refer farm production problems to researchers, researchers address the problems and generate new knowledge, and extension specialists bring the new knowledge back to farmers.

Because organic farming is knowledge intensive and involves a more complex learning process, organic farmers prefer a much more participatory system that has farmers, extension specialists, and researchers working together. This new approach also provides opportunities to partner with organic and sustainable agriculture organizations that disseminate research results through conferences, workshops, and other educational events.

Much of the credit for making farmers, extension specialists, and researchers more aware of the benefits of working together should go to USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and to the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF), a nonprofit organization based in California.

Although only about 15 percent of SARE-funded research and education projects are organic specific, the farmer friendly approach this program has developed over 20 years of grantmaking is influencing the way organic research is done. “In SARE,” the agency’s website notes, “researchers at universities, in extension offices, on farms, and in nonprofit organizations have found a place to come together.”

Organic Research Had Bumpy Start

It was widely assumed as early as the 1970s that organic farmer involvement, including farmers doing research on their own farms, was critical in generating results that were practical, relevant, farmer friendly, and useful. It also was assumed that most researchers in the land grant university system were either clueless about organic farming or, worse yet, were biased against it.

That was one assumption in 1993 when a group of California organic farmers established OFRF to raise funds to support research that organic farmers would conduct on their own farms. They assumed research designed by farmers and carried out on certified organic farms would provide practical science-based answers to their production problems.

This approach was soon abandoned when it became clear that organic farmers had neither the time nor the research design expertise to do research on their own or to turn out project reports that could be widely shared. OFRF’s new approach, and the one followed now, emphasizes grower-researcher collaboration and research conducted on certified organic land.

OFRF also organized the Scientific Congress on Organic Agricultural Research (SCOAR), which brought organic farmers, researchers and others together to develop a national research agenda that catalogues and prioritizes organic research needs.

The national agenda project also developed guidelines for organic research that are widely supported and followed. These guidelines state that organic research should be conducted under certified organic conditions, involve organic producers as active team members, and emphasize multidisciplinary systems approaches rather than input-substitution approaches.

Organic Farmers Help Shape Funded Research Projects

The farmer-researcher partnership guidelines developed by SARE and OFRF are becoming the norm for both government and nonprofit organic research funding programs. The Organic Research Initiative of The Ceres Trust, for example, incorporated the guidelines into criteria used earlier this year in making competitive grants for organic research in the Midwest.

The Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI), a national grantmaking program that provides $19 million a year for research and extension, requires all project field work to be done on certified organic land or land in transition to organic certification. Project advisory panels that include organic farmers also are strongly encouraged. Applicants also must meet the program’s guidelines for organic farmer involvement.

“USDA expects that applicants will consult with organic producers before developing project proposals,” the OREI request for applications states. “Producers and/or processors should play an important role in developing project goals and objectives, in implementing the plan, and in evaluating and disseminating project results and outcomes.”

A related partnership challenge is how to bring organic farmers and organic researchers together at events where the results of this research collaboration are shared and discussed. There is a need for more research reporting opportunities at conferences, field days, workshops, and other events easily accessible to farmers.

Midwest Research Symposium

One successful new model was the Midwest Organic Research Symposium held in 2008 in La Crosse in conjunction with the Organic Farming Conference organized by Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Services (MOSES) and the Organic Farming Research Foundation. Organic research reports and poster sessions authored by more than 100 scientists and graduate students were presented at this well-attended organic farming event.

The 2010 conference will bring farmers and researchers together again to share organic research results. This year research reports will be presented by organic researchers in six conference workshops. Research topics include weed seed predation, raising hogs in organic apple orchards, reducing tillage in organic vegetable operations, transitioning to organic production, ecological pest suppression in organic systems, and disease suppressive soils and composts.

Organic research still doesn’t get a fair share of the research funding available. But organic farmers, by taking advantage of opportunities to work more closely with organic researchers, are positioned to help make certain that the funding that is available supports project that address the problems they feel are most important.

