julie guthman - evolution of organic · julie guthman the author of agrarian dreams: the paradox of...
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Julie Guthman
The author of Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (2000, 2014, University
of California Press), Julie Guthman has been a professor of Sociology and Community Studies at U.C.
Santa Cruz since 2003. She earned her PhD at U.C. Berkeley, studying with the radical geographers.
She is a self-professed foodie and admits to disastrous food farming techniques in her backyard, making
the opportunities to find well-crafted meals and wholesome foods at farmers markets all the more
important on a personal level. As her story shows, however, Julie takes very seriously the politics of the
food system, describing here the significant role that the organic movement has had, even as her book
stirred controversy about the illusions harbored regarding that movement. Even so, she wishes for a
greater threat to conventional agriculture that continues to apply pesticides onto fields and put
farmworkers at risk. Read on.
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Her Path into the Organic Field
Though I am not a farmer nor have ever been one, I have organics in my family background. My father
was a health food freak. He owned a health food store in the 1950s in L.A., before most people knew
what health food was, and he talked about organics, though I'm not sure we had much organic produce
in our household, nor was much available.
Still, exploring the world of organic was not something I was planning on doing when I went to graduate
school in geography. I intended to work on questions of the environment and development in Nepal. But
when I had a child, I decided to focus on something more “domestic.”
Through a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley on the restructuring of the global agro-food system in 1995,
I came into working on organics. For a group project, we were supposed to research a particular world
commodity. After some deliberation, my group convinced the professor to allow us to focus on organic
salad mix in California instead. But at the time we could find almost nothing written from a social
science perspective on organics.
So we went to UC Santa Cruz one day and talked to Bill Friedland, an Emeritus faculty in Community
Studies. He said, "What are you talking to me for? Go down to New Leaf Market. Talk to them. Then go
up the road to Route 1 Farms and talk to them." After talking to maybe fifteen growers and a couple
certifiers and several distributors, we quickly learned how much corporate agribusiness was getting
involved in organics. Our research was rich with empirical material. We submitted our paper on it to a
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European journal of rural sociology, called Sociologia Ruralis, and we were credited with presenting
two theses: the conventionalization thesis and the bifurcation thesis. It’s become the most cited article
on organics. People are still building on or rebutting it.
That began my career looking at organics. I remember going to my advisor thereafter, still looking for a
dissertation topic and thinking I might do something about rural restructuring in the Sierra Nevada. He
looked at me. "Are you crazy? This is a no-brainer."
I said, "What's the no-brainer?"
"You've got to do this work on organics."
And I did. While doing the dissertation research, I interviewed 150 growers throughout the state of
California, really paying attention to regional differences. It became a fantastic project.
Lettuce for $14 a Pound?!
In first looking at the organics movement, my perspective was in the vein of political economy. One
question that got me excited about the research came from going to Andronico's, a high-end grocery
store where the salad mix was selling for fourteen dollars a pound! These days it's three or four dollars a
pound. The stuff showing up in high-end restaurants as "organic salad mix" was equally remarkable.
I thought, "This is quite a phenomenon. What's going on here?" Curious about those dynamics, I wasn't
so much following a movement at first but the industry developing around it. I was intrigued by how
organics were becoming positioned in the public imagination, the belief in organic as the agrarian
answer to the industrialization of food, the antidote to corporate food. It was a call for a renaissance or
resuscitation of the family farm: small scale, necessarily more kind to workers, in all ways chemical
free. However, my initial findings through my dissertation research showed that really wasn't the case.
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Agrarian Imaginaries vs. Agrarian Industry
One of the reasons I called my book Agrarian Dreams is because I was intrigued by this marriage
between organics and agrarianism, organics promoted as the idea of a social justice solution to save the
small farm. Agrarianism is based on the idea of Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy, that a nation of
small farms would be more democratic and independent and would ultimately benefit everyone. As
organics became more like industrial agriculture, although far from completely like it, a lot of the
organic old guard felt a loss of what was happening to their dream, and they wanted to reposition
organic as something different from conventional agriculture, and so they drew on agrarianism.
Yet California never had a huge agrarian tradition. California was rarely settled by smallholders who
only used family labor to produce their own food or food for the market, as was true in most of the
Midwest. In California, wage labor was present on most farms from the get-go. So I was seeing a real
disconnect between the small farm imaginary and how agriculture was actually practiced in California.
It was curious to me that growers who were resisting the industrialization of organics were drawing on
an imaginary that didn't quite fit. And they were doing so in a way that skirted labor issues.
