organic agriculture in the united states: a 30-year …...many american farmers.’ king’s book,...

Organic agriculture in the United States:A 30-year retrospectiveGarth Youngberg1* and Suzanne P. DeMuth2

1320 S. Gaylord Street, Denver, Colorado 80209, USA2Shady Lane Farm, 2861 Kittering Road, Macedon, New York 14502, USA*Corresponding author: [email protected]

Accepted 9 January 2013 Review article

AbstractSince the early 1980s organic agriculture has undergone enormous growth and innovation in the US and throughout theworld. Some observers have pointed to the US Department of Agriculture’s 1980 Report and Recommendations onOrganic Farming as having provided the catalyst for many of these developments. It is important, however, to understandhow the evolving character of organic ideology during the 1960s and 1970s helped lay the foundation for moving organicagriculture onto the US governmental agenda in the early 1980s. We explore these and other contextual factorssurrounding the USDA Report’s release, including its methods, !ndings and recommendations, and both positive andnegative reactions, as well as those factors that led to the Report’s declining in"uence by the decade’s end. The need foragricultural sustainability has played an important role in shaping, not only the path of organic agriculture in the US butalso the overall politics of American agriculture. Legislative efforts to support organic agriculture have evolved alongwith this altered policy environment and are considered here within the broader context of the politics of sustainableagriculture. Next, we consider the organic industry’s transition from a privately managed enterprise to the pivotal rolenow played by the federal government in the administration of the National Organic Program. Calls to move ‘beyondorganic’ are also examined. Finally, we explore the impact of sustainable agriculture, agricultural research and farmstructure upon the future of organic agriculture in the US. The politics within these three interrelated domains of publicagricultural policy will likely bear heavily upon the future of organic farming and the organic industry as a whole.

Key words: organic farming, organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture, alternative agriculture, organic ideology, R. Rodale,US Department of Agriculture, agricultural research, agricultural policy, legislation, organic marketing, USDA Certi!ed Organic,beyond organic

Introduction

During the past three decades in the US, indeed,throughout much of the world, we have witnessed remark-able innovation and growth in the !eld of organicagriculture. Interestingly, however, few (if any) advocates,practitioners or analysts foresaw the magnitude of theseimpending changes. In 1976, for example, the editor of aleading organic monthly, Acres U.S.A., had this to sayabout the future prospects for what he called eco-agriculture: ‘What you have here is a slowly evolvingtechnology . . . It will be at least a generation before theUSDA [US Department of Agriculture] recognizes us . . .We’re off to a slow but sure start’1. Despite this forecast,most members of the organic farming community re-mained stubbornly convinced that they were on the righttrack, that time and circumstances were on their side, thatchemically based, conventional agriculture was destined

to falter, and that they would keep ‘!ghting the battle,’ asWalters put it, for however long it might take.While the improving prospects for organic agriculture

may have eluded the purview of agricultural observersduring the 1970s, there was growing recognition among asmall cadre of political scientists, rural sociologists andagricultural economists that important societal changesandnewpolitical demandswere beginning to alter the agri-cultural policy landscape [pp. 129–255]2. Among thosewho saw these changes coming was Don Paarlberg,distinguished professor of agricultural economics atPurdue University, who served ably in USDA subcabinetpositions in three Republican administrations. Paarlbergsaw an expanding agenda for US agriculture and pre-dicted that its proponents would marshal a signi!cantchallenge to the advocates and gatekeepers of thetraditional farm policy agenda3. Declaring that ‘[t]heagricultural establishment has, in large measure, lost

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control of the farm policy agenda,’ Paarlberg pointed tosuch policy issues as food stamps, school lunch programs,environmental protection, rural development, land use,civil rights and collective bargaining for farm workers asmatters ‘placed on the agenda over the protests of the agri-cultural establishment’ [p. 96]4. According to Paarlberg,the agricultural establishment included ‘the farm organ-izations, the agricultural committees of the Congress, theDepartment of Agriculture, and the land-grant univer-sities’ [p. 95].Many of these ‘new agenda’ issues overlapped with the

ideological orientation and policy objectives of organicfarmers and their supporters. Paarlberg, however, in hisotherwise prescient observations regarding the evolvingcharacter of US farm policy, failed to include organicfarming in his portrayal of the new agricultural agenda.At the time when agricultural policy analysts, such asPaarlberg, had begun to recognize the broad outlines of anewagricultural policy agenda, the organic farmingmove-ment was quite small and its core ideology was conspic-uously apolitical. In terms of national policy, the organiccommunity was unorganized, politically inactive, andthus virtually undetectable in the national policy arena.Moreover, with Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz pro-claiming an anti-organic message to a receptive conven-tional agriculture community—asserting that 50 millionAmericans would starve to death if the country were toswitch to organic farming techniques5—it would havebeen dif!cult for any analyst to predict that organicagriculture would soon achieve a measure of recognitionand in"uence within national agricultural policy circles.In the 1970s, conventional agricultural science, ideol-

ogy, and policy largely re"ected and promoted the speci-alized, chemical-intensive, high-tech, export-orientedindustrial agricultural model that had emerged, andthen quickly accelerated, in the post-WorldWar II period.That model, when combined with conventional agricul-ture’s negative critique of organic farming, sent a clearmessage to the organic farming community: organicsystems would have no place in the future of Americanagriculture. Given this political and ideological context,organic farmers largely avoided the policy process, choos-ing to withdraw from a system of agricultural politics andscience that appeared to be uniformly opposed, evenhostile, to them, both philosophically and scienti!cally.Other features of the movement’s overall ideology—anti-materialism, anti-corporatism, a general distrust of largepublic and private organizations, and a preference forpersonal and political independence—reinforced its apo-litical stance, particularly at the level of national policy.Given this evolving admixture of politics, economics

and technology, organic farming, when viewed throughthe lens of conventional agriculture in the 1970s, seemedtrivial and out of touch, trapped in the grip of its ownideology, hampered by symbols of the past that itseemed to represent, and overwhelmed by the tides ofchange sweeping through American agriculture. Only in

retrospect can we see how its ideology and technologywould soon place organic farming solidly within theframework of an expanding and increasingly in"uentialnew agricultural policy agenda.

Organic Farming and the New AgriculturalAgenda: The Convergence of Ideologyand Politics

The new food and agricultural policy agenda identi!edby Paarlberg, and other analysts, during the mid- to late1970s [pp. 129–255]2 evolved alongside a complicated mixof broader societal reform movements that had begun inthe 1960s and continued to gain momentum during thefollowing decade6. The durability of the new agriculturalagenda can be explained, at least in part, by its ideologicalconvergence with these broader, largely non-agricultural,reform movements. The new agenda also gained strengthfrom various concerns that arose from within the ranks ofthe conventional agricultural establishment itself. Thesetraditional gatekeepers of agricultural policy could nolonger ignore such troubling externalities as soil erosion,ground and surface water pollution, threats to human andanimal health from excessive use of agricultural chemi-cals, the demise of small farms and rural communities,and a growing chorus of criticism, from both internal7 andexternal8 voices, regarding public agricultural researchpriorities and funding mechanisms.This combination of an expanding and politically astute

coalition of supportive new agenda groups; growingconcerns from within conventional agriculture itselfregarding the negative impacts of modern productionagriculture; a large and somewhat bewildering array ofbroad societal reform themes, issues and new ways ofthinking; and, !nally, a bold and unexpected USDAorganic farming study launched in 19799, helped pave theway for organic farming to move onto the national agri-cultural policy agenda in the early 1980s. In order to showhow these developments helped clarify the relevance oforganic farming to the goals of the new agenda—and tothe challenges of American agriculture—we turn !rst tothe ideology and politics of the organic farming move-ment.

The ideology of organic agricultureDuring the 1960s and 1970s, organic farmers held adecidedly dim view of conventional farming trends andtechnologies, objecting to the increasingly heavy relianceof these systems on petroleum-based production inputs,especially in the form of pesticides and synthetic nitrogenfertilizer. Organic farmers were also concerned aboutever-larger farms, larger and more expensive farm mach-inery, corporate farm ownership, specialized productionschemes [such as crop monocultures and large con!nedanimal feeding operations (CAFOs) and increased use of

2 G. Youngberg and S.P. DeMuth

animal drugs], water resources, food quality and safety,personal health and safety, and the gradual decline offamily farms, small rural communities, and localized foodmarketing and processing facilities. These concerns werenot unique to organic farmers but were widely shared, invarying degrees, by most new agenda participants, someelements of the larger reform movement, and a growingnumber of consumers10.Having a clear sense of what could be done to help

address these growing concerns would distinguish theorganic farming movement from other elements of thenew agricultural agenda. When consumers expressed con-cern about pesticide residues on food, organic farmersoffered pesticide-free food; when the conservation com-munity voiced concern over soil erosion and compaction,water pollution or loss of wildlife habitat, organic farmersinsisted that their production systems minimized theseimpacts; when rural development advocates called for therevival of small rural communities, organic farmers notedthe connections between small farms and viable ruraltowns. It would be decades before agricultural scientistsand policy makers would begin to seriously explore thevalidity of these and other claims. However, many newagenda participants (and other reform groups) did cometo accept and promote organic farming and its potentialfor addressing these problems and concerns.Ideological leaders. In the debates surrounding the

future direction of American agriculture during the 1960sand 1970s, proponents of organic agriculture drew upon arich ideological heritage. It would be hard to overstate theimportance of this ideology in sustaining the work oforganic farmers and their supporters during this uncertainperiod. As Robert Lane, a noted authority on the subjectof ideology, wrote some 50 years ago, most ideologies‘have a body of sacred documents (constitutions, billsof rights, manifestoes, declarations), and heroes (foundingfathers, seers and sages, originators and great inter-preters)’ [p. 15]11. The history of organic agricultureproduced many such heroes and sacred documents12,13.Here, only a few of the more prominent Americanand European organic ‘seers and sages’ are highlighted,particularly those who appear to have exerted the mostdirect in"uence upon the debates of the 1960s and 1970s.

The late Robert Rodale, long-time editor and publisherof Organic Gardening and Farming magazine, arguably,was the leading voice for the organic farming communityup until his untimely death in 1990, the tragic result ofan automobile accident. Throughout his career, Rodaledrew upon a well-formed set of underlying philosophicalthemes. His father, J.I. Rodale, founder of OrganicGardening and Farming magazine, exerted enormousin"uence over his son. Further, according to Rodale’sown words, three additional ‘sages’ greatly in"uenced histhinking [pp. 14–16]14. First, Rodale regarded CharlesDarwin’s book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould,through the Action of Worms, with Observations on TheirHabits, published in 188115, as a classic in the !eld of

organic agriculture. Second, F.H. King, former chiefof USDA’s Division of Soil Management, accordingto Rodale, made ‘even more direct contributions to theorigins of organic farming theories and practices . . . ’.Dr King was ‘extremely impressed by the careful handlingof organic materials by all Oriental farmers—a directcontrast to the wasteful and destructive methods ofmany American farmers.’ King’s book, Farmers of FortyCenturies (1911), dealing with intensive agriculture inChina, Japan and Korea16, was regarded by Rodale as amajor contribution to the organic farming movement.Finally, Rodale cited Sir Albert Howard, ‘who is con-sidered the father of organic farming.’ From his classicbook, An Agricultural Testament (1940)17, to his so-calledIndore method of composting developed while serving asdirector of the Institute for Plant Industry at Indore, India,and his work as associate editor ofOrganic Gardening andFarming, Howard had earned a hallowed position inthe history of organic agriculture. As he stated in 1976,Rodale believed that ‘the organic farming and gardeningidea thrives as a continuation of [the] ideas’ of these threemen14.While some observers viewed Rodale’s ideas as overly

purist and thus unrealistic, these charges subsided inthe early 1980s when the Rodale Research Centerunveiled a series of long-term, comparative croppingtrials that attracted considerable attention fromwithin theconventional agricultural science community18. Thesetrials, designed by Richard Harwood, a well-known con-ventionally trained scientist, conformed to conventionalscienti!c protocols and were aimed at addressing a num-ber of agronomic questions pertaining to the performanceof organic cropping systems and the informational needsof larger-scale organic farmers. The New Farm magazinealso contributed substantially to the Rodale image asspokesperson for the full spectrum of organic growers,including large-scale conventional farmers wishing totransition to less chemically intensive and expensiveapproaches. These and other initiatives ensured thatRodale himself, and the entire Rodale enterprise, wouldconstitute the single most in"uential political and intel-lectual force within the organic agriculture movement ofthe late 20th century.With the death of Rodale in 1990, however, and the

emergence of scores of supportive new agenda nonpro!tgroups, legislators, industry leaders, marketing associ-ations, food writers, nutritionists, !lm documentariansand farm journalists; expanding numbers of organicproducer and certi!cation organizations; and a growingcontingent of agricultural researchers and administrators,the Rodale organization gradually assumed a somewhatlesser, though still signi!cant, role within the overallorganic farming movement.E.F. Schumacher’s in"uence during this period was

enormous, not only among organic farmers, but just asimportantly, among other reform elements—such as the1970s back-to-the-land movement—that would come to

3Organic agriculture in the United States

practice and support organic agriculture. With publi-cation in 1973 of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if PeopleMattered19, Schumacher became an instant celebrity inboth academic and nonacademic circles. The similaritiesamong Schumacher’s ideology and the ideologies ofvarious new agenda groups were unmistakable. It wasalso apparent that he himself was, in turn, in"uencedby the thinking of various reform groups, as well as suchreligious philosophies as Zen Buddhism and Christianity,plus Gandhi and Thoreau, to highlight just some of themore prominent ideological themes appearing in Small isBeautiful.Dr William Albrecht, long-time professor in the

Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, standsout as one of the earliest and most in"uential academicspokespersons for organic farming ideas. Although heretired in 1959, he continued to write about the connec-tions between soil quality and human and animal healthnearly up until his death in 1974. His role from the 1940sthrough the 1960s was vitally important at a timewhen theorganic farming movement and its technologies lackedacademic support and credibility.Albrecht’s work would be chronicled and popularized

by Charles Walters, Jr20, who, as editor and publisher ofAcres U.S.A., would himself become an in"uential !gureamong a certain segment of larger-scale organic producers(or as Walters preferred to call them, eco-farmers), andthe newly emergent organic farming production input andsupply industry: companies that manufactured and soldvarious kinds of natural soil amendments and cropprotection technologies. Walters was a staunch supporterof these companies and technologies.This brief review of organic agriculture’s more in"uen-

tial ‘seers and sages’ would not be complete without men-tioning the contributions of Jim Hightower and WendellBerry. Their major works of this period, Hightower’sHard Tomatoes, Hard Times (1973)8, and Berry’s TheUnsettling of America (1977)21, in"uenced the thinking ofindividual citizens and the leaders of major agriculturalresearch institutions. Hightower’s critique of land-grantuniversity research priorities would set off a contentiousdebate over the impacts of these priorities on small farmsand farm workers. Berry’s more poetic yet powerfulreview of agricultural and farm structure trends also rep-resented a challenge to land-grant university priorities.For thousands of new agenda participants and ordinarycitizens, these writers helped ‘connect the dots’ betweenagricultural research and other areas of public policy, andthe environmental and societal effects of conventionalagriculture.Finally, the philosophical underpinnings and public

policy goals of both organic farmers and their ideologicalspokespersons converged with, and bene!ted from, thebroad-based, powerful, even transformational, ideas andreform agendas of the 1960s and 1970s6. This was an era,for example, that saw: the emergence of modern environ-mentalism; Rachel Carson’s in"uential critique of the

negative effects of synthetic pesticides22; the Civil Rightsand Women’s Liberation movements; calls for participa-tory democracy (‘power to the people’), and a loss of faithin large organizations, both public and private, energized,in part, by the anti-war movement; Earth Day, with itsplea for a broad societal commitment to addressing a hostof emerging environmental threats such as global warm-ing and ozone depletion, and for new technologies andprograms such as recycling and solar energy that couldhelp alleviate our dependence on fossil fuels; the intro-duction of new terms such as ecological economics, deepecology, ecological accounting and industrial ecology;and, !nally, the !rst opportunity to look back at Earthfrom outer space and behold its seeming fragility.These and other broad reform themes supported the

very idea of change, and the need for new ways of con-ducting society’s business. The new agricultural agendagroups, and likewise the organic farming movement,would bene!t politically from this larger, unprecedentedwave of reform and the new ways of thinking that itengendered.