This article was first printed in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of the Organic Broadcaster, published by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service

By Roger Blobaum

A fascinating view of biological agriculture was presented by Dr. Herbert H. Koepf, a soil science professor from Europe, at an Omaha-area workshop for organic farmers and others from the Midwest.

Also appearing at the all-day August session was Pierre Ott, a French agronomist now teaching at the University of California at Vera Cruz. The workshop was sponsored by the Center for Rural Affairs in cooperation with Father Flanagan’s Boys Town and the Quality Environmental Council of Omaha. It was coordinated by Bob Steffen, who manages the organic farming operation at Boys Town.

Koepf, the featured speaker, pointed out that organic or biological agriculture is the best long-term approach to farming. It also is a complicated process, he said, where questions do not always have easy answers and where much is unknown.

“A soil is not just a box where we put something in and take something out,” he said. “There is more going on in the soil than we realize.”

Koepf has worked with biodynamic agriculture for more than 40 years and now heads the School of Biodynamic Agriculture at Emerson College in Forest Grove, Sussex, England. He was director of the Biochemical Research Laboratory at Spring Valley, N.Y., for several years in the 1960s.

He said biodynamic farms in Europe that use only manure for fertilizer show good yields, that nitrogen and potassium and potash are emphasized too much in conventional agriculture, and that lasting fertility requires an optimum balance of such factors as soil life, water-holding capacity, and soil aeration.

He was critical of concentration of livestock in huge feedlots, often hundreds of miles away from farms where the grain being fed is produced, and the lack of emphasis on returning manure to the soil.

“To concentrate livestock the way it has been done here and the way it is being done in Europe is one of those developments and one of those steps in agriculture that quite a few future generations will have to struggle with,” he said.

“It makes you feel especially sad when you know that in actual fact you can’t maintain lasting soil fertility without a certain amount of animal manures.”

He explained the process, which he said is not fully understood, by which inorganic nitrogen fertilizer hastens the depletion of organic matter in the soil.

“To build up organic matter in the soil and to build into the soil a lasting organic reserve of nitrogen requires animal manure,” he said. “It is difficult to increase organic matter when chemical nitrogen is used.”

Koepf said he had reservations about field applications of liquid manure, explaining that the result in many cases is either an overdose or a loss of nutrients through denitrification. The best approach is composting manure, he said, stabilizing the nitrogen and adding lasting nitrogen to the soil. He said fresh manure inhibits germination and root growth while composted or mature manure enhances plant growth.

Ott raised questions about the heavy use of inorganic fertilizers, the long-term impact of conventional farming, and the social costs involved. He pointed out that too little attention is paid to the quality of food grown and suggested that crops grown with large amounts of chemical fertilizer may have important implications in terms of health problems and medical bills.

In responding to a question about how to determine whether a soil is alive, he said a good farmer can determine that by walking across his fields. How the soil reacts to the pressure of one’s foot, he said, can tell a good deal about its fertilizer needs. He said a fertile soil has good structure, plenty of organic matter, a good smell, is well aerated, and has twice the weight of a cow in earthworms per acre.

By Roger Blobaum

Although Southwest Iowa has had two dry summers in a row, the operators of a rolling 720-acre farm near Tabor hardly noticed the drought as they harvested good corn and soybean crops both years.

“Our corn last year, despite the drought, made 90 bushels an acre,” Adolph Codr reported. “We have corn this year, including one field with some of the most beautiful ears we’ve seen, that will make more than 100 bushels.”

The explanation is that this crop and livestock unit operated by Adolph and Arnold Codr, brothers and partners, has been farmed organically since 1968. It follows a rotation that utilizes legumes, cattle and hog manure, and natural fertilizers to maintain high fertility.

As a result the soil has a high level of organic matter, which increases its ability to hold moisture, and has good structure so water can rise from lower levels when dry weather sets in.