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Impacts on the Development of Organics
It's an interesting paradox that organics arose so strongly in one of the most
industrial agricultural regions in the world, in part as a response to that very
industrialization. But organics were also shaped by that industrialization.
In California, agriculture has been dominated by high land values. That greatly shapes what growers can
do and how. Land values reflect the most valuable crop you can grow on that land. That's why, for
instance, you see acreage for wine grapes in Napa’s Carneros district selling for a couple hundred
thousand dollars, because the Carneros wine grapes get so much value in the market.
At the time I was doing my research, many growers I talked to had high land payments, and faced
shortfalls in the prices for what they were growing. So they were moving into organics as a way to get
more value from their land in order to make those land payments. But in doing so, growers were also
contributing to high land values. That's why I say that the organic movement was both a rejection of
industrialization of agriculture but also a response to it, playing into it in all sorts of ways.
Another dynamic that has shaped organics in California is that as more and more conventional growers
became interested in organics, they brought along many of the practices they were already employing.
If they were already using farm labor contractors, they would continue using farm labor contractors in
their organic fields. Many conventional growers were brought into organics because of relationships
with their usual buyers who were now saying, "Hey, look, I need you to grow xx many tons of organic
processing tomatoes for our salsa."
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The Conventionalization of Organics
One strong claim I made in Agrarian Dreams is that organics replicated what it set out to oppose. I do
believe that organic is better than conventional agriculture in many ways. It's not perfect, but organic
farmers do use fewer toxic pesticides, they treat their soil better, and they employ a lot of other
remarkable practices.
However, the key point here is that growers faced some “path dependencies” in the ways that agriculture
could be practiced, and the organic movement couldn't entirely avoid them. Particularly, as more
conventional growers were experimenting with organic, they brought along the capabilities, the
relationships, and the knowledge practices of conventional agriculture.
Another important piece of this industrialization of organics was that it wasn't entirely big corporate
agribusiness biting off chunks and becoming involved in organics. There was a lot of what I’d call
"home grown organic agribusiness," large farms that have done a tremendous job of bringing organics to
a wide range of people, but it's not in practice with the agrarian imaginaries. For example Earthbound
Farms started with two acres in Carmel Valley, and now they have several thousand acres in California,
Arizona, and Mexico. With their success, they became the punching bag for some in the organic
movement. I find the politics of that conflict ambiguous. To get more people eating organic food, and
more acreage in organic practices, it’s good that there’s such growth. Nonetheless, it was not in keeping
with this imagination of small, non-corporate farms.
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Policies and Politics of Organic Labeling
Ultimately I’d like to see more, if not all, of agriculture operate with practices closer to organic.
But I'm not convinced that growing the organic market is the way to get there. My critique lies with the
dynamics of the organic label. I don’t think that labeling is the right route to change. To understand my
point, it's crucial to look at the origins of the organic label.
At the beginning of this history, a group of growers got together and said, "Hey, we're doing things
differently, and it should have meaning in the marketplace. What do we want to call what we're doing?
We'll call it 'organic.'" That group of growers later became CCOF, California Certified Organic Farmers.
Oregon Tilth was getting going at about the same time. These groups were in communication. Many in
the organic movement wanted to get government recognition to differentiate themselves from other
labels, like "natural."
Meanwhile, organics began to have more cachet in the marketplace, especially following food scares
involving the use of Aldicarb on watermelons or the use of Alar on apples. Suddenly interest in organics
exploded. Then some growers claimed their stuff was organic. Quite a lot of consumers were skeptical
about whether these labels were really what they said they were. So the guys who came up with
standards said, "We have to have more assurance here because otherwise anybody can call themselves
organic." Moreover, many players wanted to sell in markets where you needed interstate or international
certification. Exporters would need to have some sort of federal oversight. Out of that phenomenon grew
a tremendously complex system of organic standards and verification.
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Other growers, particularly small growers, resisted this move toward government involvement because
they thought that working with the government was akin to sleeping with the enemy and they didn't feel
they needed those regulations. They could sell in direct markets and had trust-based marketing
arrangements. In fact, since the USDA has developed organic standards and put them into play, many
growers dropped the organic label and no longer even market themselves as organic because they don't
need to; they’re selling in markets where they are recognized for other qualities.
The growers who won out created a set of standards to market their produce, livestock, whatever, as
organic. But then they needed to have those standards verified so that consumers would know it means
something. That’s when the organic movement developed a system of third-party certification, which
means that independent agencies, like California Certified Organic Farmers, Oregon Tilth, Farm
Verified Organic, or Quality Assurance International, would come in and inspect organic producers and
make sure they live up to those standards. In return, growers would get the certification.