Basic ideological concepts and core beliefsNature is capital.Organic farmers during the 1960s and

1970s believed that modern man had lost touch withnature, that he had become insensitive to nature’s intri-cate, delicate and immutable laws. As Schumacher put it,man no longer sees ‘himself as a part of nature but as anoutside force destined to dominate and conquer it. Heeven talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he wonthe battle, he would !nd himself on the losing side’[p. 13]19.Organic farmers agreed with Schumacher’s assessment

of the problem. According to Schumacher, man’s failureto see the difference between income and capital and torecognize the importance of the capital nature had pro-vided (and which was being consumed at a rapid rate) hadcreated a tragic illusion—the ‘illusion of having solved theproblem of production’ [p. 13]. Schumacher used fossilfuels to illustrate the difference between capital andincome, as well as to emphasize the importance of ‘naturalcapital’:

First of all, and most obviously, there are the fossil fuels. Noone, I am sure, will deny that we are treating them as incomeitems although they are undeniably capital items. If wetreated them as capital items, we should be concerned withconservation; we should do everything in our power to try andminimize their current rate of use; [but] . . . far from beinginterested in studying the possibilities of alternative methodsof production and patterns of living . . . we happily talk ofunlimited progress . . . [p. 14].

Soil is the source of life—feed the soil, not the plant.Developing and maintaining soil quality with properbalances of organic matter, bene!cial microbial and bio-logical activity, and micro- and macronutrients has long


been a central activity and objective of organic farmers.Indeed, many argue that soil quality is the ‘key’ to long-term sustainable agriculture9,23. Organic farmers believedthat synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides (andthe monocultural cropping systems that these materialspermit) disrupted these sensitive balances, thus requiringever-larger applications of arti!cial compounds. Therewas also the widely held belief that food produced inarti!cially fertilized soils had less nutritive value, and waslikely to have toxic pesticide residues that were linkedto cancer, birth defects and various forms of antisocialbehavior (such as crime), as well as psychological de-pression and hyperactivity, even gradual declines inmental acuity. Continued reliance on farm chemicals, itwas alleged by some advocates of organic technologies,would lead to greater human suffering, more widespreadillness, further declines in soil quality, and ultimately, thefall of modern civilization.The organic ethic—additional precepts. Soil quality was

the foundation that supported a number of additionalcore beliefs, not only about suchmatters as the proper wayto structure a farm enterprise so as to optimize soil health,the health of farm crops and animals, and the health ofthose families who lived on the farm, but also about howto evolve appropriate values and lifestyles in keeping withthe realities and limitations presented by Mother Nature.These wider concerns were critical parts of the totalorganic ethic or model.

According to Robert Rodale, organic ideology wentbeyond the simple matter of building and maintaining soilquality:

Organic farmers and gardeners not only wish to avoid the useof many pesticides that can cause damage to wildlife, andcreate toxic effects in a variety of ways but they also are verymuch concerned about the prevention of erosion, the addingof humus and other organic matter to soil to improve fertility,the preservation of small family farms, localized marketing offood, energy conservation, and proper nutrition. It is a rareorganic grower who does not share those concerns, or pursuethose activities [p. 4]14.

The precept of anti-materialism—one of the pillars oforganic ideology—appealed to a growing segment ofthe American public. The popularity of Small is Beautifulcan be explained, in part, by Schumacher’s eloquencein describing this issue. ‘There can,’ he said, ‘be ‘growth’towards a limited objective, but there cannot be unlimited,generalized growth’ [p. 31]19. Schumacher’s economicsof ‘peace and permanence,’ with its people-centered focuson anti-materialism, non violence, ecological sensitivityand conservation, appealed to organic farmers and theirsupporters. The ideology of making-do-with-less, or asone observer put it, ‘living lightly on the earth’24, capturedmuch of what organic farmers believed in, and were tryingto do.Finally, the quest for a greater degree of independence

formed a critical part of organic ideology. Many organic

farmers found the growing specialization and inter-dependence of society’s large organizations both repug-nant and a threat to personal and national security. Thisbelief fostered numerous features of the organic farmingmovement: local marketing cooperatives, it was argued,would help free people from large, impersonal, andinterdependent marketing and distribution systems; betterhealth, a by-product of eating organically grown food,would increase one’s independence from a costly andsometimes indifferent healthcare system; the use oforganic fertilizers and other on-farm resources wouldenable farmers to produce healthy crops with little or noreliance on the wasteful, expensive and unreliable petro-chemical industry. Renewable sources of energy weresought for the same reasons. To be independent, Rodaleexplained, ‘means that you have a basic liberty of exis-tence . . .The person who is truly independent will live wellno matter what happens to the rest of society’25.Thus, organic ideology included not only a set of

convictions about farming techniques and agronomicprinciples, but also ideas for how to live in a resource-constrained world. The failure of conventional agricultureto investigate the technology of modern organic farming,or to grasp the durability and widening appeal of itsideology, may help to explain how it could have so easilydismissed organic farming as being out of touch with therealities and requirements of contemporary Americanagriculture, not to mention the desires of a growingsegment of American society.

Organic ideology: A two-edged swordAs organic farmers began to mobilize politically aroundthe reassuring principles of their ideology (see below),conventional agriculturalists had begun to express a quitedifferent set of reactions to the symbols and politics oforganic farming. Many agricultural scientists and admin-istrators, who were establishing professional careers andscienti!c reputations during the 1960s and 1970s, hadbeen born and raised on farms much like those depicted inthe expanding literature of organic agriculture. Memoriesof dawn-to-dusk work on these kinds of mixed crop–livestock farms collided with what they saw as little morethan the romantic symbolism of organic farming. Armedwith degrees from land-grant universities, schooled therein the latest scienti!c discoveries and engineering marvels,many agricultural scientists, understandably, were non-plused by the notion that these older, more diversi!edfarm enterprise models deserved their support. Just ashigh technology was transforming other sectors of society,so too would it transform agriculture. The economicrecession that began in 1974—and continued well into the1980s—was widely attributed to the notion that the UShad lost its competitive edge in high technology to Japanand West Germany. Instead of going back to an earlierfarming model, US agriculture was being asked tohelp shore up America’s technological competitiveness


through the expansion of research in such !elds as bio-technology26. There were also concerns about agricul-ture’s ability to maintain productivity gains, which wereshowing signs of leveling off27. For these and otherreasons, the conventional agricultural community be-lieved that the age of specialized, high-technology, high-yield agricultural production had arrived, just in time tomeet the needs of expanding US and world populations.The admonition to American farmers from Secretary ofAgriculture Earl Butz, to plant ‘fence row to fence row’28,was emblematic of the day’s conventional ideology.However, there was more to conventional agriculture’s

opposition to organic farming than these kinds of macro-economic and technical issues. Many agricultural scien-tists educated during the 1960s and 1970s now heldleadership positions within the agricultural researchsystem, achievements gained, in part, from their ownpeer-reviewed research on the very same technologies nowbeing criticized by (what appeared to be) non credentialedand overly zealous organic farmers, some of whom, it wasbelieved, lacked previous farming experience or scienti!ctraining. Psychologically invested in the new technologi-cal paradigm, it was particularly dif!cult for such scien-tists and administrators to accept criticism from anagricultural constituency that, in their minds, simplylacked credibility. Moreover, the organic community’sgrowing alignment with non agricultural constituencies(i.e., ‘new agenda’ groups favoring a liberal politicalagenda)—that had begun to seek access to scarce researchdollars—made their demands all the more dif!cult totolerate, or even comprehend.Thus, the ideology that inspired and sustained organic

farmers caused most within conventional agriculture toreject both the technology of organic farming, and its newagenda supporters. Had the ideology of organic farmingbeen less powerful, less comprehensive, and perhaps lessstrident and uncompromising, it might have been lessthreatening to conventional agricultural scientists andother agricultural policy gatekeepers. Under these con-ditions, it is conceivable that conventional agriculturewould have been more willing to explore the technology,per se, of organic farming (something scores of agricultur-al scientists would later do), as well as the ways in whichthese technologies might contribute to a more sustainableagriculture. However, as we learned some 50 years agofrom Edelman29, it is often the symbols—and not thereality—that guide our reactions to matters involvingboth public and private institutions.

Organic Agriculture Moves onto theGovernmental AgendaUSDA’s 1980 Report and Recommendationson Organic FarmingThe organic farming community, in July 1980, received anunexpected boost fromUSDAwith the release that month

of its much anticipated Report and Recommendationson Organic Farming9. Since June 1979, the USDA StudyTeam on Organic Farming, assembled earlier that yearby Secretary of Agriculture Robert Bergland, had quietlyconducted the !rst-ever USDA-authorized investigationof organic agriculture in the US. (The Study Team’smethods and !ndings are discussed below.) Although theStudy Team, chaired by Agricultural Research Service(ARS) soil scientist Robert I. Papendick, had kept a lowpro!le throughout its year-long investigation, the Team’sactivities had been closely monitored by both the con-ventional and organic agricultural communities. Once theReport was released, most analysts, including members ofthe Study Team itself, would characterize it as cautiouslysupportive of organic techniques. Others in both thesecommunities would exhibit polar-opposite reactions. Theorganic farming community expressed surprise, reliefand incredulity, !nding it dif!cult to believe that a USDAstudy of organic farming would conclude that organicsystems displayed a number of positive agronomic andconservation characteristics. The conventional commu-nity would also express surprise and disbelief, but cer-tainly not relief—it reacted negatively to the Report, aswell as to the very idea that such a study would have beensanctioned, funded and conducted by USDA30,31.These initial reactions to the Report would trigger

an intensi!ed debate, not only on the merits of organicfarming but also on the consequences of conventional,chemical-based farming for the long-term sustainability ofAmerican agriculture. Ironically, the intensity of conven-tional agriculture’s negative critique of the Report wouldprompt some leaders of the organic farming communityto suggest that the word organic (which seemed especiallyrepugnant to the conventional community) be replacedwith such terms as biological, ecological, alternative, sus-tainable, practical, regenerative and even independent.This deliberate strategy of defending and advancing theprinciples of organic agriculture by introducing lessthreatening and in some cases more scienti!c-soundingwords would have substantial, unintended consequences,not only for the evolution of organic farming over the nextthree decades but also for the larger debate about thefuture of American agriculture. This aspect of the historyof organic agriculture will be considered later in thisretrospective.Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland. Nominated to

be Secretary of Agriculture by President-elect JimmyCarter in December 1976, Bob Bergland brought bothpolitical and farming experience to the Of!ce of Secretary.He had operated a 640-acre grass seed and small grainsfarm near Roseau, Minnesota, most of his adult life,was elected to Congress in 1970 on the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party ticket, and served four terms inCongress from Minnesota’s northern 7th District. In themold of a Midwestern, politically progressive, northernagricultural tier Democrat, Bergland had long cham-pioned the causes of ordinary workers and small-scale


farmers. Despite his politically progressive philosophicalpredilections, it would be a powerful yet somewhat un-usual combination of issues and circumstances that led toBergland’s decision to launch a study of organic farming.

Bergland assumed the Of!ce of Secretary at a timeof severe !nancial stress and political turmoil in farmcountry. The newly formed American AgricultureMovement and other traditional general and commodityfarm groups lobbied Bergland for increased governmentassistance to farmers in the wake of collapsing commodityprices. The dramatic tractorcades through the streets ofWashington, DC, in the late 1970s dramatized the painand frustration of many American farmers during thisera’s protracted farm crisis. Although much of the!nancial squeeze being felt by many of these farmerswas the result of having borrowed heavily in prior yearsduring a period of sharply higher prices—brought on by aseries of crop failures and expanded exports—the realityof escalating fuel and fertilizer costs also played an impor-tant role in creating the cost-price squeeze of this period.While sharply higher energy prices, alone, may not haveproduced a !nancial crisis for America’s farmers of thekind that developed in the late 1970s and 1980s, concernsover the cost and availability of energy needed to operate aconventional farm certainly were important and worri-some issues for farmers and farm policy makers.Shortly after becoming Secretary, Bergland received the

National Resources Inventory (NRI) report detailing ahost of alarming problems and trends concerning thenation’s soil and water resources on private lands32. Thisreport served as a rallying cry for soil, water and wildlifegroups throughout the country, who demanded that thesenatural resources issues be addressed more aggressivelydespite growing federal de!cits and calls for restraints ongovernment spending.This would also be a period marked by heightened

concerns over structural trends in US agriculture, par-ticularly the continuing decline in numbers of mid-sizedfamily farms, increasing concentration of land ownership,rising land prices, absentee farmland ownership, anddegradation of soil and water resources (trends caused inpart by incentives in commodity policy), and many otherissues33. In response to these mounting concerns, in 1979Bergland commissioned a formal review of US farm struc-ture. The !ndings and recommendations of this reviewwere published 2 years later34.While attempting to deal with these and other concerns,

Bergland was reminded of the success of his neighborsback in Minnesota, Paul Billberg and his son Dale,who had been farming organically for some 6 years. TheBillberg’s 1500-acre farm included about 1000 acres ofcash grains such as wheat and barley, and sizeable herds ofcattle and sheep. Bergland was impressed by the Billberg’soperation and likewise that Paul Billberg was ‘a pro-minent, politically conservative farmer and activeFarm Bureau member . . . ’ [p. 255]35. When he returnedto Washington, DC, after the Christmas holidays in

1978—which had included a lengthy visit with Billberg—Bergland asked his staff what the Department knew aboutorganic agriculture. Upon learning that the Departmenthad very little information, Bergland turned to AnsonR. Bertrand, Director of USDA’s Science and EducationAdministration (SEA), directing that he undertake im-mediately an investigation of organic farming in the US.Bergland wanted to know to what extent organic systemsmight help to address the environmental, structural and!nancial problems that were now plaguing Americanagriculture.USDA Study Team onOrganic Farming.AsDirector of

SEA, a newly formed super agency designed to foster im-proved communication and coordination amongUSDA’sscience and education agencies, Bertrand had access to theDepartment’s top scientists and policy analysts. Withinweeks after receiving Bergland’s directive, Bertrand hadnamed Robert I. Papendick as chairman of the StudyTeam. Working with Bertrand, Papendick and other top-level SEA administrators moved quickly to name theremaining team members and make other administrativearrangements to undertake the study. At the initial teammeeting in April 1979, held in James F. Parr’s BiologicalWaste Management and Organic Resources Laboratoryon the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) campus inBeltsville, MD, it was quickly agreed that the study wouldbe conducted using the highest possible standards ofscienti!c objectivity. (There would be no ‘quick and dirty’treatment, as one SEA administrator had counseled.)Given the controversial nature of organic farming, therewas considerable professional risk for those scientists whoagreed to serve on this Study Team. Honing steadfastly tothe canons of scienti!c research was the surest possibleway for these scientists to avoid staining their respectivereputations among their professional peers, as well asproducing a credible research report.Methods. Given the intense criticism of the Report’s

!ndings and recommendations from the conventionalagricultural community (discussed below), it is importantto brie"y review the methods used by the Study Team ingathering and assessing the data. The following summaryof the methods used relies heavily upon the Report’s ownwords [pp. 3–5]9.On-Farm Interviews. Credible information on organic

farming in 1979 was quite limited. Thus, to gain an overallunderstanding of the latest organic farming technologies,levels of economic success, and factors affecting theadoption and productivity of organic systems throughoutthe US, the Study Team elected to conduct a series ofon-farm case studies. Ultimately, 69 such case studieswere conducted, some in each of the ten US agriculturalproduction regions, using a standard interview schedule.Because there was no national database of organicfarmers available in 1979, the farms were selectedthrough contacts at ‘[l]and-grant universities, the StateCooperative Extension Service, organic producer associ-ations, publishers of organic literature, and commercial


companies that deal with organic growers [p. 3]9.According to the Report:

Information was obtained on the background and attitudes ofthe farmers, farm composition, soil resources, types of cropsand livestock grown, crop sequences, tillage methods,production inputs and management practices, and marketingprocedures. During each interview, visual observations weremade of crop conditions, including stands, growth, anddegree of weed and insect infestations [p. 3]9.