The Codrs explained that their corn also withstood a severe windstorm in August that blew many fields in the area so flat they were harvested with great difficulty, if at all. What protected their corn from high winds, they point out, is the deep root system that is developed by corn grown without chemicals.

The Codr farm also is unusual because it is rented. Most organic farmers in the Midwest own their own farms, or rent from close relatives, because most landlords insist that tenants follow chemical methods.

“You should go talk to our landlord about last year’s crops,” Adolph Codr suggested. “He was real happy with what his share was.”

The Codr brothers recalled how they had been urged repeatedly by a friend to switch to organic methods in the mid-1960s but kept putting it off. One influencing factor in their decision to switch was a growing health problem traced to frequent handling of farm chemicals.

“So we finally went to Hy-Brid Sales Company in Council Bluffs and liked what we found so much that we ended up ordering a carload of calphos,” they said. “We spread it on clover ground before plowing it under and saw good results right away in that year’s corn crop.”

The soil tests that Hy-Brid Sales insists on showed their land needed a lot of granite dust and calphos plus a little sulphur. The hilltop ground also needed lime. They have the company mix the right combination in a natural fertilizer each year.

They said the company also takes Fish-It, a liquid fish fertilizer, and liquid kelp and mixes them together with bacteria as a starter for corn. The Fish-It also is sprayed on as a foliar feeding when the corn is laid by.

“We use this mixture of fish, kelp, and bacteria as a starter on soybeans, too, applying it at about half the rate of corn,” Adolph Codr said. “We want to be sure we have that bacteria in there to help get extra nodules on the soybean roots, which means extra nitrogen for next year’s crop.”

They have done little thus far to find organic outlets for their production, feeding most of their corn in finishing out several hundred hogs a year. They usually farrow about 70 sows. The main exception is wheat, which they sell to an organic market.

“We are considering putting some steers on feed this winter to reach a growing market for organic beef,” they said. “We do want to get into this specialized market as time goes on.”

They have a steady supply of feeder calves from a herd of about 50 stock cows, mostly Herefords, and would have no difficulty assuring buyers their beef was organic. They also raise a small flock of chickens to assure themselves organic eggs throughout the year.

The wheat is sowed following oats on the weakest ground. Arnold Codr emphasized that it usually goes on a field where a weed problem is developing.

By Roger Blobaum

When you see Steve Groeteke pulling his mixer wagon slowly past cattle falling into line at the bunks at one end of a big hillside feedlot, it looks like any of hundreds of similar cattle setups in Northeast Nebraska.

But a closer look shows this operation near North Bend is in a class by itself. Groeteke, a university business major who returned to the farm, is one of a growing number of young cattle feeders producing organically-grown beef.

In developing his “Nature Brand Farms” beef, Groeteke is building a market for choice farm-to-freezer beef. It is sold to steady customers, many from Lincoln and Omaha, who order it on a regular basis and pick it up after it is processed at a small plant in Dodge, Nebraska.

“We are selling about 50 organic cattle a year now even though we haven’t spent much time advertising or pushing it, ”he explains. “With the large number of cattle we feed every year, we aren’t able yet to move them all into organic channels.”

Groeteke has no difficulty getting along without chemicals on a commercial-size farm that produces enough hay, pasture, grain and silage for a herd of registered Red Poll cattle, plus up to 200 head of cattle in the feedlot. All of the feed is organic.

“The main motivation for switching was a lot of sickness in livestock that the veterinarian couldn’t seem to find an answer for,” he recalls. “Our soil also seemed to be getting so much harder and more lifeless and we decided that what the organic people were saying made sene.”

We changed to organic methods in 1971 and adopted a program using products sold by Hy-Brid Sales Co. of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Included are organic fertilizers and soil building materials and a grain balancer product that is fed to livestock.