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A lot of contention revolved around that very piece. Conflicts developed in the certification market itself
in terms of how fees were charged, the distance between the inspector and the grower, and whether they
were too friendly to those they were supposed to regulate. California Certified Organic Farmers, for
example, was not really third-party certified. In fact, CCOF would have other growers come in and
inspect organic growers in a kind of peer review. That means it was really second-party, because they
weren't completely disinterested. Some growers and organizations working with newly transitioning
conventional growers saw that and insisted, "This isn’t really third-party certification."
Later regulations also insured that retailers and distributors were meeting organic standards. The system
became highly contested, with huge debates about what sort of materials could be considered organic or
not. Often the decision fell on the lines of what is synthetic or not. That's a complicated question
because what determines whether something is natural or synthetic is never very clear. Still a critical
piece was that if you agreed to abide by organic standards, you agreed not to use certain materials, and
you agreed to a farm plan where you sought to improve the soil -- it was voluntary -- once you agreed,
you as a producer would get rewarded in the marketplace with a certification from a third-party certifier.
Then you could sell your food for more. That's how organic agriculture was incentivized. But a system
based on incentives also created all sorts of contradictions.
First of all, as other producers saw that more money could be made on organics (which is still true today
in certain crops), they’d jump in, so eventually those high prices fell. This situation also created a tricky
dynamic, which is that if you’re in, you want to maintain those standards and keep others out, because
the way to continue receiving those high prices depends on others not joining in.
The voluntary label created other problematic dynamics. That is, organics were expensive by design: if
you abide by this label, you get a higher price in the market. That means consumers are paying more for
that premium, so you have to appeal to wealthier consumers who can afford to buy into the organic
marketplace, whether because they believe they’re getting pesticide-free produce or because they think
it's environmentally better.
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Organic Certification Faces Moral Dilemmas
Organic standards were originally fought out among the certifiers who had many discussions about what
should be included in organic practices. As conventional agribusiness got involved in organics, many
raised concerns that the standards would be watered down. And indeed, some say there’s been an
erosion of organic practices and regulations because of conventional agribusiness involvement. Others
were simply disappointed that organic wasn’t what they had imagined. One of their responses was to try
to raise organic standards. In doing so, they wanted to increase the barrier to entry to organics.
So, there were fights, for example, about how long the transition period should be, the rule regarding
when you can claim your crop is organic. The rule was that three years have to pass since you last used a
non-allowable substance. Some folks wanted to reduce the transition period to one year, while the old
guard wanted to increase the transition period – to impose even higher standards. But that's that paradox
again: if we want more people eating organic food and more acreage of organically treated soil, we need
to encourage these sorts of transitions. Naturally, the newer players were very confused by this
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resistance. They said, "Wait a minute! You wanted us to convert to organic. We thought this was what
you wanted, and now you’re trying to make it hard for us?"
Another fight within organics was whether organics should address labor issues. I think that if you want
to transform agriculture, using fewer pesticides and treating soil better, among other factors, the labor
issue has to be addressed. But a lot of growers said, "Hold on! We said we’d be kind to the soil and
reduce pesticides. This isn’t about labor." Still, consumers expected organic growing to be better for
farmworkers. The growers responded, "We are kind to labor because we don't expose our workers to
pesticides.” As it happens, labor conditions and wages on organic farms are rarely any better than they
are on conventional farms – and sometimes they are worse.
So other labels arose not only to address concerns about labor justice, but also about fair trade, wildlife
protection, and so forth. Many of these new labels were driven by disappointment that organic didn't go
far enough and were devised as a way to protect the products and markets of those trying to do more.
That seems a good thing, but then you reproduce that fundamental tension that persists in the organic
movement between those who want to go deeper and farther versus those who want to bring organic to a
much wider audience but maybe not in such a perfect or rarefied way.
Furthermore, while the organic growers are abiding by this voluntary vigilance, all the rest of agriculture
goes largely unregulated. I say that carefully because there is a lot of regulation in agriculture, but non-
organic farmers can use many highly toxic substances, and by doing so they can grow food that is
cheaper in the market. So we have this system where some can afford to buy their way out, and
everybody else gets the dregs. I think that’s the most difficult moral dilemma of organics. If we had a
better system of regulation that pushed growers away from using the most toxic materials, and if we had
more programs that incentivize improved production, we could have a much wider swath of consumers
eating what is presumably healthier and less toxic food.
