If we plan to stay on this planet, we must take a stand. And the very ground we stand on holds the magic key to our future here. We have the once-in-a-lifetime—no, once-in-a-species’-history—opportunity to either do the right thing or continue down the path to our demise.
But what does the right thing look like and feel like? Most chemical farmers think organic farming means nothing more than going back, returning to the way things were done before, in the “olden days”—and the chemical companies would like nothing more than for everyone to believe that. But as the chemical paradigm is about controlling nature, the organic paradigm respects nature. Business and industry are welcome in both paradigms, but they have a much more positive impact in the organic paradigm. The difference between these two ways of thinking about the universe can be characterized as disconnectedness versus connectedness. If all things are just chemical compounds that can be broken apart, controlled, and replicated in a factory, then everything is disconnected. If you instead start with the idea that everything is connected, then you can see that what you do to one part will affect the whole. Lord Northbourne explained it best in Look to the Land, the book in which he coined the term “organic” as we use it today.
The best can only spring from that kind of biological completeness which has been called wholeness. If it is to be attained, the farm itself must have a biological completeness; it must be a living entity, it must be a unit which has within itself a balanced organic life. Every branch of work is interlocked with all others. The cycle of conversion of vegetable products through the animal into manure and back to vegetable is of great complexity and highly sensitive, especially over long periods, to any disturbance of its proper balance. The penalty for failure to maintain this balance is, in the long run, a progressive impoverishment of the soil. Real fertility can only be built up gradually under a system appropriate to the conditions on each particular farm, and by adherence to the essentials of that system, whatever they may be in each case, over long periods.1
This passage was first published in 1940, and it is even more true today, when the results of our experiments with synthetic chemistry have played out in such a negative way.
But even today, it takes courage, independence, and intelligence to become an organic farmer. You have to be willing to put up with the derision of many of your peers. You have to be, the smart enough to figure out solutions to your own problems, since you don't have free “crop consultants” to rely on. And in a way you have to have faith—faith that nature knows what it's doing and you are just there to help it along.
Organic farming practices are in use on approximately 4 million acres in the United States and 30.4 million acres globally.2 It is unlikely that any organic farmers are growing vast acreages of commodity crops such as corn and soybeans, but there are many successful large organic farms.
Like chemical farmers, organic growers also start with a seed. Or, rather, many different kinds of seeds, because most organic farmers have learned that raising a diverse array of plants (and animals) is much more effective and efficient than growing just one crop. The organic seeds they use are purchased either from independent and (when possible) organic seed sources or they've been carefully—lovingly, even—collected from the previous year's crops. After all, seeds are an organic farmer's investment in the future.
The organic farmer chooses her crops based on what she3 knows will grow well in her climate and region, what her customers want, and probably what she loves to grow, because farming is not a life you choose to make tons of money. Organic farming is a decent living because you make enough money, and you feel pretty good about doing it.
She plants her seeds in soil that is rich and healthy from years of good care. She might use a tractor to plant her seeds, or, if she is forward-thinking, a “roller-crimper,” or cover-crop roller,4 but she avoids driving machines on her soil as much as possible since that compacts the soil, causing runoff and erosion. This saves fuel as well as time.
Her tractor may not be a flashy new model, but she would rather keep it than take on any debt. In her line of work, debt can make the difference between profit and loss. She uses her tractor for all sorts of things around the farm, and if her tractor can't do a job, she pays a guy down the street who has a bigger tractor to come in by the hour.
She doesn't need to buy synthetic fertilizers since every few years she treats her fields to an application of compost,5 nature's fertilizer. She might buy additional compost if she doesn't have enough, or she could trade with other farmers or even pick it up at a municipal recycling center, although she has to be careful not to inadvertently add any toxins since her farm will be inspected every year by a government-sponsored certifier to ensure that her fields are truly organic.
Depending on the weather, she may or may not need to water her crops. Her soil is spongy and holds a lot of moisture. If she does irrigate, she can use less water than chemical farmers have to, since the soil retains more water. The water that does run off is less polluted than that from her chemical neighbors’ fields. To further prevent runoff and erosion, she plants windbreaks (which the birds and bees also love) and adds swales6 to her fields to catch the valuable soil that runs off.
Knowing nature as well as she does, she knows that weeds will like her good soil just as much as her crops do, so she applies mulch to prevent the weeds from growing. This might take the form of a plastic sheet, straw, or leaves. If she is a particularly forward-thinking organic farmer, she planted a cover crop that is now compressed into mulch.
But weeds do grow, which is why she hires people to help her weed and employs other forms of manual cultivation to keep them under control. She tries not to till the soil to either plant or weed because she knows that doing so leads to erosion and compresses the soil. She also remembers her grandmother's saying “One year's seed, seven years’ weed,” so she knows that intensive weeding and killing of the weeds’ seeds now leads to less weeding over the years.
She may or may not purchase crop insurance, since as an organic farmer she has to pay a 5 percent premium to get the same coverage as her neighbors who use chemicals.7 The people at insurance companies have not read the studies that show how organic crops outperform chemical crops over time—especially in bad weather. Hmmm. Maybe she'll write a letter.