Cattle in the feedlot now were started on a high roughage ration due to high feed costs, he said, and are getting good gains on a ration that includes corn silage, a grain balancer, and a little salt.

“We feed about one-third of a pound a day of the grain balancer, which is weighed out and put in a mixer wagon so it gets blended in with the silage as it is augered out,” he reports. “I also put it out free choice with a block of salt in a mineral feeder to allow the cattle to adjust their own intake.”

Groeteke also includes the grain balancer in the ration in the winter months for his Red Poll cows, bull calves, and heifers. These cattle remain on the grain balancer when they are on grass and it is provided free choice.

He has adopted a program to build the carrying capacity of his pasture land. It includes adding a few pounds of alfalfa and sweet clover to the pasture seeding plus applying blended Al-Aska, a Hy-Brid Sales Co. Product, the first year.

“Then, according to the soil test, we will apply Calphos or granite dust or whatever is required to keep the soil balanced,” he said. “Of course cattle on pasture spread manure and we’ll also apply some composted manure as needed.

Composing of the large volume of manure produced in the feedlot is a relatively new undertaking. Groeteke mechanically piles it in windrows with a power-takeoff spreader, adds a starter bacteria in water, and turns the windrows at regular intervals over a period of about a month.

It produces a compost that resembles potting soil and that can be applied easily with a heavy duty fertilizer spreader. This past year, the crops looked greener with 1 ½ tons of compost, he reports, than they had the previous year with a heavy covering of manure.

Groeteke is convinced that organic farming, including the production of the kind of naturally-grown beef that more and more people are looking for, is the agriculture of the future. Even if the high-priced energy-intensive inputs used for chemical farming weren’t going to become scarce, he emphasizes, kicking the chemical habit still would make sense.

“What we’ve concentrated on with our agriculture technology the last 10 to 15 years is a very short run type of farming,” he concludes. “Organic farming is self-renewing and is the only kind of agriculture that can endure indefinitely.”

By Roger Blobaum

A strong belief that caring for the land means farming without chemicals has maintained the high productivity of a South Dakota crop and livestock farm for the family that has operated it since it was homesteaded.

Walter Hobbie, who now operates the original farm northwest of Flandreau, has lived on it since his birth in 1907. His twin brother, Oscar, lives on another organic farm less than a mile away.

Over the years both have purchased additional land and the two families now farm more than 1,100 acres in the neighborhood. They are helping three sons get started so a third generation of Hobbies can carry on the family farm tradition.

The farm where Walter Hobbie lives looks much different than when his father broke the Dakota grassland sod with a team of horses. White buildings are shaded by huge trees, modern machines are parked in the yard, and huge blue silos give it a contemporary touch.

Hobbie doesn’t say much about a brief period when some chemicals were used on his land. He said he decided to quit using them about 10 years ago after reading several articles about organic farming.

“I had been using chemicals some, but not too much, and I didn’t like it,” he recalls. “As long as I have farmed I never did believe the chemical way was the right way to go.”

He said he and his brother, Oscar, had some long talks about the possibility of dropping chemicals. Since they did a lot of farming back and forth, he said, they finally decided to work together in trying it out.

Hobbie said the first thing they noticed was a lot less trouble with their livestock, a development that didn’t escape the notice of their local veterinarian.

“He said he thought we had switched veterinarians because he didn’t have to come out anymore like he used to,” he said. “I told him ‘no we didn’t switch veterinarians, we just don’t need you’.”

Cutting out veterinary bills is no small matter for the Hobbies, who have extensive livestock programs and feed all the hay and grain they produce. Walter Hobbie raises a lot of hogs and feeds out 150 to 200 fat cattle every year.

The Hobbies also are big in dairying. Walter’s son, Gary, has more than 100 milk cows and his younger brother, Larry, has about 30. Oscar’s son, Roger, milks 40 to 50 cows.

The big livestock operation produces plenty of valuable manure, which is spread on alfalfa ground during the winter months. In late summer and fall it goes on stubble, then is disced or chisel plowed in. The orchard and garden also get their share.