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The Trajectory of the Organic Movement
I see the movement as originating as a farmer’s movement, a bunch of growers who said, "We want to
be recognized for growing things differently, more healthily.” Many drew on older philosophies relating
to biodynamics and ideas about the soil, including those of the Rodales. The early organic growers had a
philosophy that a more robust, healthy, and high-tilth soil would make for better plant growth and allow
the soil to regenerate over generations. The movement wasn't first imagined as an anti-pesticide
movement.
The connection to pesticides in part came from the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, which got folks
interested in pesticides. Eventually organic morphed into being more about no synthetic pesticides than
a philosophy of the soil. Obviously, these things are related; the presumption is that if you're kinder to
your soil, you'll need fewer inputs of pesticides. Today, most consumers buy organics because they
believe they're getting a pesticide-free product.
You can read a lot into the organic movement by seeing its stages of growth. Looking through early
CCOF archives, I found about 56 organic farmers in California in the late 1970s who were supplying
health food stores and co-ops. When I began my dissertation research in 1997, the California
Department of Agriculture had registered 1533 organic farmers. By 2015 there were nearly 3900.
So what caused that massive growth? The 1980s saw a huge transition from organics being found solely
in health food markets to high-end restaurants and upscale retail grocery stores.
Organic went from being a sign of rebellion to a sign of distinction. In many
ways, the emergence of the foodie revolution started with organics, with
restaurateurs like Alice Waters, one of the first to source her food from organic
farmers.
Alice had a huge influence. But we cannot underestimate the role that restaurateurs more generally
played on developing the organic movement and industry. They transformed this food from being
stunted carrots in a health food store to gorgeous mesclun on a plate. At first, only a few restaurateurs
featured organics, like Stars and Chez Panisse. Now you go to many upscale restaurants anywhere in the
country and the menu will feature organic greens from such and such farm up the road. The '80s
restaurant revolution further engendered interest among upscale consumers who also wanted to find
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salad mix in the grocery store. After that, you started seeing a few other organic commodities in
conventional supermarkets.
Another thing that affected the growth of organics was the 1980s farm crisis. We think of the farm crisis
as mainly affecting Midwest farmers, but it did have impact in California as well. Farm prices for
commodity crops, including basic crops like cotton, soy, and corn, fell tremendously because farmers
had overplanted in the 1970s. Danny Duncan, from Cal-Organic, is a conventional cotton grower who
moved into organics right out of that farm crisis. He was looking for a higher value crop, so he started
growing organics. Throughout the '80s and '90s prices for organics remained high, so a lot of growers
said, "I need to get in on those high-value crops." Those prices spurred a huge wave of conversions.
Following the growth of organics in restaurants and fiascos from the farm crisis, more interest grew in
organics, including from more buyers and retailers. The natural foods chain, Wild Oats, for example,
grew substantially in the late '80s. Whole Foods got started around then, too. In the early '90s, these
natural food retailers began to grow and consolidate. Whole Foods became a major player and started
snatching up other operations, like Wild Oats.
When those retailers came on the scene, they needed an array of products for their markets. They were
no longer just greengrocers featuring organic salad mix. They needed organic salsas, cereals, milk –
organic just-about-everything. (Livestock came quite a bit later.) So these big stores supported another
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huge wave of growth by demanding organic products from processors and distributors. In turn, these
processors and distributors needed supply. So they turned to conventional growers and said, "Will you
grow organic product for me?” Those growers usually didn't care about organic or not, but they were
used to working with their buyers, so they’d say, "Sure." That’s when you start to see huge transitions to
organic; a lot of it was for the processing market.
Impacts of Conventionalizing, Industrializing, Bifurcating
Though Whole Foods today claims that they work with local growers, they began to do so only after
they were pushed into it. In any case, their growth helped create a market for the Earthbounds and the
Paviches of the world, the farmers who could reliably grow in volume. However, when they start
working with conventional growers, the small growers got left out. Earthbound Farms is the classic
story. They started doing this bagged salad mix; and they bought components of radicchio from this guy,
and tatsoi from that guy, and baby romaine from another. But as the company got bigger, the small
growers who had first helped them make their organic fortunes on salad mix fell out of the mix.
Another factor in this shake-out of small growers in the salad mix market was food safety law. You hear
these stories of the old growers who were washing the salad mix in a bathtub. I remember seeing a
photograph of this guy with bare arms, swishing around the salad mix. But then there was a huge food
safety crackdown, with very specific regulations about how to process salad mix. Only the large growers
and shippers, like Earthbound, had the capacity to carry out all that quality assurance.
