Kevin continues punching flower holes and I continue sweating. It is 8:30 a.m., eighty-two degrees and climbing fast. A bank of blue rain clouds looms to the southwest and thunder murmurs in the background. I hope for rain or at least shade. “We sell the crap out of them,” he says proudly about the flowers. Kevin adds that they are not only popular but also profitable, partly because he has to plant them just once a year. In contrast, the farm’s main crop, lettuce, is planted weekly during the growing season, between five thousand and eight thousand new plants a week. “We harvest millions of pieces of lettuce a week. I mean millions,” he says. The flowers seem easy by comparison, a beautiful addition that happens to pay. “It’s a good business, a small niche market,” he says about the flowers. “We do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and it all adds up at the end of the year.”
A little bit of this and a little bit of that means: arugula, basil, green beans, beets, broccoli, cabbage, Swiss chard, chia seed, chives, cilantro, dill, eggplant, kale, lemongrass, lettuce, microgreens, onions, oregano, parsley, peppers, rosemary, strawberries, tarragon, tomatoes, turnips, wheatgrass, and anything else Kevin decides to experiment with. He uses “lettuce” as a blanket term for the many varieties of leafy salad greens he grows. There is a lot of plant diversity on Kevin’s farm, the kind that used to exist on most American farms but disappeared during the industrial movement. When Kevin first started farming, mentors counseled him not to even attempt lettuce; everyone said Indian River County, situated about two-thirds of the way down Florida’s east coast, was too hot for tender lettuce plants. In keeping with his beg and borrow theory, Kevin nonetheless accepted a free bag of organic lettuce seeds from a friend. The stubborn seeds refused to grow in his greenhouse, as his mentors had predicted, so he scattered them over an empty bed just for fun.
“They started growing. Ten different types of lettuce,” he says. “One of my wife’s friends owned a deli on the beach, and she came out here just to look around one day. She said, ‘You’re growing spring mix! We can sell the crap out of that.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ I didn’t know. So we gave it to them and they loved it. We went to the biggest restaurant in town, Ocean Grille, it’s been here since the ’30s. I brought it there and they jumped on it right away, and we went from there.” The next year, Kevin grew more spring mix (intentionally), cut samples, and dropped them off at eight of the swankiest beach restaurants. “By the time I got back to the farm, there were three or four voicemails on the machine,” he says.
Those voicemails signaled a major transition for the farm, from a simple farm stand business to restaurant clientele. Before the restaurants got involved, Kevin sold everything from the stand (Vero Beach didn’t have a farmers’ market then). The change came just in time: people weren’t coming down that dirt road often enough for Kevin to turn much profit, and it was getting to the point that he might have to quit farming. “[The restaurants] saved our butt as far as making money and being able to be fiscally sustainable from year to year,” he says. “We took that, and that’s what keeps us going.” And it all started with a few randomly scattered lettuce seeds.
Strangely, a similar phenomenon occurred with kale. One day Kevin spotted a kale plant growing on a fallow bed. He describes it as being “big and beautiful without any help.” How it came to be there, he had no idea. Perhaps a lost kale seed had found its way into a bag of lettuce seeds? Or maybe its origin was something greater? He snapped a picture and posted it on Facebook. “I thought about it after I posted it and another week later I said, ‘You know what? That’s God telling me I should plant kale there if it grows that big right there.’” And Kevin has grown big, beautiful kale ever since.
Both stories remind me of the biblical parable of the sower, who scattered seeds on four types of ground. Some seeds fell on hard soil and didn’t sprout at all, while others landed on stony ground, where they germinated but died shortly thereafter. A few seeds ended up among thorns; they grew a little but the thorns choked them out. The lucky few seeds that fell on rich earth thrived and became fruitful. The biblical lesson is to make one’s heart like rich earth, where faith has a good environment for taking root. Kevin did what the sower did—he scattered seeds on rich earth. But the lettuce and kale that grew were not miracles, as tempting as it might be to think so. The farm’s fertility is not an accident or some kind of biblical blessing. It’s a result of Kevin’s hard work, the mental and physical energy he expends daily. Farming organically requires complex thought, careful attention to natural cycles, and a holistic perspective of the world.