“Applying manure to the land really works,” Walter Hobbie declares. “I don’t think there’s anything like good old barn yard manure for fertilizer.”

He said he applies some purchased organic materials to the land occasionally but never invests more than $15 an acre for an application. He considers pesticides and weed killers bad for the land and a waste of money.

He observes farming practices of others, as all farmers do, and reports that a lot of operators applying chemical weed killers end up with terrible weed problems. Either they don’t get it on right, he suggests, or it simply doesn’t work.

“I’ve talked to some of them and they say it doesn’t work like the ads claim it will,” he added. “The weeds are as bad or worse than they were before. It seems to be kind of backfiring on them. It sure is something.”

Another problem in weed control, he said, is that many farmers have too much land and simply can’t handle it. “They just try to let chemicals do part of their work for them and it just don’t work.”

Hobbie said proper rotation and getting your field work done on time are the answer to weed and insect problems. “What is most important,” he stressed, “ is working with nature rather than against it.”

His normal rotation starts with alfalfa, which is followed by flax, wheat, or oats. Then the land is put in corn. Some of the other Hobbies include soybeans in their rotation to add some nitrogen to the soil.

Limited rainfall in the area puts some limits on crop rotation and Walter Hobbie has learned through the years to adapt.

“Right after alfalfa in this area, if you put it to corn it generally gets a little too dry the first year,” he explains. “The alfalfa takes most of the moisture out of the ground so you wait another year and then you will get by real good.”

Like most other organic farmers, the Hobbies stress the need to be in the field at the right time with the rotary hoe and cultivator to keep ahead of the weeds. “We use the rotary hoe and then we cultivate,” he explains. “If we get through the corn before it gets too big, we like to cultivate three times.”

How about yields? “They’re as good as any of them–or better,” he reports. “They’re better than some who are using chemicals.”

The Hobbies make no attempt to find special organic markets or to seek premiums for their grain and livestock. Walter Hobbie reports he has sold some beef direct to neighbors or to people in town.

He also has sold a few bags of wheat to an organic buyer in Minnesota and some corn to a health food store in Sioux Falls, S.D. Home-grown foods the Hobbies enjoy themselves include garden produce, milk, meat, eggs, and stone ground flour and cereal.

“We have a little stone grinder and make our own whole wheat flour for homemade bread,” he said. “I grind my own breakfast food, putting in hulled oats, corn, wheat, rye, and a little flax.”

There’s always plenty of fresh milk and lots of eggs from Mrs. Hobbie’s 500-hen flock. Another treat is big glasses of apple juice, squeezed from ripe apples from the orchard, poured into into plastic jugs, and kept in the deep freeze. Applies from last year’s big crop yielded nearly 40 gallons of frozen juice.

by Roger Blobaum · Inside Organics · Nov/Dec 2009

Is it possible organic integrity could become Priority Number One at the U.S. Department of Agriculture after all these years of inattentive oversight, lack of political support, lax and uneven enforcement, stingy appropriations, and poor management?

This could actually happen. The National Organic Program’s problems are being tackled one by one in a coordinated effort at USDA. The focus is on fixing a troubled program that has fallen short in meeting consumer expectations and failed to provide the organic sector benefits promised when the Organic Foods Production Act was passed 19 years ago.

The NOP also has repeatedly failed organic farmers with false starts and delays in issuing regulations needed to fully implement the 1990 law. More than 60 rulemaking and other recommendations produced by the National Organic Standards Board over several years are backed up at USDA with no schedule for followup. Decisions that need to be made are stalled, delayed, or postponed.

Probably the most serious is failure to complete a standard to guarantee real outdoor access to livestock, including pasture for dairy animals. The need for this standard was one of six priority issues identified in 1998 in the 278,000 public comments that forced USDA to withdraw the first proposed rule and rewrite it. Now, 11 years later, the organic pasture access standard is still not done.