Again, when we first wrote that article on organics in the mid-'90s, we were seeing a rapid entry of
home-grown "agribusiness," not only Earthbound Farms but also other firms. At the time, we made the
claim that organics was conventionalizing at a rapid place, and so organics looked a lot more like
conventional agriculture than people imagined. We were seeing bigger firms growing on larger acreage,
with more monocropping, and using practices that we might associate with industrial agriculture.
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For example, we saw less attention to integrative practices. Monocrop fields can be very challenging to
grow with some crops, but in some crops growers can do what we call input substitution. They’ll find a
material allowable by organic standards, and rather than use a disallowed pesticide, they’ll use that
instead. For instance, growers were using sodium nitrate for fertilizer, which was allowable because it’s
found “in nature.” The resulting practice didn't look very different from conventional agriculture. It
seemed to be a reduction of organic to inputs: focus on inputs rather than on the whole integrative
processes that we associate with agro-ecology. This approach to organics was very crop-specific,
because some crops were very easy to grow organically by just substituting an allowable organic input.
There was a huge growth in organic raisins, for example. Raisins don't blemish, so if you don't use some
of the inputs, there’s really no loss. It’s harder to avoid using a fungicide with fresh table grapes or any
harder-to-grow crops.
What resulted is what I've called “bifurcation,” which has also been widely debated in the scholarly
literature. Here I refer to the phenomenon where some organic growers became much more like, or
stayed the same as, conventional growers, while other growers remained dedicated to agro-ecological
techniques and smaller farm models.
What's interesting about bifurcation is that the conventionalization of organics led
to an initial loss for small organic farmers. When salad mix and other items
became a big business, many little guys fell out of the market because they
couldn't meet the food safety standards, or the big buyers preferred to go with
more experienced growers. As a result, many small farmers started producing for
their own niche -- selling through direct marketing, for example; farmers markets;
community-supported agriculture; farm stands; or small local grocers -- and didn't
get wiped out at all. Some have done quite well.
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Consumer Impact As It Affects Organic
When I did the second edition of Agrarian Dreams, I looked at new statistics to see what had happened.
I found a significant flattening of growth in the organic sector between 2007 and 2009, right around the
terrible recession. The flattening came particularly from folks who buy organic at Costco or Walmart.
When I spoke to growers for the second edition, those who farm both organically and conventionally, a
lot of them stopped growing organically in that period because the prices weren't there. The demand
wasn't there. Since some of those growers will pretty much grow whatever buyers ask them to grow,
they got out of organics during that period. However, the growers whose niche is the more direct
marketing route flourished quite well during that time, because they have dedicated consumers who are
going to buy organics no matter what.
Having a bifurcated market makes some sense because it means that we’re getting less expensive
organic food to a mass market through the big growers, which is important, while those who want the
aesthetic of direct-marketed organic food can have that, too. But most of the rest of our food is being
produced in the worst possible ways. And that food goes to people who can least afford organic foods.
One important thing to understand here is that if you look at how much land is grown with organics in
the United States, it's really minute. There has been tremendous growth in organics over the years. The
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statistic everybody uses is 20 percent growth per year in organic sales. Growth did flatten out during the
recession, but since then it has returned. However, when I did the research for the second edition, using
USDA statistics I found only one percent of US farmland in organics, although something like two or
three percent of California farmland was organic. I recently read a report by the California Department
of Food and Agriculture that stated that acreage in organic production in California increased by 46%
between 2008 and 2015, while it dropped by 10% overall in the US.
These statistics are kind of weird! So how to explain them? One explanation is that organic sales have
increased much more robustly than organic acreage, because a lot of value-added products are being
produced in organics. Organic imports (think coffee, bananas, mangos) also contribute to the growth of
sales. But I also think that the 20% growth rate is exaggerated, even in California where growth is
robust.
Another odd statistic is that recent studies show that something like 70 percent of American consumers
buy organics at least occasionally. So how do you square this one percent in organic acreage with 70
percent who claim they buy it? Still, there’s no question that consumers actually have had a huge
impact and have grown the organic movement. But changing how we grow agriculture does not all
depend on consumer demand. In other countries we see much more acreage in organic production than
in the U.S. because they have a more robust policy environment for organics. Policies can encourage
conversions, including subsidizing parts of organics. Switzerland and Austria have a higher percent of
farms in organic production because they have better policy support. In the US, there’s so much fear
about federal involvement.