In fact, Christian thinking has inadvertently contributed to humankind’s abuse of the environment by encouraging the dominion narrative. The dominion narrative rationalizes human authority over the natural world, and it’s a philosophy ingrained in most Americans whether they are conscious of it or not. Scholars agree that the dominion narrative arises from the Judeo-Christian tradition, specifically from the book of Genesis in which God instructs Adam to subdue the earth and provide dominion over it. The connection between Genesis and human control over nature was first articulated in Lynn White’s seminal 1967 essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” White exposed the connection between anthropocentric Christianity and environmental exploitation and degradation, showing that people had interpreted God’s command to subdue the earth as permission to do whatever they wanted to the natural world.1 Human authority over the natural world sanctioned by God—a license for destruction.
The view of humankind as dominant over nature, however, is not associated with the Judeo-Christian philosophy alone. Rather, it is a view deeply entwined in both secular and religious Western thought. Ecocritic Paul Shepard linked the dominion narrative concurrently to Platonism, Christian theology, the mechanization of society in the industrial era, capitalism, and the urban worldview of thinkers like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx.2 So the human-over-nature view has been fairly unavoidable for a long time. The dominion story is especially present in Western life and continues to be our primary cultural narrative, particularly when it comes to managing our agricultural lands.3 In a world where food originates at the grocery store, not from the work of our hands, and where homes stocked with appliances, computers, and temperature control systems make our lives convenient and comfortable, it’s easy to forget what it means to be creatures of the natural world and thus we embrace the urge to control it rather than live with it. We’re like indoor cats: wild somewhere in our hearts, but so domesticated that we couldn’t survive long outdoors.
If humankind controls nature, as the dominion narrative says, then humans can’t also be part of nature. We are outside of it. And if humans don’t see themselves as part of the natural world, then its destruction is less troubling. That’s one reason conventional farmers typically do not see a problem with their methods; to them, the land is a commodity used to run their business and little more. Their survival depends upon it only in financial terms. Aldo Leopold wrote about the consequences of this view in A Sand County Almanac: “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”4 Kevin and other regenerative farmers take the “community to which we belong” view, and they understand that their land is part of an ecological whole in which they can’t manipulate one thing without impacting everything else. Kevin can’t simplify or control nature’s diversity, things industrial agriculture seeks to accomplish with its monocultures, fertilizers, and sprays. Instead he teams up with nature as a member of the wider ecological community, and he feels responsible for that community’s well-being.
This responsibility is one reason he chooses to grow organically. “I’m so true to the organics thing,” he says. “People tell me they are organic and I say, ‘Are you certified?’ If they say no, then I’m like, ‘Well, you’re not organic.’ They say, ‘We do everything organically.’ But I can walk through somebody’s farm and say, ‘That’s not organic.’ A lot of people say it.” Kevin has worked as an organic farm inspector since 1995, conducting more than a thousand inspections all over Florida. Farms that claim to be organic but lack certification probably aren’t truly organic in his experience. Even on certified farms, he finds occasional rule violations. Good intentions are not always enough. For crops, USDA certified organic means promoting soil fertility through crop rotation, tillage, cover crops, and manure or other natural waste. Pests, diseases, and weeds must be controlled physically, mechanically, or biologically; if those methods fail, farmers can use approved substances. Organic farmers must also use organic seeds (when available), and they cannot use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or chemicals (except those on the “safe” list), genetically modified seeds, sewage sludge, or irradiation.5 Farms undergo periodic inspections and keep immaculate records. “It is a little bit more paperwork, but it’s worth it,” Kevin says. “We have guidelines that we follow. They are black and white. I sign on the line to follow those guidelines and be certified organic, and the rules are right there. There are no gray areas anymore. It’s pretty easy to follow if you want to.”
Kevin ate organically years before the National Organic Program was established, but unless he knew the farmer or food processor, he had no way of knowing whether the food was really organic. A national organic standard ensures consistency and purity, he tells me, which is beneficial for buyers. Without a standard, he says, the consumer has no way of knowing what, if any, qualifications a product has met to earn the label. “Having a National Organic Program is a good thing,” he says. “When you see that seal, whether it’s in Publix or Whole Foods or wherever you shop, you know it’s for real.” He distrusts the integrity of most organic produce grown outside of the United States because the oversight sometimes isn’t as strict. His position on certification is firm: “Everybody says they’re organic. Everybody. It’s a buzzword. It’s hot right now. You aren’t going to hear anybody say, ‘I’m GMO!’ But if they are not certified organic, they are not organic.”