Survey of New Farm Subscribers. During the datacollection process, Rodale Press provided the Study Teamwith the results of its survey of subscribers to The NewFarm magazine. This survey, sent to 1000 randomlyselected subscribers, yielded a 70% response rate. Re-spondents self-identi!ed as ‘conventional’ (112), ‘organic’(95) and ‘combination conventional-organic’ (204) farm-ers; those remaining were nonfarmers. Informationgenerated by this survey, which was similar to the StudyTeam’s on-farm interview schedule, provided valuablecomparative and contextual data.Literature Review. The Study Team conducted a

comprehensive review of the scienti!c, economic andsociological literature pertaining to organic agriculture.Information gathered through this process helped theTeam to not only assess the contemporary character oforganic farming but also to place its current status inhistorical perspective.Organic Farming in Europe and Japan. To assess

the scienti!c and practical status of organic agriculturein Europe, where interest in organic farming appeared tobe growing rapidly, four Study Team members touredresearch facilities in Germany and Switzerland, as well asa number of organic farms and organic food processors,and one farm-implement manufacturer specializing inmachinery for organic production. One team memberspent time in Japan touring organic farms and studyingthe production and marketing of organically grown fruitsand vegetables.Findings and recommendations. Some 30 years after its

publication, it may be dif!cult for those reading theReport today to understand why its !ndings and recom-mendations would have caused such a commotion withinagricultural circles. Within the context of today’s organicagriculture world, the Report’s principle !ndings mayseem unremarkable, its recommendations quite reason-able, even restrained. Findings (such as the fact thatorganic farming can be practiced on large acreages) havenow been well documented and are no longer disputed.Many of the recommendations (such as the call forholistic, systems-oriented research) are now part of thestandard organic agriculture research lexicon. Indeed,except for the more historically oriented or those oldenough to have either observed these events or directlyparticipated in them, the Report overall has been some-what forgotten or simply overlooked. The 2010 NationalResearch Council (NRC) report36 on sustainable

agriculture, for example, which includes information notonly on organic farming but also on other subjects (suchas mixed farming systems) covered in the 1980 Report,fails to mention the prior study. The literature dealingwith organic farming and its underlying principles hassimply exploded over the past 30 years, albeit most of itunder the rubric of sustainable agriculture. Astonishingly,the NRC report includes some 68 pages of references,roughly two-thirds as many pages as comprised the 1980Report in total.Before exploring the Report’s controversial history,

we summarize its major !ndings and recommendations.(The full report is online at http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/USDAOrgFarmRpt.pdf.) The Report’s summarybrie"y describes 12 major !ndings [pp. xii–xiii]9 that arehere condensed and collapsed into eight.(1) Organic farmers fall along a spectrum from the utterly

pure (i.e., those who would not use any chemicalfertilizers or pesticides under any circumstances) tothose who would use these materials, especiallysynthetic fertilizer, but only infrequently and spar-ingly as a last resort. Regardless of where they fellalong this continuum, these respondents consideredthemselves to be organic farmers.

(2) The vast majority of organic farmers had notregressed to the farming practices and technologiesof the 1930s, nor were these operations limited byscale. Among the 69 case study farms, respondentswere using ‘modern farm machinery, recommendedcrop varieties, certi!ed seed, sound methods oforganic waste management, and recommended soiland water conservation practices’ [p. xii]. The scale ofoperations included some farms, especially in theNortheast, of only several acres, and some, especiallyin the heartland, ranging from 100 to as high as 1500acres. Regardless of size, the farms in the survey were‘productive, ef!cient, and well managed’ [p. xii]. Someof the larger-scale farmers had switched fromchemical to organic practices.

(3) Study respondents expressed a range of motivationsfor electing to farm organically. These included: ‘. . .concern for protecting soil, human, and animal healthfrom the potential hazards of pesticides; the desire forlower production inputs; [and] concern for theenvironment and protection of soil resources’ [p. xii].

(4) Most of the surveyed farms fell within the broad para-meters of mixed crop/livestock operations. Legumesand other cover crops were rotated with various cashcrops such as corn, wheat or soybeans, dependingupon geographic location. Animals comprised anessential component of the overall farm enterprise,with substantial amounts of grain and hay crops fed toanimals on the farm, then recycled back onto the landas manure. In most cases, this system producedenough nitrogen (N) and other nutrients for cropyields acceptable to the farmer. The Study Team wasimpressed by the ability of these types of systems ‘to


http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/USDAOrgFarmRpt.pdf



control weeds in crops such as corn, soybeans, andcereals without the use (or with only minimal use) ofherbicides . . . [and instead with] timely tillage andcultivation, delayed planting, and crop rotations’[p. xiii].

(5) Some of the respondents complained about the lack ofinterest in their operations from USDA and theirrespective land-grant universities, and the lack oftechnical information available from these insti-tutions.

(6) Although the Study Team was generally impressedwith the management, production levels, economicperformance and conservation characteristics foundon most of the survey’s 69 farms, it did conclude thatsome of these farms were probably ‘mining’ residualsupplies of potassium (K) and phosphorus (P), andthat at some point these operations would be forced tosupplement these two nutrients.

(7) Farm labor requirements, energy use, and neteconomic returns are important variables used toassess total farm performance. On these measures, theStudy Team found that these 69 organic farms, onbalance, required somewhat more labor, but used lessenergy, than conventional farms. The economicmodels developed by the Team ‘showed that theeconomic return above variable costs was greaterfor conventional farms (corn and soybeans) than forseveral crop rotations grown on organic farms’[p. xiii]. The need to devote a large portion of theacreage on organic farms to legumes and other greenmanure crops largely accounted for these !ndings.

(8) The Study Team concluded its summary of major!ndings with the following statement: ‘There aredetrimental aspects of conventional production, suchas soil erosion and sedimentation, depleted nutrientreserves, water pollution from runoff of fertilizers andpesticides, and possible decline of soil productivity.If costs of these factors are considered, then costcomparisons between conventional (that is, chemical-intensive) crop production and organic systems maybe somewhat different in areas where these problemsoccur’ [p. xiii].

Clearly, these !ndings and conclusions lent of!cialgovernmental legitimacy to the proposition that organicfarming systems exhibited an impressive assortment ofpositive agronomic and environmental characteristics,and therefore were deserving of increased support fromUSDA and the land-grant university system. It was thisnew reality, this aspect of the Report, which drew themostattention, and generated the most heated reactions, fromwithin conventional agricultural institutions and interests,both public and private. Within this political context, theReport’s research, education, extension and policy recom-mendations, though important, failed to achieve acorrespondingly high level of attention and scrutiny.As the likelihood of USDA support, including ad-

ditional new funding, quickly waned under the Reagan

Administration (see below), there was little incentive,initially, for agricultural scientists and educators toembrace these recommendations or to begin formulatingnew programs. In retrospect, however, we can see howmany of the Report’s recommendations [pp. 86–94]9

have become important elements of contemporaryorganic research, education and extension activities. TheReport’s call for holistic, interdisciplinary research; studyof the transition from conventional to organic systems;research on nutrient cycling for crop production, soilimprovement through enhanced utilization of organicwastes, biological weed, insect and disease control, andbiological nitrogen !xation; development of crop varietiesadaptable to organic systems; and many of its otherrecommendations, continue to be among those criticalresearch questions and challenges facing today’s organicinvestigators and educators (e.g., see Sooby et al.37 andFrancis38).Finally, the Study Team reported the following most

frequently cited concerns by farmers and the generalpublic regarding the extensive and sometimes excessiveuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the largeenergy inputs required of conventional agriculturalsystems [p. xi]:. Increased cost and uncertain availability of energy andchemicals.

. Increased resistance of weeds and insects to pesticides.

. Decline in soil productivity from erosion and accom-panying loss of organic matter and plant nutrients.

. Pollution of surface waters with agricultural chemicalsand sediment.

. Destruction of wildlife, bees and bene!cial insects bypesticides.

. Hazards to human and animal health from pesticidesand feed additives.

. Detrimental effects of agricultural chemicals on foodquality.

. Depletion of !nite reserves of concentrated plantnutrients, for example, phosphate rock.

. Decrease in numbers of farms, particularly family-typefarms, and disappearance of localized and directmarketing systems [pp. 1–2]9.Organic farming de!ned. The de!nition of organic

farming developed by the Study Team arose directly outof the empirical !ndings and observations gleaned duringthe course of the study. The Team had no preconceivednotion of how to de!ne organic farming. It was aware,however, that for marketing purposes, formal de!nitionsexisted in several states, most notably Maine andCalifornia, and that a number of other state and regionalorganic producer associations were in the process ofdeveloping formal de!nitions. Since many of the respon-dents in the USDA study would not have quali!ed asorganic under these de!nitions (but, nonetheless con-sidered themselves to be organic farmers), the Study Teamdeveloped a less-than-pure de!nition that simply re"ectedthe spectrum of practices actually found on the 69 survey


farms. Thus, for purposes of the 1980 Report, thefollowing de!nition was used:

Organic farming is a production system which avoids orlargely excludes the use of synthetically compoundedfertilizers, pesticides, growth regulators, and livestock feedadditives. To the maximum extent feasible, organic farmingsystems rely upon crop rotations, crop residues, animalmanures, legumes, green manures, off-farm organic wastes,mechanical cultivation, mineral-bearing rocks, and aspects ofbiological pest control to maintain soil productivity and tilth,to supply plant nutrients, and to control insects, weeds, andother pests [p. 9]9.

This less-strict de!nition was never intended to serve as aguide for certi!cation and marketing of organic foods. Itwas intended to re"ect the essential agronomic com-ponents and characteristics of organic farming technologydiscovered over the course of the survey. The Department’sprinciple motivation was to learn as much as possibleabout how organic practices might be incorporated intoconventional agricultural production systems as a meansto help alleviate some of the problems that had begun toplague American agriculture (such as soil erosion, waterpollution and increasing energy costs), not to addressdirectly the needs of the organic certi!cation process.There is, in fact, nothing in the Report’s de!nition of

organic farming, its research results or commentary, or inthe Recommendations for Action [pp. 86–94]9, to implythat agricultural chemicals should be completely elimi-nated from American agriculture. To the contrary, thespeci!c language of the Report, as well as its overall tone,suggests a quite different and much broader agenda:restoring balance and choice to American agriculture.Nonetheless, in the Study Team’s view, if achievingorganic certi!cation appealed to certain segments of thefarming population, those farmers deserved a reasonablemeasure of technical assistance and research support fromUSDA and the land-grant universities. As one top USDAadministrator who had originally opposed the organicfarming study would later say in its defense: ‘Organicfarmers pay taxes, too.’The immediate aftermath. The Department’s rationale

for following up on the Report failed to reassure itsdetractors, particularly many federal agricultural agencyresearch leaders, land-grant university scientists andadministrators, and personnel of private !rms involvedin the manufacture and sale of agricultural chemicals.As late as 1984, long after some members of the con-ventional agricultural community had begun to under-stand and accept the potential bene!ts of at leastsome aspects of organic farming, the remarks of TerryB. Kinney, administrator of USDA’s AgriculturalResearch Service, re"ected how dismissive of organicagriculture many within conventional agricultural circlescontinued to be. When asked by a reporter about the1980 USDA organic farming report, Kinney replied:‘What do you mean by organic farming? I refuse to think

about organic farming per se. I grew up on a farm, andI know what wormy apples and corn decimated by bugsare like’39.With the election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980

(4 months after the Report’s release) and the appointmentof John Block, a large-scale hog and grain farmer fromIllinois, as Secretary of Agriculture, those who opposedthe Report—and the Department’s "edgling organicprogram—had acquired a powerful political ally. Withinmonths after taking of!ce, Secretary Block assuredconventional agriculture that there would be no follow-up to the previous administration’s ‘dead end’ organicfarming initiative30. In the spring of 1981, the Depart-ment’s newly designated Organic Farming Coordinatorwas told to spend only half his time on follow-up activitiesrelated to the 1980 Report. The Coordinator positionwould be eliminated a year later as part of a Reduction inForce.These reactions stood in stark contrast to those of

organic farmers, other elements of the new agriculturalagenda, the farm, science, and general press, substantialnumbers of agricultural scientists, and a small contingentof members of Congress. These and other observersviewed the Report as a reasonable and measured attemptto learn how organic farming systems worked, and howthese practices might be brought to bear on the problemsof US and world agriculture. They did not perceive theReport as representing a wholesale assault on conven-tional agriculture.A review of the Report in the July 11, 1980, issue

of Science magazine—several days before its of!cial re-lease—re"ected these typicallymoderate reactions. LutherJ. Carter, author of the Science article, was quick to pointout, for example, that the Report did ‘not suggest that asweeping conversion of farmers to organic methods iseither likely or desirable. But it suggests that manyfarmers can, and perhaps should, adopt organic farmingpractices, combining them with conventional practicesif necessary or desired’ [p. 254]35. According to Carter,Secretary Bergland had told Science: ‘We think it isan important report—the !rst recent report to lookat organic farming as a legitimate and promising tech-nique . . . We now depend on imported oil and exportedwheat, and farmers are worried about these forces overwhich they have no control. People are looking for ways toreduce their fuel-related inputs’ [p. 254]35. The USDAReport had speci!cally recommended research on variouscombinations of conventional and organic practices inorder to reduce chemical/energy inputs in US agriculturalproduction systems [p. 92]9.Certainly, reducing the use of these inputs was a

major factor motivating Bergland’s neighbors, Pauland Dale Billberg, who told Carter they had loweredtheir fertilizer costs by switching to legume-based rota-tions, and by adopting shallow tillage methods instead ofusing the more energy-intensive mold board plow thatinverts the soil pro!le, requires more tractor fuel, and


depletes soil organic matter through increased oxidationand erosion. ‘The life and tilth of the soil were justnot there any more,’ said Dale Billberg [p. 254]35. TheBillbergs also insisted that since adopting organicmethods their animals were healthier and their veterinarybills were reduced.Carter’s review concluded with these words: ‘Farmers

tend to be set in their ways, but when there is as muchtrouble down on the farm as there is today, they can beamenable to change. Many may soon be taking a look atorganic farming practices that can perhaps ease some oftheir problems, such as loss of topsoil to erosion and lossof income to escalating fertilizer costs’ [p. 256]35.Although the USDA Report may have fallen on hard

times within the Department that produced it, the mess-age it conveyed could not easily be contained. Within2 years the Report was translated into seven foreignlanguages, and thousands of individuals and organiz-ations were requesting copies. Its impact spread quickly toCapitol Hill, academia, dozens of grassroots organicproducer and advocacy organizations, international for-ums, and a plethora of Washington, DC-based environ-mental, food safety, nutrition, wildlife, social justice andrural development groups (all elements of the new agri-cultural agenda coalition) that would, for the !rst time,take up the banner of organic agriculture. These newagenda groups championed organic agriculture with legis-lative initiatives, symposia, in-house studies and reports,on-farm demonstrations, and many other research andeducation outreach programs. Many in the print andbroadcast media would continue to report on shiftingattitudes among farmers, scientists and legislators.There also would be scores of scienti!c conferences and

symposia devoted to extensive and detailed examinationsof the character and implications of organic farmingand its potential role in a sustainable agriculture. Manycolleges and universities established special courses andcurricula (a few even created prestigious faculty chairs andcenters) devoted to the exploration of organic methodsand principles40,41. Most of these initiatives, however, forreasons discussed below, were labeled ‘sustainable’ by theend of the 1980s.

The Report’s impact and life cycleThe 1980 USDA Report was a precipitating event formany of these developments, not the only causal factor.With or without it, the Zeitgeist of the era likely wouldhave caused many of these changes to have evolved insome form. While the Report may have provided supportfor some new agenda demands, it did not create thosedemands; nor did it create the organic farmingmovement.Similarly, the problems and concerns associated withconventional agriculture, while noted in the Report, cer-tainly were not caused by it. Clearly, however, the USDAimprimatur on the 1980 Report did help to catalyze,encourage and strengthen many of these initiatives.