Strawberries and Soil
The role of consumer response has been interesting in my more recent strawberry research. I closely
followed the battle over methyl iodide, a chemical that was supposed to substitute for methyl bromide,
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which is a fumigant used in California strawberry production. Methyl bromide was slotted for phase-out
because it's an ozone-depleting substance, not in accordance with the Montreal Protocol.
I looked at the 53,000 public comments regarding registration of methyl iodide. Almost all but a handful
opposed methyl iodide. It's remarkable how many people wrote as consumers to the effect of, "I will
never buy another strawberry again," or "I don't want your cancer-coated strawberry in my baby's body."
However, the fact is that methyl iodide, which is a nasty chemical, does not affect consumers. It's a pre-
plant soil fumigant, a gas used in the soil to sterilize soil. Methyl iodide is not sprayed on crops, so no
residues show up on a strawberry. So commenters on the chemical were often acting in their capacity as
consumers, when the folks who were most at risk for the use of methyl iodide were farm workers and
applicators and neighbors. Still, because of public reaction, many growers would not adopt methyl
iodide and that contributed to the eventual withdrawal of methyl iodide from the US market, following a
highly contentious lawsuit over the Department of Pesticide Regulation’s handling of the registration
process. Arysta LifeSciences, the owner of the chemical, found it to be “economically unviable.”
Some strawberry growers have held on to the last remaining inventories of methyl bromide, while others
have moved to the remaining available fumigants, chloropicrin and Telone. Still others are moving into
organics and for the old reasons. They say the market is better for organics, and it is. One study put out
by UC researchers showed it costs about the same to grow organic and conventional strawberries; but
growers can get $15,000 dollars more per acre in revenue! They might have much lower yields, but the
profits are better.
At the same time, strawberries are very difficult to grow organically. One problem is the soil pathogens
that the soil fumigants are designed to eradicate. They tend to reappear and are particularly virulent in
drought-stressed plants. It took a long time to figure out how to grow organic strawberries successfully.
Successful organic strawberry farmers don’t grow on the same block year after year but grow in
complicated rotations of maybe every four or five years. They put in brassicas as cover crops,
particularly broccoli, in advance of the strawberry crop, because brassicas have a mild fumigation
quality. If you really like strawberries, you have to eat your broccoli!
Some growers are moving from conventional into organic strawberries. They are doing so mainly for the
market and but also because they want to see if they can grow without fumigants. Yet they are not doing
those long rotations of four or five years. Instead, they do two- or three-year rotations, and they try to
find new ground that hasn't been treated or grown on to plant strawberries there. I don't know how
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sustainable that model is. A lot of people are converting, and they're doing great right now, but who
knows what's going to happen in a few years when those pathogens reappear?
Another interesting phenomenon is that conventional growers, including conventional strawberry
growers, say that they can integrate the best of organic and conventional techniques. They justify the use
of soil fumigants like methyl bromide by saying that sterilizing the soil wipes out all the bad stuff,
allowing them to introduce the friendly microbes. When I conducted my earlier organics research I
talked to several big-name growers who used methyl bromide right before they started their transition to
their organic operation. They said they wiped out all the crap in the soil so they could start it “fresh.”
I've even heard it analogized to a tuberculosis patient: You sterilize the sheets so that you can start fresh
and reintroduce biota. It's a contradiction. The folks who categorically oppose soil fumigation recognize
that you're wiping out soil health.
Regulation-Forcing Conditions Invite Using New Techniques
The issue with strawberries reminds me that another reason growers moved into organics is what I
would call "regulation forcing conditions." They were worried that particular tools they use, such as
organophosphate pesticides, would be taken away, so they began experimenting with organic
techniques. That's true with strawberry growers today, as well. We're seeing some strawberry growers
experimenting with organic techniques, not that they necessarily want to be organic growers, but they're
looking for technologies that they can use, should there be a crackdown on fumigants.
This is hugely important, because it suggests that regulation and governance can strongly affect grower
practices. For a long time, the organic sector was not very attentive to policy. It depended more on
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market-driven changes for agriculture. But policy matters. It is clear that pesticide regulation has pushed
some growers into innovating with organic techniques.
Some new technologies being developed as replacements for fumigants have had success. But they're
very specific to certain climatic and soil conditions; and none have really been scaled up. For instance,
anaerobic soil disinfestation – or ASD – is being tested throughout California by some of my colleagues
at UC Santa Cruz. ASD basically puts a lot of carbon and water into the soil, and then you cover it with
plastic. It's still a kind of fumigation because the carbon crowds out the pathogens. It takes a lot of
carbon sources, though. Researchers have used rice bran successfully as a carbon source, but the
amount of rice bran available is limited, should this program be scaled up. And a lot of water gets used
at a time when we have ongoing drought. It's not an agro-ecological technique by a long shot. Is it better
than fumigants? For sure, since fumigants are very toxic. But it's a far cry from an integrative technique.