It appears help is on the way. Important moves made over the last few months include agreeing to permit independent continuous outside oversight of the NOP, hiring an experienced organic program manager qualified to whip the NOP into shape, elevating the NOP to a stand-alone program within USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, and appointing five highly qualified new members to the 15-member NOSB.

NOP Moved Up in USDA Bureaucracy

The NOP also is getting more respect within the USDA bureaucracy. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has informed Congress that the NOP will no longer be stuck at the bottom of the chain of command in the Transportation and Marketiing Program at USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service. He said upgrading the NOP to stand-alone program status under the AMS administrator will help support organic agriculture’s growth and ensure proper oversight and enforcement.

“Establishing the NOP as a stand-alone program area illustrates to the organic industry, Congress, and the public that the Department recognizes the importance of organic agriculture, supports its growth, and is committed to protecting the integrity of the organic label,” Vilsack told Congress.

The USDA actions have been accompanied by a strong vote of confidence from Congress, which appropriated more money for the NOP for Fiscal Year 2010 than anyone inside or outside of USDA had asked for. The new level of $6.978 million, more than double the amount provided a year earlier, is $300,000 more than the Administration asked for.

The extra $300,000, which was included in the conference committee report that cleared Congress and was sent to the President, had not been included in either the House or Senate agriculture appropriations bills. It is reported that the conferees took the unusual step of adding the extra funding “to enhance accreditation and oversight capabilities.”

More Important NOP Improvements Promised

More moves to shape up the organic program are promised. Included are writing and publishing a Quality Manual and a Policy Manual for the NOP’s accreditation program, finalizing the pasture rule and reducing the backlog of other delayed or postponed rulemaking recommendations, addressing issues related to organic fish and personal body care products and pet food standards, and stepping up enforcement of OFPA regulations.

All will require adding qualified professionals with organic expertise to the NOP’s staff to increase compliance and enforcement capability, draft regulations, make quality system improvements needed to obtain NIST recognition, and clean up NOP website misinformation and make other website improvements.

The planned changes, as well as those already made, are administrative moves carried out under existing authority. None of the needed improvements under active consideration are expected to require changes in the provisions of the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act or in the final implementation rule that went into effect seven years ago.

Miles McEvoy Named to Head NOP

Leading the new effort to shape up the NOP is Miles McEvoy, who took over as director of the new stand-alone NOP on October 1. He comes to USDA from the Washington State Department of Agriculture, where he has directed its highly-regarded

organic program since it was established more than 20 years ago. Washington’s state program now certifies more than 800 operators.

McEvoy was a founder of the National Association of State Organic Programs and has been serving as its president. He also has experience with global organic issues and opportunities, including serving on the Organic Trade Association’s Canada-U.S. Equivalency Task Force. Under his direction, the Washington State Organic Program has been accredited to IFOAM standards and criteria for several years by the International Organic Accreditation Service.

Most important to organic farmers and consumers and other organic food and farming advocates is McEvoy’s unwavering commitment to organic integrity, to enforcement of organic standards, and to provisions of the public/private partnership built into the 1990 law.

McEvoy will be challenged to help the NOP more fully realize its public/private partnership responsibilities in working with a stressed-out and unappreciated NOSB. Five highly-qualified new members, a new class of appointees named without drama or controversy, will join the NOSB in January. The OTA expressed pleasure with the new appointees and the Organic Consumers Association called them “the best in recent memory.”

New NOSB Members Named

The new members appointed to 5-year terms are environmentalist Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides; retailer Joe Dickson of Whole Foods; Oklahoma organic fruit and vegetable farmer Annette Riherd and Organic Valley livestock specialist Wendy Fulwider, and handler John Foster of Earthbound Farms in California.