For the new agenda groups, other reformers anda growing number of agricultural scientists (especiallythose trained in the more traditional agronomic sciences,as contrasted with the newer agricultural science !elds ofbiochemistry, molecular and cell biology, and biotech-nology26), the Report provided the outlines of a positivealternative agricultural model. Opponents and skeptics ofconventional agriculture were no longer placed in theawkward position of simply criticizing conventional tech-nologies, they could nowmobilize around the !ndings andrecommendations of the Report, and do so with an addedmeasure of knowledge, con!dence and legitimacy. Acommentary in Countryside magazine in October 1980seemed to re"ect this new-found hope: ‘. . . [I]n view of theideas and insights of the USDA report, one cannot helpbeing more optimistic that, as U.S. agriculture seeks tosolve its problems of soil depletion and excessive chemicaluse, it will turn to the answers offered by organic agri-culture as a means of building a sustainable agriculture’42.In fact, pro-organic groups initially would rely heavily

upon the USDA Report for ideas, and as a source forscienti!c legitimacy in support of their policy proposals.Over the next several years, however, its in"uence waned.Countless new reports and scienti!c conference proceed-ings, even several new peer-reviewed journals, wouldprovide credible, more current and much more diversesources of information in support of these policy activities.The substitution of the word sustainable—in place of theword organic—over the decade of the 1980s also wouldhasten the Report’s declining visibility and in"uence.Even those scientists and policy makers who felt com-fortable using the word organic could no longer ignore theliabilities of its negative scienti!c and political symbolism.Finally, the de!nition of organic agriculture set forth inthe Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (andimplemented in 2002, see below) effectively denied anyuse of the word organic except for the purposes set forth inthat legislation. Once the word organic had been legallyde!ned in federal law (to facilitate and encourage themarketing of organically grown food), its continued use asa descriptive term for the more general agronomic andenvironmental meanings and purposes discussed in theUSDAReport would have been disruptive and confusing.Thus, by the end of the decade, the 1980 Report would beeclipsed by these multiple developments and the newlanguage they fostered. Despite its declining role, many ofthe activities highlighted below—for the most part, underthe banner of sustainability—continued to re"ect ele-ments of the Report’s !ndings and recommendations, notto mention the ideology of organic agriculture.

Sustainable Agriculture: Interest GroupStrategies in an Altered Policy Environment

As noted previously, from the moment the 1980 USDAReport on organic farming was released there were


indications that the word organic would constitute animportant barrier to acceptance of the Report’s !ndingsand recommendations, particularly within USDA,the land-grant university system, and among manyprivate-sector conventional agricultural leaders andorganizations. One need only trace the public evolutionof the word organic in order to gauge how conventionalagriculture’s aversion to the word itself, to the 1980Report, and to organic farming generally, affected con-ventional agricultural science, Capitol Hill and theorganic farming community.At about this time, coincidentally, the word sustainable

would begin to emerge in both popular and scienti!cliterature as the word of choice for denoting the mostcritical, overriding goal for US and world agriculture,especially among those groups and individuals whocontended that conventional systems were not sustain-able. Many attribute the formal emergence of this termwithin the context of contemporary agriculture to itsuse by Wes Jackson in his 1980 book, New Roots forAgriculture43, and even earlier to arguments presented inhis less well-known 1978 essay, ‘Toward a SustainableAgriculture’44.In response to conventional agriculture’s negative

and increasingly shrill critique of organic farming, andto the USDA’s 1980 Report, organic advocates quicklyseized upon the word sustainable as a means of defendingand promoting the value of modern organic systems.Associating the goal of sustainability with organic farm-ing, and likewise the 1980 Report, was seen as a way ofimbuing both with a modern, more scienti!c, and moreurgent purpose and image, thereby countering thenegative symbolism of the word organic for conventionalfarmers, scientists and policy makers (Eliot Coleman,personal communication, December 2010). It should benoted, however, that the goal of sustainability has longbeen an important element of organic ideology. LordNorthbourne, for example, considered by many to have!rst used the term ‘organic farming’ in his 1940 book,Look to the Land45, envisioned ‘the farm as a sustainable,ecologically stable, self-contained unit . . . ’ [p. 1]46. Hisconcerns, according to Sco!eld, including soil erosion,soil health, ‘the exhaustible nature of imported fertility,’and human health, remain part of the debate overagricultural sustainability [pp. 1–2]46.Within conventional agricultural research circles, those

scientists sympathetic to organic farming systems alsowould soon resort to use of the word sustainable asa strategy for legitimizing the investigation of organictechnologies. The !rst major scienti!c exploration oforganic farming following release of the 1980 Report tookplace in 1981 at the annual meeting of the AmericanSociety of Agronomy. This full-day symposium, spon-sored by the Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry divisionof the Soil Science Society of America, was entitled‘Organic Farming: Current Technology and Its Role ina Sustainable Agriculture.’ The agonizing search for

language acceptable to conventional scientists appearsin the Preliminary Program. The organizers spoke of‘the need to make Society members aware of ongoingresearch in the area [of organic farming] and thepossibilities of amalgamating high energy input agricul-ture with low energy input agriculture to providesustainable cropping systems’47. The symposium wastimely, according to the organizers, because of thepotential of organic farming to lower energy inputs anddevelop a sustainable farming system.Over the next several years the word organic would

virtually disappear from scienti!c conferences dealingwith sustainable agriculture. In 1988, for example, amajor two-day conference at Ohio State University(OSU), entitled ‘Sustainable Agricultural Systems,’would fail to include the word organic in material justify-ing the conference, or in the titles of any of the 40 formalpresentations. This, despite the fact that the Preface to thepublished proceedings would use these words to helpexplain the importance of the conference:

There is a growing awareness about the need to adopt moresustainable and integrated systems of agricultural productionthat depend less on chemical and other energy-based inputs.Such systems can often maintain yields, lower the cost ofinputs, increase farm pro!ts, and reduce ecological problems[p. xiii]48.

Clearly, by the late 1980s, the scienti!c community hadlargely abandoned the word organic, even though theactual technologies under consideration at this conferenceand other similar events included techniques and systemslong associated with organic farming. At the OSU con-ference, nutrient cycling was presented as a key element ofa sustainable agriculture. In the USDA’s 1980 Report,nutrient cycling was seen as a key feature of organicsystems. In less than a decade, sustainable agriculture hadbecome the linguistic repository not only of agriculture’slong-term goals but also of the technologies needed toachieve those goals as well.A somewhat different (but no less revealing) example of

efforts to !nd substitute language for organic technologieswhich was acceptable to both political and scienti!caudiences occurred within USDA. In a July 1981memo from Anson R. Bertrand, Director of USDA’sSEA, to theDepartment’s Organic FarmingCoordinatingCommittee, we !nd these words: ‘Since the USDAReportand Recommendations on Organic Farming was pub-lished in July of 1980, interest in low energy-biologicalfarming systems continues [emphasis added]’49. Withinthe Department, signals from Secretary Block and otheropponents of organic farming had successfully sti"ed useof the word organic, but not necessarily its ideology andtechnology.The chilling effects of USDA’s attitude toward organic

farming would ripple through some parts of the nonpro!tsector as well. In Iowa in 1985, for example, a group oforganically oriented farmers, as well as some farmers


simply searching for ways to survive the !nancial crunchof the 1980s farm crisis, would organize a small producerorganization that they chose to call The Practical Farmersof Iowa (PFI). The group’s organizers were primarilyinterested in learning more about how organic-typemethods and other low-chemical approaches could helpreduce input costs, improve net farm income, and begin toaddress the growing issues of soil and water quality inIowa and throughout much of the Midwest. The group’sorganizers reasoned that researchers at Iowa StateUniversity (ISU) might feel comfortable working on‘practical’ solutions to these and other problems, thusavoiding the potentially divisive politics and symbolism ofsuch words as organic and sustainable. PFI has beenremarkably successful, its !eld days and on-farm co-operative research with ISU attracting national andinternational attention. Given the anti-organic ideologyof conventional agriculture during the early 1980s, thedecision of these farmers to be ‘practical’ would seem tohave produced enormous dividends. There is, of course,no way of knowing how this group’s history might haveevolved with the word organic in its name.Clearly, disputes over the symbolic uses and meanings

of language have greatly in"uenced the history of organicagriculture in the US, especially in the more than threedecades since publication of the 1980 USDA Report.Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of con-gressional efforts to craft legislation supportive of organicfarming.

Capitol Hill and organic farming:The early push for legislationLed by Representative Jim Weaver of Oregon andSenator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a small contingentof Congresspersons responded quickly to the legislativeopportunities created by the 1980 USDA Report onorganic farming. Initially, these supporters took steps toensure the inclusion of organic farming language in the1981 Farm Bill. That language called for establishing‘integrated multidisciplinary organic farming researchprojects designed to foster the implementation of majorrecommendations of the US Department of Agriculture’sReport and Recommendations on Organic Farming, July1980’50.The following February, Weaver introduced his initial

organic farming bill, the Organic Farming Act of 1982(H.R. 5618)51. Weaver hoped his bill would becomethe legislative vehicle for implementing the authorizinglanguage included in the 1981 Farm Bill. According toWeaver, expanded research on organic farming wasjusti!ed by ‘the skyrocketing cost of energy, petro-chemically-based fertilizers, and pesticides. More impor-tantly, there is a growing concern about the dramatic soilerosion and nutrient depletion often associated with manyconventional farming practices’52. Weaver’s bill requiredthe Secretary of Agriculture to ‘establish 6 pilot projects,

taking into consideration the Report and Recommen-dations on Organic Farming, United States Department ofAgriculture (July 1980) . . .’ (H.R. 5618, Sec. 4, (a))51.These pilot projects were to develop science-basedinformation on a range of organic farming methodssuch as crop rotations, green manures, and other tech-nologies and management techniques needed ‘in makingthe transition from conventional chemical-intensivemethods of farming to methods of organic farming’[H.R. 5618, Sec. 4, (a) (1) & (2)]51.In April 1982, Senator Leahy introduced companion

legislation in the US Senate. After months of internalstaff debate, Leahy opted to call his bill the InnovativeFarming Act of 1982 (S. 2485)53. The Senator and his staffhad concluded that using the word organic in the titlewould not only have guaranteed the bill’s defeat, butdenied it a fair hearing as well. With the exception of adifferent title, however, Leahy’s bill mirrored the Weaverlegislation, de!ning organic farming precisely in the sameway it had been de!ned in the 1980 USDA Report.Despite the bill’s ‘innovative’ title, the purpose of Leahy’slegislation was clear. The USDA opposed this legis-lation54,55, and neither bill would pass.These defeats marked the beginning of a 7-year hiatus

in early congressional efforts to advance organic farminglegislation using the word organic. Not until 1989, whenSenator Leahy introduced a bill dealing with a nationalcerti!cation program for marketing organic products (seebelow), would the word organic headline any congres-sional legislation. The search for more creative languageto advance organic methods would now challenge thesupporters of organic agriculture on Capitol Hill.

The political landscape: New (organic) realitiesBy 1983, 3 years after publication of USDA’s organicfarming report, political reality had replaced the climateof optimism among organic farmers and the new agendagroups which had accompanied its release.While the agri-cultural community could no longer ignore the negativeexternalities of conventional agricultural productionpractices, or the early 1980s groundswell of acceleratingdemands for changes in food, agriculture and environ-mental policy—circumstances that might have openednew pathways for promotion and use of organicmethods—opposition to organic farming from conven-tional agriculture and the Reagan Administration wasunyielding. Despite accumulating evidence of ground andsurface water contamination from agricultural chemi-cals56,57, increased levels of soil erosion and declines insoil productivity58–60, adverse effects of technology andfarm policy on trends in farm structure61, increasing pestresistance to pesticides62, links between human illness androutine use of antibiotics in animal feed63, rising energyprices, and the continuing severity of the farm economiccrisis, Secretary Block’s USDA could see no role fororganic farming in American agriculture.


Instead, the conventional agricultural communityinsisted that these issues were being addressed throughmodi!cation of existing technologies, and developmentand adoption of new ones. Biotechnology, precisionagriculture, conservation tillage, improved soil tests,integrated pest management (IPM), best managementpractices (BMPs) and better ways to handle environ-mental threats from CAFOs were among the solutionsoffered by conventional agriculture. The Administration,agribusiness, most farmers andmost agricultural scientistsappeared to be solidly in agreement with this set ofprescriptions. By 1983 the organic community had cometo realize that it would need a new legislative strategy if ithoped to include its voice and its technologies in thenational debate over the future of US agricultural policy.Against this backdrop, in the spring of 1983,

Weaver and Leahy jointly introduced the AgriculturalProductivity Act of 1983 (H.R. 271464; S. 112865),legislation that called for a number of familiar-sounding,organic-type program initiatives. While the word organicwas conspicuously absent in this legislation, it nonethelessauthorized twelve 5-year-long on-farm studies ‘forthe purpose of examining the effects of the transitionfrom—(A) farm practices which rely on syntheticallycompounded fertilizers, pesticides, growth regulators,livestock feed additives, and tillage practices which failto control erosion; to (B) farm systems which rely onlegume and other sod based rotations, the ef!cient use ofcrop residues, greenmanures, off-farm organic wastes and. . . nonchemical or biological methods of weed and pestcontrol’ [H.R. 2714, Sec. 5, (a)]64. Both bills also called fordata collection on 12 farms that had used alternativesystems for !ve or more years. Other provisions author-ized cost-share payments for intercropping of legumes,and directed USDA to assess the availability of extensionmaterials related to alternative methods and to recom-mend research that would help farmers better understandlow-energy farming methods. Sponsors and supporterswere cautiously optimistic about the prospects for passageof this creatively worded organic legislation.An August 3rd House subcommittee hearing on H.R.

2714, chaired by Rep. Weaver, reinforced this sense ofoptimism: the only formal testimony in opposition to thebill came fromUSDA. According to Clare Harris, ActingAdministrator of Cooperative State Research Service,the Department was ‘sympathetic to the purposes’ of thelegislation, but could not support it because ‘much of thiswork is currently underway; the bill would impose overlyrestrictive requirements on the conduct of such researchand the costs are excessive’ [p. 48]66. This would be theDepartment’s essential argument against the bill, andother later versions, for the next several years.Witnesses testifying in favor of H.R. 2714 gave a variety

of predictable reasons for supporting the bill. However,the testimony of Patrick Madden, the Penn State agri-cultural economist who 5 years later would becomethe !rst coordinator of USDA’s Low-Input Sustainable

Agriculture (LISA) program, seems especially telling.Madden called the bill’s objectives ‘admirable, well worthpursuing, and attainable’ [p. 78]67, which he had prefacedby the following: ‘I am pleased that the term organicfarming does not appear in the act, because the term isladen with emotional content that gets in the way of usefuldiscussions and actions’ [p. 76].That a prominent supporter of organic farming would

publicly acknowledge that the word organic had itselfbecome an obstacle to progress on low-input farmingillustrated just how sharply the political climate surround-ing organic agriculture had deteriorated in just 3 years.What was not known in 1983, however, was that anynational policy effort designed to support the investi-gation of organic technologies—regardless of the languageused—would be met with determined opposition fromvarious elements of the conventional agriculture commu-nity, including major input suppliers and commodityorganizations55 [pp. 140–146]68. This pattern can be seenin the legislative and administrative history of theUSDA’sLISA program, authorized in the 1985 Farm Bill, as wellas in the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education(SARE) program, authorized in the 1990 FarmBill69, andin the controversy surrounding a major NRC reportreleased in 1989, entitled Alternative Agriculture70.With respect to the Agricultural Productivity Act itself,

opponents of this legislation would hold it in abeyanceuntil 1985 when some of its features were incorporatedinto the 1985 Farm Bill in Subtitle C, Title XIV, as‘Agricultural Productivity Research’71. It would be threemore years before any funds were appropriated to imple-ment this provision as USDA’s LISA program. By then,some 8 years would have elapsed since release of the 1980USDA Report on organic farming, the initial impetus forthis protracted legislative effort. The word organic wasnot included in Subtitle C, and the LISA appropriation in1988 was for a mere $3.9 million, a tiny fraction of totalfederal agricultural research funding. Still, most suppor-ters of organic/sustainable/low-input farming consideredLISA a noteworthy step in the right direction. They werealready planning for the 1990 Farm Bill !ght, the nextmajor legislative opportunity to advance what many werenow calling sustainable agriculture.