Another thing that strawberry growers have experimented with is growing in soil-less substrate, like peat
or coconut. It's moving toward more greenhouse or hydroponic-type growing. We don’t do it much in
California because it doesn't make much sense here. Strawberry growing is so lucrative in California
because you have a nine-month season, particularly in the central coast and Salinas and Watsonville,
when they can pick strawberries from February until November. When you have a great climate and
great soils, moving to greenhouses and soil-less substrate makes very little sense.
However, what's intriguing about growing in substrate is that you can grow in waist-high trays. A lot of
hydroponic operations have much better ergonomic working conditions. Strawberry workers in the
fields have the worst back-breaking conditions, always bent over those long rows. Some alternatives are
showing up, like the cart that Emmanuel Mercado invented, where you can pick in a prone position. So
there can be a third way between industrial agriculture and organics that also benefits workers.
The story of strawberries is significant for organics for several reasons. One is because the strawberry
industry's entry into organics is a good example of bifurcation, but of bifurcation that doesn't quite work.
These guys are dabbling in organics but not really doing integrative techniques. I don't think they’re
long for this world in organics. Two, it’s a story of how policy and technology-forcing regulation can
change grower practices.
But it also holds lessons about roads less traveled for the organic movement. The methyl iodide fight
was very interesting to me, one of the first battles in a long time where activists got contentious. They
brought in the unusual suspects. They worked with farm worker groups, public health groups, and anti-
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pesticide groups. They had a victory around methyl iodide, but that had nothing to do with getting
people to buy different strawberries, though that’s how the public interpreted it, as a consumer issue. It
was actually a different kind of politics that the organic movement has all but neglected.
The Future of Organic
Look at where we’ve come: the '70s was the grass-roots movement; the '80s was the yuppie explosion
and more generalized attraction to organics; the '90s was the movement of conventional growers into
organics; and since 2000, organics has shifted into mainstreaming.
The change in the way organic is regarded can best be captured by looking at two very famous
secretaries of agriculture. Writing in the early 1970s, Earl Butz said something like, "Sure, we can grow
organic, but we have to figure out which 50 million people will die." In contrast, under Tom Vilsack's
administration for the USDA, the USDA adopted an organic standard, and he began to promote it as an
important niche market to rejuvenate US agriculture.1
I wanted to write a second edition of Agrarian Dreams to see what had happened in the fifteen years
since the first edition came out in 2004. One thing that jumped out at me is that organics have gained
much more legitimacy. When I originally did the research, many growers were still skeptical of organics
and thought it was fringe farming. Now, even growers who don’t completely believe in it see it as a
force to be reckoned with. Also in those fifteen years, organic went from being limited to natural food
1 Earl Butz served as the Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He advocated corporate-
farming development. Tom Vilsack served as Secretary of Agriculture from 2009 until 2016 under President
Obama.
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stores, like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, to being featured in stores like Walmart and Costco. You find it
everywhere. Many consumers now see organic as something they might want to try.
That legitimacy is also recognized in public policy, in my mind insufficiently, but organics have been
legitimated by the federal government. You see people moving between spheres, like Mark Lipson, who
used to work for the Organic Farming Research Foundation, becoming an advisor to the USDA.
In those fifteen years the organic sector has continued to grow, although it's still a marginal percentage
of production in the United States. A lot of organic startup companies either grew quite a bit or were
bought out by major food manufacturers. Phil Howard at Michigan State has done wonderful work
documenting the buyouts and mergers. General Mills owns many organic brands, as does Kellogg and
Hain Celestial. Many major brands now own several organic lines or started their own, like Safeway’s
“O” or Trader Joe's organics. So that’s another way we see the mainstreaming of organics. It has always
seemed like a fairly white, elite kind of venture, so I'm surprised by the degree to which organics have
grown, sprouting offspring with community gardens and farmers markets everywhere.
For a long time the USDA was very reluctant to have an organic standard because that would disparage
the rest of the food supply. At some point, people convinced the USDA that it's just another niche, a
different way for agriculture to grow its markets. But that reinforces my point:
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Having organics safely side-by-side with conventional agriculture diminishes
what organics can do to undermine the conventional and unhealthy agricultural
supply. Organic is not a threat, but I think conventional agriculture needs a threat.