She checks for pest and disease problems on a regular basis. Since she is more likely to have a diverse group of crops, she tends to have less catastrophic problems, but every farmer has to deal with harsh weather, diseases, and insects now and then. Fortunately, the birds who flock to her farm keep the insect pests under control. But if they aren't on top of the problem, she might bring in some beneficial insects to eat the problem insects. If her crops are diseased, she tries to understand what is out of balance and correct it, either with a mineral supplement or a USDA approved organic remedy.
There will most likely be a flood or drought—organic farmers have the same weather as chemical farmers—but it will affect them differently. A flood may cause some erosion and runoff. But because organic crops have bigger, deeper, and stronger root systems (because the soil is healthier), the crops are more resilient, the plants and the soil absorb more water, and overall there is less damage and less crop loss. In a drought, the added strength of the plants’ roots and sponginess of the soil make the crops more resilient and able to survive water deprivation longer. (Maybe she doesn't need that insurance after all!)
Now it's time to talk about sex again. The bees and butterflies are all over the farm, pollinating and helping that procreation along. She is concerned about colony collapse disorder in the bee community, but her bees seem to be doing all right. They are, as the song by the indie rock band Plants and Animals goes, “working hard, but hardly working.” Even if there's a flood followed by a drought, it will probably be a good year. And all her animal babies are growing up fast, too. The chickens are laying, the piglets are fattening up, and the cows are producing just enough milk to make the best cheese and ice cream ever.
At some point during the year, an organic inspector will come to make sure that she is following the rules, so people who buy organic will know it truly is organic. Keeping up her certification is a hassle and costs her a few thousand bucks per year, but it gives her the right to charge enough for her crops to cover her costs with a little bit extra left over. She has no government subsidies to fall back on. The government doesn't “bail out” organic farmers. But she also has more freedom and sleeps well at night. Nor does she have to deal with the “gene police.”
Her harvest is not a single event, but rather many smaller ones, so her risk is spread out over the year. Since there has been such high consumer demand for organic foods, she has a few more choices than chemical farmers do of where and how to sell her crops. She might have formed a CSA (community-supported agriculture) group that allows her friends and neighbors to buy her goods in advance and receive a weekly distribution in return. Maybe they even help her do the harvesting! She might have a stand at the local farmers’ market, where she can look her customers directly in the eye as she sells the labors of her love. A local restaurant might feature her products on its menu, which helps her win credibility in the community. If she is certified organic, rather than an “underground practitioner,” she might have a contract with a food processor like Stonyfield Yogurt (owned by Groupe Danone) or Cascadian Farm (General Mills), a dairy co-op like Organic Valley, or a direct relationship with a supermarket like Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, or my local supermarket, Wegmans. There is virtually no chance that her corn will be used for biofuel, since the varieties she grows for food are much more valuable.
She might rely on migrant workers or labor contractors for harvest every year, because they are the only ones willing to do the work. But she tries to treat them well and looks forward to seeing families return every year. Fortunately, many young people are getting interested in organic farming and offering her sweat equity in exchange for the chance to learn how to farm. She sometimes puts her kids to work, too—they love collecting eggs and feeding the animals. She feels good knowing that they won't be exposed to any dangerous chemicals or toxins on her farm.
And now for the food—the glorious food. Her products, because organic is less available and the demand is high, go to people who really care about what they eat—and, yes, who can afford the higher cost. Some may go to a food processor, and although fuel is required to process and transport it, most organic processors know that their customers are concerned about the environment, so they are careful to use less, and less toxic, packaging.
After the harvesting and the harvest feasts and festivals are finished, she still has two more jobs to do. The first is to turn her farm waste into fertilizer. She gathers the stalks and leftover plant materials, the animal manure and bedding straw, and adds them to her compost pile, which “cooks” as its materials decay over the winter and turns into fertile soil that will enhance her farm's health and productivity.
Last, she plants a cover crop. She started doing it to cut down on winter erosion and weeds—which it did well. Then she read an article about mycorrhizal fungi, which grow on the roots of her winter cover crop and pull carbon from the air to hold it safe and sound in her soil. Though she can't see the mycorrhizal fungi, she knows they are there, working hard for her farm. They are on her team, just like the birds, the bees, the chickens, and the flowers.
Organic farming is a hard life, but it's a good life.
At the end of the organic cycle, no corporation has made a lot of money selling stuff to her. Organic farmers aren't held hostage either. No government agency has to clean up after her, but the government hasn't helped her either (other than by establishing those USDA Organic rules and not allowing them to be eroded—one case in which government regulation benefits us all). No river or ocean has been polluted. No child has been poisoned. More carbon has been stored on that farm than she released in the process of farming her land. Best of all, healthy, nutritious, and tasty food has been provided to the people who were able to buy it from her. And she's made the world a better place in the process.
That sounds good to me.
Since the beginning of the human synthetic-chemical experiment, a few important people have not only questioned the use of chemicals, but also explored alternative ways to grow food—often based on historically effective techniques that had been lost or overlooked due to the arrogance of “civilized man.”