Organic/sustainable agriculture in the1990 Farm BillAs preparations for the 1990 Farm Bill began, organicproducer and certi!cation associations, along with thequickly expanding organic wholesale, retail, processingand distribution industries, were focused on the creationof a national certi!cation program for organic foodsand other products. The Organic Foods Production Act(OFPA) (S. 2108)72, introduced by Senator Leahy in early1990, provided for establishing a USDA ‘organicallyproduced’ label for products meeting a strict set ofnational standards and guidelines. As Leahy said when


this legislation was initially introduced in late 1989(S. 1896)73: ‘Since goods labeled organic often sell atpremiumprices, the temptation tomisuse the word is great. . . A national organic certi!cation program will easeproblems in interstate commerce’ and ‘give farmers acommercial incentive to alter the way they farm’74. Notsince 1982 had national legislation dealing with organicfarming actually used the word organic to denote itscharacter and purposes. To avoid consumer confusion,the bill prohibited all other uses of the word organic.Ultimately, the OFPA became part of the 1990 FarmBill; however, disputes between the organic industry andUSDA, and disagreements within the industry itself overthe meaning of speci!c provisions of the bill, would delayits implementation until 2002 (see the following section onOrganic Certi!cation).Meanwhile, as use of the word organic shifted toward

legally de!ned, commercial purposes, other supporters oforganic technologies had begun to use words such assustainable, alternative and low-input when promotingthe use of organic methods to address issues such as soilerosion and water quality, and to lower farm productioncosts. Groups supporting organic-type technologies forthese more traditional purposes had reason to be op-timistic as the 1990 Farm Bill rolled into view. Bolsteredby the growing popularity of the 2-year-old LISAprogram (LISA had faced strong opposition from agri-business and some land-grant university scientists andadministrators during its startup phase69), its supporterswere determined to broaden and re!ne its scope andimpact. Since passage of the 1985 Farm Bill with its his-toric swampbuster, sodbuster, conservation complianceand conservation reserve measures75, a number of newideas for incorporating various organic-type methods(such as crop rotations) into conservation and commoditypolicy had been advanced, some in the form of legislativeproposals76,77. Moreover, since passage of the 1985 FarmBill, there had been a constant "ow of articles and reportsdocumenting the need for a more environmentally soundagriculture, as well as evidence that low-input methodscould contribute to the goal of sustainability.When the 1990 Farm Bill78 had (!nally) passed both

houses of Congress, sustainable agriculture supporterswere pleased—although not entirely—with the results.Those who had fought for the expansion of programsfeaturing organic-type technologies could point to thefollowing successes. The LISA program had been re-authorized, along with a companion federal-state match-ing grant program to help states expand sustainableagriculture. Additional authorization was included forextension agent training and development of technicalpublications designed to help farmers adopt sustainablepractices. The Bill also authorized research on ‘integratedmanagement systems’ aimed at developing environmen-tally sound crop and livestock systems.Beyond these research and education provisions, the

1990 Farm Bill allowed farmers, for the !rst time, to plant

environmentally bene!cial, nonprogram crops on up to25% of their commodity crop base acres, without losingany of the farm’s historic commodity crop base. Also,a pilot Integrated Farm Management Program Optionwas included under which farm program participantscould develop 3- to 5-year sustainable farm plans thatauthorized planting of resource-conserving crops on theircommodity base acres, as well as the right to use a portionof that set aside for commercial haying or livestockgrazing. Calls for incorporating these kinds of "exible,environmentally friendly practices into commodity policyhad been a major goal of organic and sustainableagriculture advocates for many years.

Sustainable agriculture and public policy:Competing definitions and agendasYet despite these noteworthy organic/sustainable agricul-ture policy accomplishments (as outlined above), closeobservers of the 1990 Farm Bill process had reason to beconcerned. Within the Bill’s overall context, with excep-tion of the organic certi!cation measure, these policygains could best be described as marginal: most tra-ditional agricultural research priorities and price supportpolicy remained in place, and some within the low-input,sustainable agriculture community were beginning towonder if use of the word sustainable for advancingorganic-type technologies had begun to back!re. As theFarm Bill debates unfolded, it had become increasinglyclear that multiple de!nitions of sustainable agriculturehad confused and frustrated lawmakers. Early effortsby Representative George E. Brown, Jr, Chairman ofthe Research Subcommittee of the House AgricultureCommittee, and many others, to make the low-input,organic-type version of sustainability the overarchingorganizing principle of the 1990 Farm Bill79 had fallen farshort of expectations. Brown’s notions of sustainableagriculture would have to compete with those of USDAand agribusiness. By 1990, conventional agriculture hadstaked a !rm claim on its own version of the symbolicallypowerful notion of sustainability.Throughout the debates on the 1990 Farm Bill,

sustainable agriculture became a political football onthe largest stage in agricultural policy. Groups that wouldhave been urging adoption of organic policy options10 years earlier were now using the word sustainable topush in that direction. Meanwhile, other elements of theorganic community seemed poised to create a popular andhighly visible national certi!cation program for organi-cally grown food and other products. While this initiativemay have seemed misguided and somewhat threateningto conventional agricultural interests, these traditionalpolicy gatekeepers simply could not allow the organiccommunity to claim sole ownership of ‘sustainability,’ aterm laden with implications for the future of US agri-cultural policy. This struggle for control of the symbolicuses of sustainability for political purposes was not new,


its broad outlines had been evolving throughout the1980s. The 1990 Farm Bill debates simply provideda public venue for exposing how this issue would play outin the face of speci!c policy disputes, not merely insymposia and conferences—settings where sustainableagriculture had often provided the language needed togloss over policy differences, and seemingly reduce ten-sions, between conventional and organic communities.The 1990 Farm Bill debates over how best to de!ne

sustainable agriculture were not new. The history ofagriculture includes many thoughtful perspectives offer-ing valuable insights and guidance for understanding theimportance of sustainability and addressing its multi-faceted characteristics80–82. While these commentarieshave a long, important history, growing signs of agri-culturally induced environmental degradation and rapidchanges in farm structure—trends that had becomeincreasingly evident by the late 1970s—made the searchfor more precise de!nitions of agricultural sustainability,and better understanding of its parameters and require-ments, seem increasingly urgent. Over the past 30 yearsthere has been a commendable response to this challengefrom the academic community68,83–85. Despite the scopeof these and other efforts, however, to this day thereremain large areas of ambiguity and disagreement, bothwith respect to de!nitions, and even more importantly,to the actual technologies and systems best suitedfor achieving sustainability36. No wonder that the USCongress, in the throes of trying to pass a hotly contestedfarm bill, would become frustrated with these de!nitionalambiguities and be forced to compromise over a numberof key provisions86.

Sustainable agriculture gets two definitionsWhen the farm bill process began in early 1990, pro-ponents of reduced-input, organic-type technologies fellin line behind the de!nition of sustainable agricultureincluded in the bill as reported by the Senate AgricultureCommittee, a de!nition that borrowed heavily from the1989 NRC report,Alternative Agriculture70. According tothe NRC Committee:

Alternative agriculture is not a single system of farmingpractices. It includes a spectrum of farming systems, rangingfrom organic systems that attempt to use no purchasedsynthetic chemical inputs, to those involving the prudent useof pesticides or antibiotics to control speci!c pests or diseases.Alternative farming encompasses, but is not limited to,farming systems known as biological, low-input, organic,regenerative, or sustainable [p. 4].

Not surprisingly, USDA, commodity groups and agri-business !rms strongly opposed the Senate AgricultureCommittee’s de!nition of sustainable agriculture, whichsounded eerily similar to the de!nition of organic farmingdeveloped by the 1980 USDA Study Team on OrganicFarming [p. 9]9. Conventional agricultural groups had

managed to derail legislative support for organic farmingin the early 1980s and were not pleased to see those ideasre-emerge, !rst in the guise of an NRC report on‘alternative’ agriculture, and now once again as thecenterpiece of sustainable agriculture in the 1990 FarmBill. Using the word organic for certifying foods producedfor the niche organic market—quite small in 1990—wasan entirely different matter than allowing notions oforganic agriculture to in!ltrate and in"uence major farmbill provisions with the potential to affect the broaderoutlines of US agricultural policy and practice. Conven-tional agriculture would insist upon use of the de!nitionof sustainable agriculture promoted by USDA: an agri-culture that is ‘environmentally, agronomically, and eco-nomically sound over long and short periods’ [p. 304]86,but which did not embrace the notion of reducing the useof purchased inputs. Much of the farm bill debate wouldrevolve around the differences between these two de!nitions.Ultimately, the de!nition of sustainable agriculture—a

mere paragraph of text in an enormously complicated,700-page bill—‘became one of the most signi!cant andcontroversial issues of the 1990 FarmBill. The de!nitionaldispute fueled weeks of debate and, ultimately, a battle onthe "oor of the Senate that required every Senator torecord his or her vote on which de!nition should becomethe law of the land’ [p. 304]86. On one side were those whoargued that purchased, synthetic inputs could and shouldbe reduced, and that doing so would bene!t farmers, theenvironment and the general public. Opponents of thisview contended that agricultural chemicals had been ofenormous bene!t to American production agriculture,and that the goal simply should be their more careful andef!cient use. When agreement on a single de!nition forsustainable agriculture could not be reached, Congresswould be forced to settle the matter by including bothde!nitions in the bill’s research title, authorizing researchprograms under each de!nition.

Organic agriculture in 1990: A look at itsaltered statusBy 1990, organic agriculture in the US—as evidencedby the politics and provisions of the new farm bill—hadreached a crossroads. One road was labeled ‘certi!edorganic,’ an approach to farming and marketing thatseemed to be gaining visibility, acceptance and support,especially from the consumer community. The goals ofthose taking this road were clear: most producers hadaccepted the de!nition of organic farming included in theOFPA, and were hoping for better and more predictableeconomic returns; organic foods processors, wholesalers,retailers and certi!ers were on the cusp of creating a wholenew industry, one modeled along the broad outlines of theconventional food industry that many on this road hadcome to reject. While no one on this road could haveenvisioned precisely where it would lead, or how dif!cultit would be to resolve the many disputes that lay ahead,


most travelers were !lled with a sense of hope, excitementand accomplishment. At long last, organic agriculture hadarrived: it had achieved governmental agenda status; itwould now be certi!ed; it was becoming an important,legitimate, national and international industry; its roleand purpose in society had been resolved; it would soon begiven a seal of approval from USDA, its staunchest criticjust a few short years before. Travelers on this road nowhad sole, legal possession of the word organic.While somehad accepted federal standards reluctantly—warning thata single set of formal national standards would acceleratethe industrialization of organic agriculture, water down itsagronomic principles and erode its basic philosophicaltenets—overall the future looked clear and bright. Formost of the travelers on this road, it was a heady, albeitsomewhat unsettling, moment in the history of organicagriculture.Meanwhile, travelers on the other road—now labeled

‘sustainable’—comprised of those farmers, scientists,policy makers, new agenda groups, and other organicadvocates who had come to embrace and support a less-pure form of organic agriculture, were left to ponder howthis new, legally de!ned, market-focused organic programwould affect the many traditional issues of concern morebroadly throughout US agriculture: soil and waterquality, soil erosion, wildlife habitat, social justice, farmworker safety, energy conservation, efforts to improve netfarm income, and rural community development andfamily farms. These were the issues, after all, that hadenergized large segments of the expanding organic farm-ing advocacy community throughout the 1980s. Nowsuch advocacy would be conducted largely within theframework of sustainable agriculture, even though thereseemed to be a great deal of confusion about what thatword meant. Many of these travelers were quick torecognize, for example, that there were large-scale farmers—using heavy amounts of purchased inputs and mono-cultural cropping systems—traveling with them on thissame road. Moreover, there were disquieting indicationsthat promoters of agricultural chemicals and the newlyemerging !eld of agricultural biotechnology would betraveling with them as well. They also noticed that thisroad was much wider and more crowded than the onelabeled ‘certi!ed organic.’ These proponents of organic-type technologies worried that their own beliefs wouldbe overlooked amid these competitive, confusing andcrowded conditions.In fact, in a single decade, the politics of agriculture had

greatly altered the de!nition, meaning and purposes oforganic farming. The earlier idea that organic farmingtechniques might be incorporated into conventionalsystems, thereby reducing costs and helping to addressvarious environmental concerns, was no longer widelydiscussed. Apart from their use on certi!ed organic farms,organic technologies were now labeled sustainable andobliged to compete for recognition and support with animpressive and expanding collection of conventional

agricultural technologies. Organic agriculture was nowtraveling exclusively on a road labeled certi!ed organic.While this was, in many ways, an enormously positive andwidely supported accomplishment, it did not greatly alterthe overall agricultural political, environmental or struc-tural landscape. Proponents and practitioners of organicfarming—both certi!ed and non certi!ed—would stillneed to compete for scarce public resources (e.g., research,education, marketing and promotional support) with amyriad of emerging conventional technologies, all nowclaiming the mantle of sustainability, a powerful politicalsymbol no longer reserved for use by organic, ecologicaland other low-input farming adherents. Proponents ofconventional agriculture were now well positioned tocontinue propelling agriculture along the same energy-intensive, high-technology and high-cost structural tra-jectory it had been on since World War II, only now withthe added advantage of being ‘sustainable.’ The con-sequences of these new institutional, de!nitional andpolitical dynamics would soon become obvious to thesupporters of organic agriculture, regardless of whichroad they had chosen—or had been forced to choose.

Organic Certification at the Federal Level:A Long and Bumpy Road

When the 1990 Farm Bill was signed into law and theOFPA became part of of!cial USDA policy, few withinthe organic community could have imagined that it wouldbe 12 dif!cult, exhausting years before this legislationwould be implemented and shoppers would !rst notice thenow familiar green and white label, ‘USDA—Organic,’on organic products in an expanding array of retailoutlets. (For the OFPA’s formal provisions, see below.)Since the mid-1970s, when several nonpro!t organicproducer groups had established organic certi!cationprograms, participants in these efforts had known of theinherent complexities of de!ning certi!ed organic farmingin a way that would be acceptable to producers (and otherelements in the organic supply chain) and be understand-able and reassuring to consumers. Finalizing the federalrule under theOFPA simply elevated thematter of organiccerti!cation to another level of technical and politicalcomplexity. This brief retrospective is not the place to fullyrecount the history of this protracted and painful politicalprocess. Instead, we trace its broad outlines, including thesociopolitical and !nancial motivations of the majorconstituencies involved in these debates, as well as theimpacts of a national program of organic certi!cationupon broader notions of organic agriculture and its role infostering agricultural sustainability.