As for the future, while specialty food consumption like organics does follow economic trends, interest
in organic is here to stay. Even mainstream consumers now think something is better about organic,
even if they can’t identify what it is.
The public tends to project onto organics what they want it to be. The fact that it just sprang up
serendipitously, spontaneously, says something about its pliability. There was little strategy about
building it as a “movement.” There were strategic thinkers, but as a whole it’s really grassroots in that
sense that it sprang up. Yet it was a growing movement. Organizations held regular conferences, like the
Ecological Farming Conference, where people bonded and felt themselves part of the movement.
But simply counting on the organic market to continue to grow strong on its own will never work
because there are too many countervailing forces. From my perspective, to really challenge the worst
aspects of conventional agriculture will take strategic thinking and action, as we've seen with successes
by activists against the biotechnology industry. Some activists are focusing more on the policy arena.
For instance, they hold discussions about the Farm Bill, discussions that didn't exist ten or twelve years
ago. So the organic movement has unquestionably matured.
A key question is whether there is sufficient unity to have a sustainable alternative to conventional
agriculture. There are still so many different visions for where organics should go, with tensions around
deepening it, spreading it, making it more ecological, more integrative. Yet looking at the most pressing
issues around food and agriculture around the world, much more needs to be done. We see massive food
insecurity due to drought or war; major land grabs by major corporations going into other countries and
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buying land to produce cash crops; malnutrition; climate change. It isn’t clear that the organic
movement can address these.
The organic movement has been terrifically successful at learning to grow and
distribute organic food in better ways. We have much better food in the markets
and at restaurants than ever before. But if organic was about doing more than
producing better food in better ways, if it was about changing the world by
changing the food system, I think it has fallen short.
Over the years, I’ve watched how my students’ interest in the food system change with the latest
iteration of alternative food movements. First, they were very interested in organics. Then it was fair
trade. Then food security came along, which included the idea of bringing producers and consumers
together and cutting out the middle man. That approach aimed both to support farmers and address the
needs of low-income consumers, but it actually didn't address their needs. Now you have food justice
movements to focus on low-income consumers and address food deserts. Some found the organic food
movement too white, which brought new education around racism in the food movement.
So it’s hard to talk about unity in the food movement when you have such big issues and vested
interests. Some people still aspire for the food movement to be a social change movement that will
address issues of labor, food insecurity, and justice. The organic movement is in no position to do that. It
will take other sorts of movements.
In fact, I don't think of organics as a social movement much anymore but as a business. There's no
question that we need sustainable agriculture. Should a social movement come along with the force to
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really impact food production around the world, they’ll borrow techniques developed by organic
farmers, but the organic industry won’t take the lead. Earthbound Farms, for example, does not care
about food insecurity.
Still, the success of the organic industry gives reason to be quite hopeful about the future. Interest is
growing in organic foods and will continue to do so. One success of the organic movement has been
developing really good farming techniques. Compare it to my backyard, full of aphids on my lemon tree
and squirrels eating my figs. We haven't harvested one good olive in three years! I admire what those
growers have figured out about how to address these pests in relatively benign ways. Those techniques
and the knowledge transfer are really important.
Hope & Grit
There’s a lot of concern about the aging of the farm population. The Greenhorn movement sounds like a
great solution for that, with a new generation interested in farming, but it's unclear whether they're in it
for the long haul. I see a lot of students very excited about farming. They treat farmers as rock stars.
Seriously! Some claim they love farming and say how important it is to put their hands in the soil. But I
worry whether these new greenhorns will stay in it. Many of the children of those who have been
farming long-term on multi-generation farms are getting out of farming because it’s rough going.
The reality includes all sorts of obstacles to farming, including access to land, capital, markets. A former
student was visiting the other day. When I first met him several years ago he was saying, "I want to
grow my own food and teach people how to grow, too.” Now he wants to get out of farming after a few
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years. Farming is hard work! It's hard to get into some farmers markets, for example, because they’re
regulated. It's a competitive business. On one hand, you want farmers markets to grow, yet they regulate
how many growers they'll allow in order to keep their prices up. There's a lot of romance about farming,
but to do it for a lifetime is very difficult.
We have to be very concerned about not only developing all the alternatives in
our food system, helping organic food production grow ever stronger, but also
thwarting the worst parts of conventional agriculture. That takes policy work,
going up against the worst sort of practices and substances used. Together, doing
oppositional politics alongside building alternatives provides the best hope of
moving to a food production system in which many more people have access to
higher-quality food, and more land is grown in a kinder, gentler manner.
Ultimately, I’d like to see better agriculture rather than perfect agriculture.