Selecting these appointees suggests USDA has given up on appointing industry representatives to NOSB board slots reserved by law for consumer and other public interest representatives. Consumer representatives rebelled recently when Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns appointed industry representatives to fill two consumer slots on the NOSB. This raised troubling questions about USDA’s commitment to follow requirements of the 1990 law and protect the integrity of the NOSB’s decisionmaking process.

Another challenge will be relieving NOSB members of activities they should not be asked to do, such as conducting technical reviews of petitions to add materials to the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances. It is assumed that the NOP, under its new management, will no longer attempt to press busy unqualified NOSB members to conduct reviews or handle other tasks outside their job description.

Is the new USDA commitment to put organic integrity first at the NOP for real? There is every indication now that it is. But just as the organic community was feeling good about this likely outcome, it was jarred back to reality by an unexpected sour note:

Vilsack’s announcement that a Monsanto-connected biotechnology heavyweight had been named to head the new National Institute for Food and Agriculture at USDA. As one of his responsibilities In this new position, Robert Beachy, prominent biotechnology researcher and president of a Monsanto-sponsored plant science center, will oversee nearly $500 million in USDA competitive grants and other research funding.

This disappointing development suggests organic advocates will end up with a rehabbed NOP, an organic label that has organic integrity, and an influential industrial agriculture insider at USDA who has been brought in to promote biotechnology here and abroad. This is not the change we were hoping for.

by Roger Blobaum

This article was first printed in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of the Organic Broadcaster, published by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service

by Roger Blobaum · Inside Organics · January, 2007

After seven long years of stonewalling to block independent review and oversight of its troubled organic program, it looks like the U.S. Department of Agriculture may have its hands full in the coming year with not one, but two, organic program audits.

A surprising decision by USDA to agree to an independent outside audit of its organic accreditation program by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was disclosed in July. Appropriations committees in both houses of Congress pressed ahead at the same time to provide $500,000 to USDA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) to audit the operations of the National Organic Program (NOP).

USDA’s NIST audit decision was made public in a letter from Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan to the National Organic Coalition (NOC). The coalition proposed the NIST audit to the Obama Administration’s transition team in December and a NOC delegation followed up with a meeting with Merrigan in June. NOC, a coalition of organizations including Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, suggested the NIST review would fix USDA’s “flawed” organic accreditation program and satisfy the law’s controversial Peer Review Panel requirement at the same time.

Organic producers understand why audits are important. Their audits are the annual inspections used to verify their compliance with the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA). Producers also may be told to improve their systems as a condition of continuing their organic certification. The NIST audit would put the NOP under a similar system of annual surveillance and continuous improvement and help solve inconsistency and other implementation problems.

Merrigan’s letter to NOC stated that applying for and receiving NIST recognition will support the NOP’s credentials as an accreditation program and satisfy the organic law’s peer review requirements. “We understand the value of this step,” her letter said, “as we continue working to strengthen the integrity of the NOP and to building the organic community’s trust in the program.”

Why Peer Review Is a Big Deal

Why did Merrigan cite the need to meet the organic law’s peer review requirement and why is peer review still such a contentious issue? The reason is that organic farmers and others involved in shaping the 1990 organic law felt strongly that USDA could never be trusted to operate an organic program without public oversight.

They insisted, as a result, that the law include both the Peer Review Panel requirement and the National Organic Standards Board’s statutory authority over the national list of allowed and prohibited substances.

The requirements for peer review and USDA’s refusal to fully implement them despite Congressional prodding have been a source of contention for years. Senate report language in USDA appropriations bills in each of the last five years have called on USDA to establish the review panel called for in the 1990 law. This language appears again in the recently approved Senate version.

Why is the new NIST audit important to organic farmers and to the consumers who purchase organic food? One reason is the NOP accredits 98 certification bodies worldwide, making integrity issues crucial to consumer acceptance and to farmers needing assurance that organic soybeans and other competing imports meet U.S. organic standards. The list of NOP-accredited certification bodies includes 54 U.S.-based certifiers, including several that certify farms and processors overseas, and 44 foreign certifiers based in more than 20 countries. Lax oversight of certification agencies has become a pressing organic integrity issue for consumers aware of problems with food imports from China and other countries.