Organic farming and marketing: The earlyyearsAs noted previously, the ideology of organic agriculture,even as late as the 1960s andmost of the 1970s, had little to


do with certi!cation and marketing of organically grownproducts. While organic farmers of this period did, in fact,sell some of their products as ‘organically’ grown, thesetransactions were mainly based upon relationshipsof personal knowledge and trust between farmers andconsumers situated in what sociologists call dense localnetworks, not upon legally de!ned certi!cation criteria.These early producer–consumer connections were theforerunners, at least in part, of what many now refer to as‘civic agriculture,’ a term popularized by the late TomLyson a number of years ago87. Organic farmers of thisera were motivated more by ideological factors—respectfor nature, enhancing soil quality, improved health, en-vironmental concern, community development, personalindependence and the like—than by the desire for pricepremiums or other forms of !nancial gain. Well into themid-1980s, many organic farmers continued to sell theirproducts into conventional marketing channels, duelargely to the lack of suitable and conveniently locatedorganic wholesale and retail outlets, and a poorlydeveloped certi!cation and processing infrastructure.According to the results of The New Farm surveyconducted by Rodale Press in 1979, in connection withUSDA’s organic farming report, ‘. . . only 20 percent ofthe organic and combination respondents received apremium price for organically grown products. Only6 percent of the totally organic farmers reported receivinga premium price on all of their organic products’ [p. 18]9.Beginning in the early to mid-1970s—largely in

response to increasing consumer demand for pesticide-free food, and the enhanced marketing potential rep-resented by this trend—the number of organic growerassociations expanded rapidly. The Maine OrganicFarmers and Gardeners Association was organized in1971 and claims to be the oldest such group in the US.Formed in 1973 as an information and support groupfor organic farmers, the California Certi!ed OrganicFarmers, one of the nation’s !rst certi!cation organiz-ations, began to certify organic farms in the mid-1970s.In the Northwest, a group called Regional Tilth withchapters in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and NorthernCalifornia, was formed in 1974 as a farmer support andinformation organization, but did not launch a formalcerti!cation program until 1982 when the WillametteValley chapter of Oregon Tilth began to certify organicgrowers. By the early 1980s there were estimated to besome 35 such grower support and information groupsactive in 29 states [p. 18]9. A handful of these largelygrassroots, grower-based organizations either had certi!-cation programs in place or were beginning to considerdeveloping them.By the mid-1980s a number of private !rms also were

beginning to enter the !eld of organic certi!cation.The entry of private, for-pro!t !rms, coupled with thesteady growth of not-for-pro!t, grower-based certi!cationprograms and the involvement of a handful of state-sponsored programs, had, by this time, begun to create

numerous problems for the "edging organic marketplace.According to DiMatteo and Gershuny, by then ‘therewere multiple state laws and differing de!nitions oforganic, con"icting standards among the handful ofcerti!ers, and frustration among processors in !ndingconsistent, reliable sources of organic products’ [p. 254]88.This ad hoc assortment of programs was ill designed toserve the certi!cation and marketing needs of an industrythat seemed poised for a period of relatively rapid growth.Indeed, organic agriculture had reached the point whereit needed a more formal, recognizable, nationwideorganizational structure acceptable to the disparate andincreasingly contentious farmer and business interestswithin the overall organic community88.The Organic Foods Production Association of North

America (OFPANA) was formed in 1985 to address theseneeds. (The group’s name was changed to Organic TradeAssociation in 1994.) However, due to continuing distrustamong certi!cation organizations, farmer-based groupsand various business interests, OFPANA’s overall goal ofcreating a national certi!cation program with increasedreciprocity among individual certi!cation programswould fail. The frustration associated with this unsuccess-ful, multi-year, private-sector effort to establish a nationalorganic standards and accreditation program, coupledwith the surge in demand for organic food following the1989 Alar incident (highlighted on the CBS televisionprogram, ‘60 Minutes,’ February 26, 1989), set in motionthe prospect of turning to the federal government as thevenue of last resort with the authority and resources tocreate and enforce a comprehensive national program oforganic certi!cation and accreditation.

Defining and Regulating ‘Organic’:Policy Making at the Federal Level

By the late 1980s, as we have seen, the organic agriculturemovement was rapidly evolving into a national industry.Remarkably, within the span of a single decade, organicfarming had largely shed its primitive, back-to-the-landimage; had been featured in two major scienti!creports9,70; was being studied (often under the rubric ofsustainable agriculture) by a growing number of USDAand land-grant university scientists; had been the focus ofnumerous university and nonpro!t on-farm researchdemonstrations and !eld days; had provided the grist fora great deal of congressional attention, including thelaunch of the LISA and SARE programs; had attractedthe interest of many small- and mid-scale conventionalfarmers; and had begun to register impressive gains in theorganic marketplace as consumers began to more ag-gressively seek out organic foods and other organicproducts. In all of this, there had been precious littletime for the various stakeholders within the organiccommunity to digest such rapid and signi!cant changes.Many newer entrants into the !eld of organics (including


otherwise conventional food companies) welcomed theaccelerating pace of change, and seemed eager to moveahead with the institutionalization (even the industrializ-ation) of the industry. Some members of OFPANA (theso-called ‘suits’) earlier had re"ected this impulse[p. 260]88. Meanwhile, other members of the organicmovement, especially those with deep philosophicalattachments to the kinds of agrarian ideological preceptsoutlined earlier in this retrospective, had already begun tovoice concerns about the future of organic agriculturewithin a more highly industrialized and regulated model.Passage of the 1990 OFPA—and the rule-making

process that followed in the wake of that historic legis-lation—would play out amid these politically contentious,polar-opposite organic world views. To a large extentthese debates involved the meaning of organic, as thoughthere is one singular, knowable organic essence. Yet,within the 30-year span encompassed in this narrative,much of the con"ict has revolved around simple, pre-dictable !nancial and political agendas. While many ofthese disputes existed long before passage of the OFPA,the establishment of federal organic certi!cation stan-dards drew considerable public attention to organicfood and farming, raised the !nancial stakes for mostparticipants in the organic industry, transferred control ofthe legal de!nition of organic to the federal government,and inadvertently created a larger and much more visiblestage upon which to contest a range of key organic policyissues.The organic farming movement in the US has long

been, and remains, an incredibly diverse and dedicatedentrepreneurial community of strong willed and oftencolorful individuals. The agricultural geography of thenation with its highly variable soils, ecosystems andmicro-climates, and local and regional sociopoliticalhistories and traditions, reinforces the organic commu-nity’s agronomic, ideological and political diversity. Theinherent tensions within this complicated national con-stituency, represented bymultiple sizes and types of farms,individual life experiences and philosophies, and personaland organizational agendas, were apparent when thesestakeholders came together to fashion the OFPA, andlater to make recommendations to USDA for the nationalorganic rule.In retrospect, given these complexities and the

enormous risks and uncertainties associated with such afundamental shift in how the rules of the organic industrywould be established, administered and enforced, it issomewhat remarkable that this effort to create a federalorganic certi!cation scheme did not die aborning.Although most members of the organic community mayhave recognized and accepted (begrudgingly in manycases) the notion that structural changes were needed inorder to eliminate fraud and to facilitate the industry’sgrowth in interstate and international commerce, thesystem in place today owes much to those individuals whochose to see the rule-making process through to the end.

Even now, some 20 years after passage of the authorizinglegislation, and a decade after the program was fullyimplemented, participants continue to deal with amultitude of dif!cult issues and disparate philosophicalpoints of view. The efforts of these pioneering policymakers, though by no means universally praised, forman important part of organic agriculture’s history overthe past 30 years. One can only speculate about what theorganic foods marketplace might look like today in theabsence of this pivotal page in the history of organicagriculture. It is easy to forget that the private sector hadtried and failed to erect a national-level program oforganic certi!cation and accreditation.

Organic Foods Production Act: Formalprovisions and some key issuesThe OFPA of 1990, Title 21 of the 1990 Farm Bill78,provided for establishment of the National OrganicProgram (NOP) to be housed in USDA’s AgriculturalMarketing Service. The Bill also provided for creation ofthe National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), com-posed of 15 industry representatives to be appointed bythe Secretary of Agriculture and charged with ‘develop-ment of standards for substances to be used in organicproduction,’ the so-called National List. The NOSB wasalso authorized to ‘provide recommendations to theSecretary regarding implementation’ of the legislation.NOSB membership represents a cross-section of industryand consumer interests, including farmers, processors,retailers, environmentalists, consumers, the science com-munity and one certifying agent. The OFPA required thedevelopment of national standards for organically grownagricultural products in order to assure consumers thatproducts labeled organic, both raw and processed, wouldconform to the standards proscribed in the legislation andrules, and would have been certi!ed as such by third-partycerti!cation agencies, accredited by USDA. The Actstipulates that the NOP is a marketing program, and thatneither the Act nor its regulations are intended to addressissues of food safety or nutrition. Producers and pro-cessors of organic products with less than US$5000 insales per year are exempt from certi!cation. The lawprovides for civil penalties against persons who knowinglysell or label products as organic that do not conform toNOP regulations89.When these deliberations began in the late

1980s—under the leadership of Senator Leahy and hiskey staffer (on the issue of organic agriculture), KathleenMerrigan—most participants were hopeful, but also waryof where this process might lead90. Some questionedthe entire enterprise. The notion of transferring formalcontrol over the sensitive matter of organic productionstandards to the federal government, especially to USDA,which had long championed high-tech conventional pro-duction systems, seemed misguided if not totally unthink-able. While many taking this view may have recognized


the potential bene!ts of national standards, they simplycould not support shifting control over the meaning oforganic to an institution that had often ridiculed organicsystems. For some, psychologically, this alone made themove to a USDA-controlled standard a ‘tough pill’ toswallow. Moreover, many feared that lodging authorityfor the meaning of organic within USDA would providethe so-called ‘big boys’ (those who often had littlesympathy for the established characteristics and philoso-phical tenets of organic agriculture) with undue access tothe reigns of conventional power, thus fostering a ‘slipperyslope’ to weaker standards and the erosion of time-honored organic principles.On the eve of the program’s implementation, one such

dissenter, Eliot Coleman, long-time organic farmer andadvocate, expressed his opposition to federal standardswith these words:

Now that the food-buying public has become enthusiasticabout organically grown foods, the food industry wantsto take over. Toward that end the U.S. Department ofAgriculture-controlled national de!nition of ‘organic’ istailored to meet the marketing needs of organizations thathave no connection to the agricultural integrity organic oncerepresented. We now need to ask whether we want to becontent with an ‘organic’ food option that places the market-ing concerns of corporate America ahead of nutrition, "avorand social bene!ts to consumers . . . The food giants that aretaking over ‘organic’ want a simplistic list of ingredients sothey can do organic-by-the-numbers. They are derisive aboutwhat they label ‘belief systems,’ and they are loath toacknowledge that more farmer commitment is involved inproducing real food than any number of approved inputs canencompass [p. 1]91.

While Coleman’s sharp-edged assessment almost cer-tainly re"ected a minority view within the organic com-munity (after all, details of the NOP and the NationalList had been thoroughly debated and approved by theNOSB, a panel representing a cross-section of the organicindustry), his perspective, nonetheless, illustrates thepolicy orientation and emotional intensity of a substantialsegment of organic participants at that time. In his articleentitled ‘Beyond organic,’ Coleman argued that thefederal de!nition of organic, and the regulations promul-gated to implement it, no longer represented the funda-mental characteristics of organic agriculture. Thus, itwould now be incumbent upon those who did understandand respect those principles to rede!ne organic, andthereby reclaim and perpetuate its true meaning andvalue. ‘I encourage all small growers who believe inexceptional food and use local markets to use the word“authentic” to mean “beyond organic.”With a de!nitionthat stresses local, seller-grown and fresh, there is littlelikelihood that large-scale marketers can appropriate thisconcept’ [p. 3]91.Later in 2001, the phrase ‘beyond organic’ would be

popularized by Michael Pollan in a New York Timesarticle in which he questioned the nature and direction of

the so-called Big Organic (industrialized) version of theorganic industry, while extolling the virtues of the moretraditional, Little Organic (small-scale) version of organicfarming92. Several years later, in his popular book, TheOmnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan further developed thesethemes, describing favorably, for example, the farmingmethods and philosophy of a well-known small-scaleorganic farmer from Virginia, Joel Salatin, while paintinga somewhat less-than-"attering image ofWhole Foods, aswell as of Gene Kahn, who in 1990 had sold his company,Cascadian Farms, to Welch’s (acquired later by GeneralMills where it would become Small Planet Foods), and asa result had become the ‘poster child’ for those organicpioneers who had chosen to embrace the industrializedversion of organics over its more traditional forms93.Kahn had been among the 69 farmers interviewed in

1979 by members of the USDA organic farming StudyTeam. At that time, Kahn’s farming and marketingoperation fell squarely into the ‘Little O’ version oforganic farming. Given Kahn’s role within the organicfarming movement of the 1970s and 1980s, many found ithard to accept his decision to become part of ‘Big O’organics. Kahn defended his actions by arguing that thebene!ts of organic agriculture (e.g., reduced use of syn-thetic production materials, cleaner food and improvedfarm worker safety) were so important that no opportu-nity to extend its reach and impact should be overlooked,even if that meant allowing large corporations to enterthe !eld.

Big O, Little O, and Beyond Organic:The evolving structure of organic agricultureThe accelerating growth in the sale of organic foodsand other organic products94 over the past two decadeshas been accompanied by equally dramatic shifts in thestructure of organic farming and marketing, including theemergence of many new product labels. These changesappeal in varying degrees to the multiplicity of producerand consumer sectors that comprise the overall organiccommunity. Clearly, for example, there is a great deal ofconsumer and producer support for the ‘Little O’ versionof organic agriculture in the US. The dramatic risein numbers of farmers’ markets and various types ofcommunity supported agriculture (CSAs) over the pastdecade or so con!rm the growing popularity of theselargely traditional marketing structures, and the familiarfarmer–consumer connections that they and other localmarketing arrangements afford. Data collected by Adamsand Salois95 would seem to suggest a rising tide ofconsumer interest in simply buying more farm productsdirectly from local producers, whether or not these localoperations are certi!ed organic. These researchers con-tend that this ‘locavore’ trend correlates strongly withpassage of federal organic standards, and indicates agrowing desire among consumers for a return to a timewhen organic was more closely associated with small


farms, community support and deeper notions of sustain-ability. Data reviewed in their study show that organic isno longer as strongly linked to these traditional notions asit once was, and for that reason many consumers havecome to favor local over organic95.While the data and analysis presented by Adams

and Salois95 are persuasive, the fact remains that even acasual stroll through any Whole Foods Market (or anyWalmart or Costco, for that matter) reveals a great deal ofsupport for ‘Big O’ organics as well. Indeed, the meteoricrise of ‘Big O’ (industrialized) organic agriculture overthe past 10–15 years, coupled with the simultaneous surgein the more traditional, smaller-scale forms of ‘Little O’organic farming and localized marketing discussed byAdams and Salois95, suggests an even larger point: theonce mono-structural and ideologically homogeneouscharacter of organic agriculture, including its prac-titioners, advocates, consumers and other adherents, hasevolved into a highly pluralistic and complicated systemof agronomy, marketing, economics, politics and con-sumption.While more in-depth studies are needed to sort out the

causes and implications of these alterations in thestructure of organic agriculture (and consumer responsesto them), this much seems relatively certain: many ofthese changes are the product of broad socioeconomicin"uences and would likely have occurred with or withoutthe introduction of federal organic standards. Currenttensions between and among advocates of ‘Big O,’‘Little O,’ and ‘Beyond Organic’ systems of farming andmarketing may well be unavoidable at a time whenthe organic industry faces the challenges of establishingits role and con!guration within the broader contextof a rapidly changing society, especially one inclinedto welcome (if not demand) ever greater and morespecialized consumer product choices. While structuraltransformations of the kind occurring presently withinorganic agriculture will produce individual winners andlosers, overall, as organic agriculture (regardless of itsmultiple forms) continues to attract support amongconsumers and the broader public, the collective good islikely to be substantial. As that process unfolds, theideological and institutional diversity characteristic oftoday’s organic agriculture (though painful for manyorganic participants) may prove to have been an essentialelement in the long-term growth of the overall organicindustry.

Organic Agriculture Today: Recurringand Emerging Issues and Themes

As noted at the outset of this retrospective, over the past30 years organic agriculture has undergone enormousinnovation and growth in the US and throughout theworld. During this period, the science, politics, symbolismand institutional underpinnings of organic agriculture in

the US have been largely transformed. Today, forexample, unlike three decades ago:. many conventional scientists now conduct researchon organic agriculture, acknowledging and even pro-moting the ecological and environmental bene!ts oforganic systems38,96;

. other members of the academy have described andextolled the social and economic characteristics andadvantages of small farms and localized marketingsystems, often giving special attention to organicoperations87,97;

. the federal government now provides the institutionalframework for administration and enforcement ofnational standards for certi!ed organic foods pro-duction, manufacturing and marketing;

. many large conventional food manufacturers, distribu-tors and retailers now proudly display and promote awide variety of certi!ed organic products;

. farmers’ markets, CSAs and other localized marketingarrangements have grown in number and popularity,and together with organizations such as Chef’sCollaborative and a number of high-end restaurantshave helped create and sustain a vibrant, dedicated andgrowing locavore movement; and

. a number of foundations have provided !nancialsupport for both organic and sustainable nonpro!torganizations.