In 1911, F. H. King published Farmers of Forty Centuries, which explored how China was able to grow highly productive crops on the same land for thousands of years by using human and animal fertilizer. In 1924, Rudolf Steiner gave eight lectures and later published a book called Agriculture, which became the manual for biodynamic farming. Sir Albert Howard’s book, An Agricultural Testament was published in 1940 and introduced the Western world to the techniques of composting that India had used for centuries. In 1943, Lady Eve Balfour wrote the book The Living Soil, which recognized the importance of soil health to growing food and human health. She founded the Soil Association in the United Kingdom in 1946.
In 1940, about the time that my grandfather, J. I. Rodale, was moving to a worn-out farm in Pennsylvania to test his ideas for organic farming, Lord Northbourne wrote Look to the Land. In it, he writes:
In order to deal with the loss of fertility, or to enable speeding up to be accomplished without incurring loss, scientists have lately come to the rescue with a great variety of “artificial manures.” By their use remarkable immediate results can often be secured in the crops to which they are applied. But it may be that we have made the same kind of mistakes in feeding our land as we have made in feeding ourselves, and that most of our artificial manures must be regarded at best as stimulants rather than as foods, and in no case therefore as substitutes for biologically sound feeding.8
When my grandfather launched Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942, Sir Albert Howard was a contributing editor. J. I. Rodale was ahead of his time in many ways, but he was also a part of his time. His magazine served as a voice for a growing chorus of concern, and back then, if you wanted to eat food without chemicals, there was only one way to do it: Grow your own.
J. I. Rodale's ideas did not take hold immediately. Rather, he encountered outrageous ridicule and prejudice. The people developing new chemicals—intellectual descendents of those once called quacks—used that label for my grandfather in a classic case of “done-to becomes done-by.” By then, most Americans did believe, thanks to shrewd marketing, that chemicals actually made food safe to eat and that plants wouldn't grow without them. It was downright unpatriotic to believe otherwise.
But on his little farm in Allentown, Pennsylvania, J. I. continued to experiment. When he and my grandmother had bought the farm in 1940, it was about as unfertile as a farm could be. He jokes in his book Organic Merry-Go-Round that when they first bought the farm, even the rats were miserable. “Any untaught amateur in the lore of rodentry could see that these specimens were the worst of their scummy race. . . . They seemed savagely displeased and snarled as they ran.” But with his organic methods, the farm was soon completely regenerated. The rats, he wrote, had become “amiable creatures that reminded me of opossums.”9
When one of the scientific community's own, Rachel Carson, published Silent Spring in 1962, the world started to take notice of our chemical dependence. But the public and media focused primarily on DDT, which was only one of many toxic chemicals in use. The scientific evidence Silent Spring presented did rally public opinion against DDT, which led to a ban on its use in the United States. However, it is still in use today in Africa and India.10
The community of organic supporters in America remained small and consisted mostly of independent-minded gardeners and conservationists until the early 1970s. Then hippies embraced organic farming and food as an avenue for political independence and self-sufficiency and “organic” became a “movement.” One person from that emerging counterculture, Alice Waters, opened a restaurant in Berkeley, California, and with her leadership, organic gradually changed from primarily a health nut's pursuit into a gourmet culinary pursuit. At the same time, in Pennsylvania, my father, Robert Rodale, began planning a scientific study aimed at comparing the results of organic farming with those achieved by chemical farming methods (the Farming Systems Trial).
The organic idea began spreading around the world. Masanobu Fukuoka wrote brilliantly about organic Japanese rice farming in 1978, and Bill Mollison, a Tasmanian, developed the principles of permaculture, which defined an organic approach to a whole landscape.
Yet the term “organic” remained unprotected. Some states, such as California in 1979,11 had passed their own certification laws. But not until 1990, the year of my father's sudden death in a car accident, did Congress pass the Organic Foods Production Act, which directed the USDA to develop national standards for organic products. The result is the USDA Organic label that we now see on many items in supermarkets and other stores. For 7 long, contentious years, industry leaders, farmers, consumer advocates, a few enlightened scientists, and the government worked to come to agreement on those standards.
When the first set of proposed rules was issued, the public was offered the opportunity to comment. The USDA received nearly 300,000 comments, most demanding that irradiated foods, sewage sludge, and GMOs be prohibited for certified organic products. That's more letters (e-mail was not yet in widespread use!) than the USDA had received ever before or since.
Today, the USDA Organic label is found in products in almost every supermarket in every state and demand for organic products has never been higher. Britain's Prince Charles has an organic farm and business, and is one of the leading advocates for the cause. First Lady Michelle Obama has joined with local schoolchildren to plant an organic garden on the White House lawn (although she doesn't call it “organic” publicly). And the USDA headquarters has a certified organic garden on its front lawn.
So we've won, right?
Wrong.
The amount of organic farmland in the United States is less than 1 percent. The amount of organic farmland in Europe is slightly more, 4 percent. But worldwide the figure is still less than 1 percent of all agricultural land. “A rounding error,” as Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, calls it. GMOs are now the rule rather than the exception, allowing herbicides like Roundup to be spread indiscriminately around the world in ever greater quantities. The impacts on our health, environment, and climate are catastrophic.