When Kevin says this, I think about Phil’s stance on certification and how, if they met, they would probably argue about it. Kevin is as stubborn about the benefits of certification as Phil is about the drawbacks. Their differing opinions highlight the larger struggle within the regenerative agriculture world about rules and who sets them. Organic agriculture sounds simple—do not use agrochemicals and GM seeds, do use natural processes that conserve soil and water—until you get down to the brass tacks. What about pesticides derived from natural ingredients, like neem oil from the neem tree? Most farmers agree something like that is acceptable, but some purists don’t. Or the case of our organic steer, who can pig out on organic corn in a CAFO but remain certified. Most people consider that practice harmful to the animal and the environment, even though the steer remains technically organic. Others have no problem with organic CAFOs, including the giant corporate food companies that source meat from them.
Kevin advances a moral and health-focused argument in favor of certification. People have many reasons for selecting an organic product, he says, and often those are connected to remedying a disease. If food companies or farmers sell a product that isn’t actually organic, but contains “poison” instead (by this he means nonorganic chemicals or ingredients), then the results could be disastrous to the person’s health. “If they are recovering from cancer and you sell them something that really isn’t organic, maybe it will never affect them—but maybe it could,” Kevin says. The deception is also an affront to the consumer’s personal liberty and his or her philosophical commitment to supporting organic growers and practices over industrial ones. He believes an important part of the organic grower’s responsibility is honoring customer intentions by providing a product that is what it claims to be. “It’s the consumer’s choice and they are making up their mind which way they want to go, and you have to follow that,” he says.
One way inspectors confirm the integrity of organic growers is by scrutinizing their activity logs. Farmers log everything they do, such as what tasks they complete each day and what substances they use, all the way down to the hand soap that workers wash with before handling produce. Every material must be permitted for use in organic production. Products must also be approved by the grower’s certification organization. If Kevin wants to make a change as minor as using a different brand of sanitizing solution, for example, he has to inform his certifier ahead of time. Farms are regularly inspected to ensure compliance. Inspections take about four hours at Kevin’s farm, two for combing paperwork and another two for visual inspections.
He also keeps precise seed inventories, because the seeds he plants must also be certified organic. Seed companies test their seeds twice a year for accidental GM contamination, a process that makes them extra expensive for growers. Kevin records what seedlings are planted when and where. The result is an audit trail stretching from the seeds to the vegetables, ending at where they are delivered for consumption: an invisible thread linking farmer to consumer. And if something goes wrong—a bag of lettuce is contaminated, for example—the problem is traceable.
It’s a lot of hoop jumping, but no more than conventional growers do to enroll in the USDA’s farm program and other subsidies. Kevin doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he is excited to share what he does with inspectors and anyone else who might be curious. He welcomes visitors to the farm, inviting them to wander the fields at their leisure and watch the produce being harvested. One can only learn so much from logbooks and long walks, however. A better indicator of the quality of the produce from Osceola Organic Farm literally walks through the door. A woman who lives down the road enters the farm stand, where Kevin and I have retreated for a few moments of shade, and asks when it will reopen for the season. She’s moving soon and wants to get a last bit of produce before she goes. She calls the farm “one of the hidden secrets of Vero.” About the farm’s produce she says, “You just can’t beat it. It lasts. Sometimes I have to shop at Publix, but it’s bad in two days.” She makes a “blah” sound and waves her hand dismissively. Like many other Americans, this woman is fed up with the tasteless, half-decayed produce in the grocery store. Big chains like Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, and Publix stock fruits and vegetables, including organic items, from national distributors, which usually source from megafarms. This system adds fuel miles to the food, and it forces farmers to harvest fruits and vegetables before they’re ripe so that they don’t spoil, which means they never achieve their full flavor potential. After days on a truck, even the organic produce loses its freshness. Local farms like Kevin’s are much better at feeding their communities and regions without the fuel use or produce breakdown. That’s another reason locally grown food is usually tastier and lasts longer.
Kevin has nothing to offer the woman; he’s still a month away from the first harvest of the season. She bids him good-bye and says she’ll miss him and the vegetables.