While these institutional alterations all help to fortify andenhance organic agriculture’s political and scienti!ccredibility, a number of closely related developmentsbear even more directly upon the industry’s overall capa-city to mobilize, focus, and deliver political messages andpublic policy proposals. To wit:. consumers have responded enthusiastically to the or-ganic foods marketplace, producing double-digit salesgrowth for organic foods and other products over thepast 10–15 years94, and in the process have made animportant political statement to policy makers;

. organic producer associations, certi!cation organiz-ations, specialized organic retailers, and organicallyoriented nonpro!t organizations have grown steadily insize, number and in"uence;

. many environmental, consumer, farmland preservationand rural development groups now include organicfarming policy work in their respective portfolios, thusbroadening the political base of support for organicagriculture;

. the interests and perspectives of organic and sustainableagriculture are now skillfully represented in nationalpolicy debates by various industry and nonpro!t groupsand coalitions;

. books, popular articles and peer-reviewed journalsprovide a continuous "ow of credible information andcommentary on organic agriculture to both scienti!cand lay audiences; and

. sympathetic press accounts dealing with the bene!ts oforganic and sustainable farming operations appear


frequently in both local and national media outlets,often with catchy titles, enticing story lines andsuggestions for how consumers can support farmerspracticing various alternative production and market-ing methods and strategies. (A recent article inThe Denver Post, for instance, entitled ‘How now,sustainable cow?,’ typi!es this popular genre98.)

As these selected developments illustrate, organicagriculture in the US today is far different than it wasduring the 1960s and 1970s1. Throughout this earlyperiod, the core elements of the organic farming move-ment consisted, essentially, of a "edgling but intrepidgrassroots contingent of pioneering farmers; a modestnumber of small, mostly rural, largely voluntary nonpro!torganizations; a handful of supportive writers, publishers,retailers and academics; and a small, but slowly ex-panding, community of interested consumers. Withthe exception of research conducted at the Center forthe Biology of Natural Systems at Washington Universityin St. Louis, a non-land-grant institution99,100, and theUniversity of Nebraska101, formal research programson organic farming were nonexistent prior to the early1980s.Much of organic agriculture’s growth over the past

30 years (as noted previously) has related to mountingscienti!c and societal concerns associated with conven-tional agriculture, particularly its heavy dependence onnonrenewable, and increasingly expensive, petroleum-based resources, and the potentially adverse impacts ofmany conventional technologies on the natural resourcebase, human and animal health, rural communities andthe structure of American agriculture. These and otherfactors, including growing concerns about food qualityand safety, caused many scientists, policy makers andordinary citizens to begin reassessing the bene!ts andcosts of conventional agricultural production systems,and to begin exploring how organic farming methodsmight, at least to some extent, be incorporated into con-ventional systems. These concerns and reassessments,combined with the determination and skill of organicfarmers and their supporters, slowly allowed organicagriculture to play an increasingly in"uential role in thecontentious, protracted and divisive debates of the pastthree decades over how to achieve a more sustainableagriculture in the US, and around the world.Today, despite these impressive achievements, efforts to

expand organic agriculture’s footprint in the US mustaddress a number of recurring and emerging issues. Whilethere seems little doubt that organic agriculture willcontinue to occupy a prominent place on governmental,societal and personal agendas, its future character anddirection are by no means certain. It is possible that theissues and battles that lie aheadmay prove to be evenmoredaunting for advocates of organic agriculture than thoseencountered over the past three decades. What are theseissues, and how will they in"uence the future of organicagriculture?

Sustainable agriculture

The word sustainable did not appear prominently inearly debates regarding the costs and bene!ts of eitherorganic or conventional agriculture. Instead of claimingthat organic farming deserved governmental supportbecause it was sustainable, the 1980 USDA Report andRecommendations on Organic Farming simply character-ized organic systems as having the potential to helpconserve ‘soil resources and the environment’ [p. v], orpossibly to address ‘energy shortages, food safety, andenvironmental concerns’ [p. iii]9. In summarizing the basictenets of organic agriculture, the Report concluded that‘. . . organic farmers seek to establish ecologically harmo-nious, resource-ef!cient, and nutritionally sound agricul-tural methods’ [p. 9]. In the period surrounding itspublication, the notion of sustainability had not yetbecome agriculture’s dominant verbal endgame, andthe word sustainable had not yet emerged—as it soonwould—as one of the most coveted, ubiquitous, symbo-lically powerful and politically charged words in theagricultural lexicon.It was not until the word organic became the target of

elevated and sustained attacks from the conventionalagricultural community that organic proponents began tosubstitute other terms (including sustainable) in place ofthe word organic, to make organic farming more palat-able to the agricultural scienti!c and policy-making com-munities. During this linguistic transition, it is importantto remember that it was the terminology that changed, notthe technology. Throughout much of the 1980s, as thelabeling of organic technologies shifted toward the wordsustainable, advocates of organic farming and those mem-bers of the science community sympathetic to organicapproaches seemed relatively comfortable using thesewords more or less interchangeably. By the end of the1980s, however, the science community, facing mountingpeer pressure and continuing USDA and industry cri-ticism of organic methods, had gravitated almostexclusively to use of the word sustainable. Meanwhile,the organic community began to focus its attention moreheavily on organic certi!cation and other aspects of theorganic foods marketplace, with sustainability becomingonly one of several reasons why consumers chose tosupport organic farming. Thus, throughout much of the1980s, but especially during the !rst half of that decade,use of the words sustainable and organic, two of agri-culture’s most symbolically powerful terms, were viewedas somewhat synonymous by members of the organiccommunity and those agricultural scientists and policymakers most concerned about the negative externalities ofconventional agriculture.These developments did not go unnoticed within con-

ventional agricultural circles. Once the organic farmingcommunity—and a distinct minority of scientists andpolicy makers—began to suggest that organic technol-ogies were sustainable, and that conventional technologies


were not sustainable, proponents of conventionalapproaches vigorously entered the sustainability debate.The specter of organic technologies emerging as oneof agriculture’s best hopes for achieving sustainabilityrepresented an even larger threat to conventional agri-cultural interests than did the expanding organic foodsmarketplace, which remained quite small prior to passageof the OFPA in 1990.By the late 1980s, the conventional community had

begun to marshal its considerable resources in defenseof chemical production inputs, precision agriculture,reduced tillage, biotechnology, large specialized farmsincluding CAFOs, and other conventional methods.Proponents insisted that these technologies were nowmore necessary than ever in the quest for sustainability,which, under the conventional de!nition, emphasized thechallenge of feeding a rapidly expanding world popu-lation. The launch of USDA’s LISA program in 1988added to these tensions. The idea of linking sustainabilitywith low inputs was repugnant to conventional agri-culture. The phrase, ‘Low inputs mean low outputs,’became a common refrain as conventional agriculturesought to associate its high-input technology with sus-tainability. This issue, as noted earlier, came to a head inthe 1990 Farm Bill debates. Efforts by the conventionalagricultural community to discredit organic and otherlow-input approaches, and to emphasize the importanceof ‘ef!cient and prudent’ use of farm chemicals, bio-technology and other conventional practices in achievinga sustainable agriculture, has been a central theme inagricultural policy debates for most of the past threedecades.Meanwhile, the organic community has sought to

expand the meaning of sustainability to include not onlyenvironmental, ecological and nutritional bene!ts, butalso issues such as social justice, farm worker safety andsecurity, animal welfare and a more balanced farmstructure, emphasizing the role of small farms and healthyrural communities. Much of the impetus to move ‘beyondorganic’ revolves around these kinds of issues, and may beseen in the growth of new certi!cation programs andproduct labels102. For example, a !ve-step animal welfarerating system for meat and other livestock products,announced in 2010 by Whole Foods Market anddeveloped in coordination with the nonpro!t GlobalAnimal Partnership, would allow consumers to betterunderstand where and how farm animals are raised. Thehighest rating would go to those producers whose animalsspend their entire lives on the same farm103.The NRC recently characterized agricultural sustain-

ability as ‘a complex, dynamic, and political concept thatis inherently subjective in that different groups in societyplace different emphasis . . .’ [p. 5] on the various goalstypically used to help de!ne it36. According to the NRC,these goals include:. Satisfy human food, feed and !ber needs, and con-

tribute to biofuel needs.

. Enhance environmental quality and the resource base.

. Sustain the economic viability of agriculture.

. Enhance the quality of life for farmers, farm workersand society as a whole [p. 4].

Unfortunately, broad, goal-type statements such as theseinvite multiple arguments in defense of almost anycombination of agricultural production methods, leavingthe critically important concept of sustainability at themercy of competing political, ideological and marketforces. Thus, from a purely political perspective, organicagriculture (along with other low-chemical approaches)has lost its early, and nearly exclusive, claim onsustainability, a word that may at some point—if it doesnot already—hold even greater symbolic appeal to thebroader agricultural community, and perhaps even tosociety in general, than the word organic.The importance attached to sustainability by the

conventional agricultural community may be seen in itsdetermination to include conventional production tech-nologies in various efforts to develop a certi!ed label forsustainable agriculture. In late 2010, for example, theconventional agricultural groups involved in a 2-year-oldprocess to develop a national standard for sustainableagriculture, convened by The Leonardo Academy,resigned from the Committee. In explaining the resigna-tions, the American Soybean Association (ASA) cited‘serious systemic limitations and chronic biases thatare inherent in the structure that The LeonardoAcademy has set up for this initiative’104. The ASAfurther alleged that . . . ‘the Committee is dominated byenvironmental groups, certi!cation consultants, agro-ecology and organic farming proponents. These groupshave neither the vision nor desire to speak for the farmersof mainstream agriculture who produce more than 95percent of the food consumed in or exported by theUnitedStates.’ The Association further noted that it ‘. . . supportsdeveloping a progressive de!nition of agriculture sustain-ability that encompasses pro!table, intensive productionand encourages consumer acceptance of biotechnologyenhanced products and satis!es food, feed, !ber andbiofuel needs’104. Should conventional agricultural inter-ests be successful in shaping and promoting into themarketplace a sustainable label (54 commodity andother conventional farm groups also withdrew from theAcademy process104), it would represent an enormouslyimportant public relations achievement, enhance theimage of conventionally produced foods (that would belabeled sustainably produced), reassure conventionalfarmers, confuse policy makers and consumers, andpose an important barrier to the expansion of organicfoods and farming.As the organic community moves ‘beyond organic’ by

broadening the de!nition of sustainability, similar claimsby conventional agriculture can be expected to increase.Evidence of this emerging trend may be seen in thepromotional literature and outreach of the relatively newAssociation for the Future of Agriculture in Nebraska


(A-FAN). This nonpro!t organization was formed by anumber of conventional agricultural groups in thestate: Nebraska Cattlemen, Nebraska Corn GrowersAssociation, Nebraska Farm Bureau, Nebraska PorkProducers Association, Nebraska Poultry Industries, andNebraska Soybean Association. Its website stresses thatA-FAN’s purpose is ‘to assist farmers seeking to makeresponsible changes to their farms to remain economicallyviable and environmentally and socially responsible,and to share with Nebraskans a truthful representationof farm life and the connection between it and Nebraska’seconomic and social well-being’105. A-FAN spokesper-sons, unveiling the group onRFD-TV, stressed repeatedlythe commitment of its farmer members to animal safetyand welfare, as well as to other commonly used indicatorsof agricultural sustainability106.As long as the technologies and systems needed to foster

a sustainable agriculture are debated and contested,American consumers will be left to sort out what is likelyto be an ever more complicated marketplace of symbols,labels and certi!cation programs, as well as competingclaims regarding the sustainability of various productsand technologies. Meanwhile, agricultural policy makerswill face an equally confusing set of choices when con-sidering how to apportion increasingly scarce dollarsfor agricultural research, education and other forms ofsupport.

Public agricultural researchSupport for organic systems research. For the past three

decades, the issue of public funding for research andeducation programs directly relevant to organic farmingsystems has been one of the most important recurringthemes in the debates surrounding the character andpotential of organic agricultural methods. Organicadherents have argued that conventional, disciplinaryresearch programs fail to address the inherent ecologicalcomplexities and the physical, biological and chemicalinteractions occurring within organic systems. Organicfarmers and their supporters have called for holistic,interdisciplinary, systems-oriented research programsdesigned to identify, measure and better understandthese complexities. During the period covered in this retro-spective, the USDA Study Team onOrganic Farming wasamong the !rst to emphasize the need for such anapproach, calling for programs designed to ‘[i]nvestigateorganic farming systems using a holistic approach’[p. 88]9. The Study Team then explained why suchprograms were needed:

The USDA case studies revealed that many organic farmershave developed unique and productive systems of farmingwhich emphasize organic recycling and the avoidance orrestricted use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It is alsolikely that these systems are highly complex and involveunknown or poorly understood chemical andmicrobiologicalinteractions. Much of the research conducted to date that

relates to organic farming has been somewhat piecemeal andfragmentary. A holistic research approach, which mayinvolve the development of new methodologies, is needed tothoroughly investigate these interactions and their relation-ship to organic waste recycling, nutrient availability, cropprotection, energy conservation, and environmental quality[p. 88].

Many of the Study Team’s other recommendations, invarying degrees, re"ected the need for new research ap-proaches, including interdisciplinary efforts [pp. 86–94].Nearly a decade later, the NRC, while reviewing

the role of alternative farming methods in modernproduction agriculture (understood at the time to includeorganic methods), also appealed for expanded programsof interdisciplinary research. According to the NRCCommittee, ‘. . . agricultural research at the land-grantuniversities and the USDA has been extensive andvery productive’ [p. 137]70. However, the Committeecontinued:

Most of the new knowledge has been generated through anintradisciplinary approach to research. Scientists in individualdisciplines have focused their expertise on one aspect of aparticular disease, pest, or other agronomic facet of aparticular crop. Solving on-farm problems, however, requiresmore than an intradisciplinary approach. Broadly trainedindividuals or interdisciplinary teams must implement theknowledge gained from those individual disciplines with theobjective of providing solutions to problems at the whole-farm level. This interdisciplinary problem-solving teamapproach is essential to understanding alternative farmingpractices . . . [M]ost research has focused on individualfarming practices in isolation and not on the developmentof agricultural systems [pp. 137–138].

More than two decades after this NRC appeal for ex-panded programs of interdisciplinary research on alterna-tive farming systems (and over 30 years since the USDAStudy Team on Organic Farming had reached a similarconclusion), many agricultural scientists, especially thosewho have actually studied organic farming, continue toargue that the unique features of organic systems requireinterdisciplinary approaches. According to Drinkwater,for example, conventional farming systems are based on a‘command and control’ philosophy that ‘has led to thedevelopment of practices and inputs aimed at simplifyingand reducing variation in agricultural systems . . . Incontrast, the use of systems thinking and integratedmanagement strategies is fundamental to organic agri-culture . . . [O]rganic production systems are intentionallymultifunctional’ [p. 21]107. As the science of organicagriculture has expanded over the past 30 years, these andother calls for more interdisciplinary research haveacquired a heightened level of credibility and urgency,and, in recent years, would seem to have had a positiveimpact on organic research funding levels.As late as 1997, however, investigators could !nd little

evidence of progress. In a careful review of USDA’s


Current Research Information System (CRIS) conductedin the mid-1990s, Mark Lipson, policy analyst at theOrganic Farming Research Foundation, found that amere 34 research projects out of some 30,000 could beclassi!ed as focusing directly on organic systems, within‘an experimental setting consistent with conditions foundon working organic farms’ [p. 7]108. Lipson furtherconcluded that these 34 projects represented ‘less thanone-tenth of one percent of USDA’s research portfolio,both numerically and !scally’ [p. 7]. Some 267 additionalprojects were deemed to be ‘compatible with organicmethods, but not explicitly placed in a context of organicagriculture’ [p. 7].Faced with these persistently low levels of research

support in the years following implementation of theOFPA in 2002 (which provided a legal de!nition oforganically produced food), proponents of organicsystems added the principle of ‘fair share’ to theirongoing funding strategies. Armed with statistical infor-mation regarding the amount of organic food sales—approximately 3.5% of the value of total food sales as of2010109—organic advocates settled on the notion ofequivalency, meaning that a fair share of research dollarsdevoted to organic research would be equivalent to theorganic percentage of total food sales. The total appro-priation in Fiscal Year 2010 for federal- and state-levelpublic agricultural research, education, and extension wasnearly US$2.9 billion110. Thus, the equivalency or fair-share standard suggests that organic research fundingannually should be approaching US$100 million. In fact,organic research funding in 2010 was slightly less than halfthis amount. However, according to Kathleen Merrigan,Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, ‘Another $41 million ofARS research is compatible with organic farming systems,but is not directed towards speci!c organic researchobjectives’ [p. 11]111.Political and institutional barriers. Clearly, these recent

estimates represent a substantial improvement in thelevel of funding for organic research and other forms oftechnical assistance for farmers wishing to transition toorganic practices. It should be noted, however, that asubstantial majority of these gains came recently, withpassage of the 2008 Farm Bill112. Thus, some 30 yearsafter organic agriculture moved onto the public agricul-tural agenda in the US9, it is important to ask why it hastaken so long to achieve these minimal levels of fundingwhen compared with conventional agriculture. Here wenote brie"y some of the more intractable political andinstitutional forces arrayed against proponents of organicagricultural research. As Hadwiger113 demonstrated 30years ago, the politics of agricultural research is compli-cated.