The NIST audit is important because it would require USDA’s accreditation program to have a quality manual that would clearly spell out procedures for dealing with certification and enforcement, require consistency in guidelines given to certification agencies and producers, provide continuous review of the manual, and provide oversight needed to make sure NOP personnel follow its requirements.

News Reports Undermine Consumer Confidence

The audit decision also may slow the growing number of national media reports critical of the NOP that organic farmers and others believe are undermining consumer confidence. USDA has been hit hard by stories reporting that organic standards have been relaxed and are unevenly applied, that it has failed to support the scientific analysis the NOSB needs to evaluate which substances and additives can be used in organic products, and that Washington influence peddlers working behind the scenes have been successful in getting the NOP to increase the number of substances and additives allowed.

The decision to seek NIST recognition also will put on hold the recent attempt by an NOSB committee to recommend an alternative peer review approach. The NOSB’s Compliance, Accreditation, and Certification Committee’s latest proposed approach would establish a special NOSB task force that would attempt to provide the kind of NOP oversight that the peer review process calls for. NOC urged the NOSB at the meeting to reject the committee’s task force approach and to seriously consider recommending the NIST approach instead.

The appropriations bills calling for providing the OIG with $500,000 to audit the operations of the NOP indicate that Congress has run out of patience with how the program is being run. The OIG funding was sponsored in the House by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and in the Senate by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and is expected to be in the USDA appropriations bill when it gets final approval later this year.

Holt’s House bill provision calls on the OIG “to determine whether the USDA organic certification program ensures that the most rigorous standards for certification are honored and to investigate whether non-organic substances inappropriately remain allowed in small amounts in USDA certified products after organic alternatives have been discovered.” This is a reference to the increase from 77 to 245 in the number of non-organic substances and additives now allowed in certified organic products.

Numerous Noncompliances in Previous Audits

The OIG audit presumably will be more comprehensive than an earlier audit that identified serious NOP operations problems. An additional audit of USDA’s organic accreditation program conducted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) six years ago turned up 21 noncompliances, including lack of a quality manual. Although both audits identified serious problems and made recommendations, neither the OIG nor ANSI had the authority to require USDA to make the corrections needed. .

The NOP at the time promised to implement the recommendations of the ANSI audit and bring the organic program into compliance. The NOP also expressed an interest in having an assessment of this kind on a regular basis but but there was no followup. Four years later Senate appropriators were still asking the NOP for “a detailed report to the Committee regarding progress in implementing these recommendations.”

The NIST audit, which will place the NOP under continuous outside surveillance and oversight, may be the most important organic policy development since the final rule went into effect in 2002. This rigorous audit, unlike the others, will require USDA to correct all the problems identified. It will force USDA to bring its organic accreditation program into conformity with international standards for management of accreditation programs for the first time and bring the NOP into compliance with the 1990 organic law.

The audit of USDA’s organic program, with NIST recognition as the hoped-for outcome, will get underway October 1, 2009 and is expected to take a year or more. USDA already has some NIST audit experience. The Audit, Review, and Compliance Branch of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service , which performs organic certifier audits, received NIST recognition in April for its ISO Guide 65 program. NIST recognition is for two years and the full audit process must be repeated each time it is renewed.

There is no reason why USDA should have anything less than a world class organic program. The NIST audit decision, the new Congressional commitment to shape up the NOP, and other changes USDA is making to support organic agriculture are important first steps. The challenge to organic farmers is to stay vigilant and keep the pressure on both USDA and Congress so the backsliding so common in Washington when attention lags will not undermine the progress being made.

by Roger Blobaum

This article was first printed in the Sept/Oct 2009 issue of the Organic Broadcaster, published by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service