In the 2010 NRC report dealing with sustainableagriculture, the authors noted that agricultural researchremains ‘largely organized by discipline . . .’ and thenoffered the following explanation for the ‘slow movementof public scientists toward more holistic and

agroecological approaches to agricultural science andtechnology . . .’ [p. 322]36. According to the Committee:

Aside from the in"uence of formal research program fundingpriorities, long-term cultural and cognitive routines ofagricultural scientists generate assumptions about the currentand future importance of different kinds of agriculturalsystems and in"uence their views of the viability of alternativeapproaches to scienti!c research114. Moreover, institutionaland disciplinary reward mechanisms, publication opportu-nities, and increasingly specialized skill sets mitigate againstthe likelihood that young agricultural scientists will besuccessful pursuing careers using interdisciplinary, holistic,or alternative technological approaches115,116 [p. 322].

Focusing initially on the Committee’s third and !nal pointin the above passage, it would appear that 30 years afterpublication of USDA’s Report and Recommendations onOrganic Farming, and despite the efforts, over this period,of organic and sustainable agriculture supporters toin"uence the research priorities of the USDA/land-grantuniversity system, these institutions have yet to fullyaddress the training, !nancial and professional incentives,and the psychic rewards, offered to both seasoned andaspiring agricultural scientists wishing to pursue inter-disciplinary research.In addition to the organizational disincentives for inter-

disciplinary research noted by the NRC Committee, it isequally important to focus on the Committee’s openingphrase in the above quotation: ‘Aside from the in"uenceof formal research program funding priorities . . .’[p. 322]36. Here, the Committee seems to be acknowl-edging that the politics of establishing research prioritiesmay also hinder the development of more interdisciplin-ary research. Indeed, there has long been substantialagreement among policy analysts that politically powerfulagricultural commodity, trade and industry groups haveconsistently held sway in setting the overall prioritiesand direction of agricultural research policy117. Theseentrenched and politically experienced research policysubsystems consist generally of specialized commodityproducer associations (and their industry counterparts),sympathetic House and Senate appropriators who may bealigned politically with such groups in their respectivestates and districts, and a supportive agricultural researchbureaucracy organized largely by disciplinary categoriescorresponding to the needs and expectations of commod-ity, trade and industry clientele groups. The in"uence ofthese kinds of so-called political ‘iron triangles’ (some-times referred to as sub-governments) has been welldocumented by policy researchers, and is not limited tothe politics of agricultural research [pp. 71–74]117.Most agricultural policy analyses, however, particu-

larly those conducted prior to the ascending in"uence ofthe new agricultural agenda groups discussed earlier, havegenerally concluded that the American agricultural estab-lishment ‘has comprised one of the most closely knit,impenetrable cadres of political decision makers in the


whole of American government’118. Thus, while it wouldbe dif!cult for any new claimant for limited agriculturalresearch dollars to compete effectively against thesespecialized, commodity-based research policy subsys-tems—that often compete vigorously against one anotherfor limited funds—it may be especially challenging forproponents of organic agriculture to alter the priorities ofthese established, often symbiotic, sub-governments. Notonly does organic agriculture represent one more compe-titor for limited funds in an already highly competitiveoverall agricultural research system, the interdisciplinary,ecologically based nature of many of its funding requestsalso represents an organizational challenge to the mannerin which that research would need to be planned,conducted and evaluated, thus disrupting establishedbureaucratic missions and routines.The recent uptick in both authorized and mandatory

funding for organic agriculture research and othersupport programs, as represented in the 2008 Farm Bill(see Lipson et al.112), would seem to indicate some degreeof realignment within the agricultural research sub-government. Indeed, it may now be more accurate tothink of the agricultural research sub-government as a‘policy community’ that, according to Anderson, ‘. . . isbroader and more open in participation than an irontriangle . . .’ [p. 73]117. A more complete description of theagricultural research system as it has evolved over the past30 years, and is presently con!gured, must await athorough empirical analysis.Finally, the NRC Committee drew attention to the

notion that ‘long-term cultural and cognitive routines ofagricultural scientists generate assumptions about thecurrent and future importance of different kinds of agri-cultural systems and in"uence their views of the viabilityof alternative approaches to scienti!c research’ [p. 322]36.Presumably, in other words, scientists make personaljudgments about the importance of larger societal andagricultural trends and needs, and the probable impact ofthose trends on the likelihood of !nancial and other formsof professional support—and personal rewards—likely toaccompany their involvement in a variety of basic andapplied research programs. Thus, the growing interest inorganic farming among members of the conventionalagricultural research community may well be tempered byboth the symbolism and ideology of the high-yield, high-technology agricultural production systems that continueto dominate the world of agricultural science, andagriculture in general.Today, for example, major agricultural media outlets,

agricultural research institutions, private !rms involved inthe development and sale of conventional productioninput technologies, and major commodity organizationshave all begun to stress the challenges facing Americanagriculture of feeding a worldwide population of 9 billionpeople by the year 2050, while at the same time beingbetter stewards of the environment, honoring the familyfarm and its agrarian traditions, and improving animal

welfare. These stated challenges, in various iterations nowappearing widely on conventional agricultural websitesand in other media outlets, have been formalized underthe name ‘Farmers Feeding the World’119. This cam-paign, unveiled in 2010 by Farm Journal Media, is aninitiative of the newly formed nonpro!t Farm JournalFoundation. Billed as an industry-wide, agricultural anti-hunger campaign, its goals have been embraced bySenator Richard Lugar, former chairman of the SenateAgriculture Committee. In a video clip endorsing FarmersFeeding the World, Lugar said:

Farmers everywhere are facing a big challenge: They will needto produce enough food to feed a population that is projectedto grow to 9 billion by 2050. Their ability to do so will comelargely from proper stewardship of scarce natural resources,like land and water, as well as making the best use oftechnology-based sustainable production practices. To meetthat challenge, Farmers Feeding the World is rallying theUnited States agriculture industry to assist organizations onthe front lines of the !ght against hunger, while educating thegeneral public about modern agriculture as an essentialcomponent of the solution. Farmers Feeding the World willhighlight the history of tenacity, hard work, discovery andknow-how that make American farmers uniquely quali!ed tohelp 925 million people suffering from food insecurity120.

This campaign, whose goals are highly laudable andwhose membership includes nearly all major conventionalagricultural producer and industry groups, illustratesconventional agriculture’s ability to shape the "ow ofinformation to the food and agricultural community, andeven to some extent, to the larger society. It also demon-strates the determination of mainstream agriculture tocontrol the agricultural policy agenda, including research,trade and development. It would be nearly impossible,given the origin, character and magnitude of this cam-paign, for most agricultural scientists to resist, or evenquestion, its compelling and symbolically powerful goalsand messages. In addition to extolling the bene!ts ofmodern, high-yield agricultural technology in support ofefforts by US farmers to ‘feed the world,’ the campaignincludes an appeal for individual and corporate !nancialdonations to assist groups such as Heifer International indelivering food aid and helping farmers in the developingworld become more self-suf!cient in food production.According to the Foundation’s website, US$20 millionannually would be sought for these purposes121.This humanitarian element of the overall campaign, no

doubt sincere and certainly commendable, serves toreinforce the larger message of Farmers Feeding theWorld: namely, that feeding 9 billion people by 2050 canbe achieved only through the continued development andadoption of modern farming techniques by US farmersand their counterparts in other developed countries.Visitors to the Farmers Feeding the World website arereminded, for example, in an animated video clip, that:‘Yesterday’s agriculture cannot feed 9 billion people.’Organic and other low-chemical farming methods are


conspicuously absent from the campaign’s discussion ofproduction technologies with the capacity to help addressthe global hunger challenge. The origin, tone, andpowerful imagery of the Farmers Feeding the Worldcampaign, coupled with its pervasive reach withinagricultural institutions, including the research commu-nity, reminds us again to consider the second point of theNRC Committee’s summary statement regarding reasonsfor the continuing disciplinary organization of agricultur-al research: ‘. . . [C]ultural and cognitive routines of agri-cultural scientists generate assumptions about the currentand future importance of different kinds of agriculturalsystems and in"uence their views of the viability ofalternative approaches to scienti!c research’ [p. 322]36.Despite the barriers to organic farming research posed

by these and other ideological and political characteristicsof our conventional agricultural institutions, over the pasttwo decades or so many agricultural scientists have forgedsuccessful, even prominent, careers while focusing muchof their research and teaching efforts on organic systemsand publishing the results of their research in new peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journals. Considering that theagricultural sciences, as we have seen, remain organizedlargely along disciplinary lines, including the publicationof prominent disciplinary journals, the fact that a growingnumber of mainstream agricultural scientists wouldchoose to place their work in these relatively new inter-disciplinary journals demonstrates at least two importantpoints: (1) disciplinary journals have tended to overlookthe importance of interdisciplinary work, especially workfocused on organic-type production systems; and (2)increasing numbers of agricultural scientists are gravitat-ing toward the scienti!c challenges associated withexploration of ecologically based, organic-type farmingsystems. As these events have unfolded, more such workhas appeared in traditional publication outlets, includingsome of the world’s most prestigious journals (e.g., seeReganold et al.23,122,123).These efforts have made important contributions to the

science community’s understanding and acceptance oforganic farming systems, identi!ed key knowledge gaps,elevated the scienti!c image of organic farming, andhelped to legitimize the need for expanded, interdisci-plinary research on organic farming as perceived by bothpolitical and scienti!c audiences. Proponents of organicagriculture are mindful of the increasing attentionand respect shown to organic farming by some membersof the conventional research and policy communities.Nonetheless, most continue to believe that current effortsfall far short of those needed to allow organic agriculturalsystems to reach their full potential, and for the ecologicaland environmental bene!ts associated with these systemsto be more fully understood and more widely incorpor-ated into farming systems both here and abroad.Organic adherents, including a growing number of

agricultural scientists and policy analysts, believe thatthe ecological, agronomic and production characteristics

of organic systems can and must play a larger role inthe goal of feeding the world’s population124. Unlike theFarmers Feeding the World campaign that, despite itshumanitarian component, emphasizes the high technol-ogy and high yields associated with a US export-orientedstrategy, proponents of organic farming argue that globalefforts to reduce poverty and hunger should focus moreattention on development of low-cost, organic-type tech-nologies appropriate for small farms and localizedmarketing systems125,126. Moreover, it is important tonote that the bulk of US grain exports go to the mosthighly developed countries, not to the poorest and leastdeveloped ones127.For these and other reasons, organic ideology favors a

multi-faceted strategy for food production, one that restsmore heavily upon the diverse human and natural ecologyof local soils, crops, climates, communities and culturesthat exist throughout the world. Advocates argue thatthis approach would go a long way toward making itpossible for more farmers everywhere to feed themselvesand their communities. This strategy would, of course,require a prolonged and substantially greater investmentin holistic, interdisciplinary and systems-oriented researchconducted by teams of investigators representing thefull range of agronomic, ecological, economic and policysciences. As the foregoing discussion illustrates, however,given the politics of agricultural research, securingexpanded levels of support for ecologically orientedinterdisciplinary approaches represents a very tall order,indeed.

Public agricultural policy and farm structureFor the past several decades, organic farming advocacyhas been conducted against the backdrop of a largerdebate over how American agriculture should be struc-tured. Successful organic farming operations have longbeen associated with small- to mid-sized, family-type,mixed crop–livestock farms, particularly for farms locatedin the Midwest agricultural heartland. The intensivemanagement required of organic farming operationslargely accounts for the belief that smaller farms generallymay be more compatible with organic systems. In sharpcontrast to this farm enterprise model, however, trends inUS farm structure—farm size expansion, specialization,intensi!cation, and mechanization—especially sinceWorld War II, have combined to create a relatively‘non-organic’ overall farm structure, one consisting ofever-larger, more specialized farms, reliance upon heavyand widespread use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides,monocultural cropping systems, and separation of cropsand animals128. One result of these trends has been thegradual decline in numbers of family, or mid-sized farms(numbers of small farms have increased during thisperiod), in what many have called the ‘disappearingmiddle’ within the overall structure of US agriculture.These technological, economic, political and social forces


continue to drive American agriculture in the direction ofan increasingly ‘non-organic’ farm structure.These structural issues must be addressed at a time

when some organic proponents have begun emphasizingthe survival of mid-sized farms as both a technologicalnecessity and an ethical imperative, not only for the futureof organic-type systems, but for the future of the planet aswell. Fred Kirschenmann, for example, argues that theindustrial character of US farm structure, relying soheavily upon relatively inexpensive, nonrenewable re-sources, has overlooked the importance of social andhuman capital, resulting in . . . ‘a disastrous effect on thenation’s “independent family farmers”’ . . . the kind offarmers needed to . . . ‘meet the challenge of sustaining afood system that can provide adequate amounts of foodfor an increasing human population in the face of peakglobal oil production, degraded soils, depleted fresh watersupplies, and more unstable climates’ [p. 331]129. The pleafor preserving a solid core of mid-sized farms is not,he writes, a ‘matter of “saving the family farm”’ [p. 331].Rather, it is because these are the kinds of farmerswho possess the . . . ‘ecological and cultural wisdom andcommitment required to restore the physical and biologi-cal health of our soils. They are the farmers who ownedtheir land, lived on their land, were intimately related totheir land, and planned to pass it on to future familymembers—all factors that nurtured a culture of caring forthe land’ [p. 330]. Despite the urgency attached toreversing (or at least stabilizing) the loss of mid-sizedfarms, by Kirschenmann and other proponents of organicfarming, success in altering this and other interrelatedtrends in US farm structure is far from certain.While many organic food consumers and other

supporters of organic agriculture, including growing num-bers of scientists and analysts, may view organic systemsas a way to foster a more decentralized, less industrializedand more sustainable farm structure, others see the matterquite differently. A recent article in Foreign Policymagazine entitled ‘Attention Whole Foods shoppers,’ byRobert Paarlberg, a well-known analyst of food andagriculture policy at Wellesley College, undoubtedlyre"ects the views of many within the conventional agri-cultural community. According to Paarlberg, ‘If weare going to get serious about solving global hunger, weneed to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial foodand farming. And that means learning to appreciate themodern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricul-tural system we’ve developed in the West. Without it, ourfood would be more expensive and less safe’130.Paarlberg is not alone. For most of conventional

agriculture, the relatively ‘non-organic’ farm structurenow in place throughout US agriculture represents apositive, even stunning, technological and policy achieve-ment. Meanwhile, many supporters of the industrialmodel continue to view organic agriculture, as Paarlbergphrased it, as ‘preindustrial food and farming’130. Themany substantial efforts over the past three decades

to enhance the scienti!c understanding and image oforganic production systems has failed to convince mostconventional agriculturists, many of whom continue toregard organic farming in much the same way it wasviewed (and dismissed) decades ago. The followingpassage captures this sentiment:

. . . [O]rganic food has garnered an extraordinary amount ofattention from the media and, along with ‘local’ food, is adarling of foodies and environmentalists, who talk up its civicvirtues and bene!ts to the environment. There’s just oneproblem with this: agriculture has moved away from small-scale, local, and organic farming because these types of farmsare land and labor-intensive and don’t do a very good job offeeding lots of people. In addition, they are not de!nitivelybetter for the environment, and their growth would lead tohigher food prices than most Americans are willing to pay[p. 1]131.

The views of Paarlberg130 and Haddad131 illustrate acritically important point: The controversy that has ragedaround organic versus conventional agriculture for thepast several decades transcends arguments about thebene!ts and costs of various technologies and farmingsystems per se; much of the debate revolves around theissue of farm structure itself. In fact, the structure ofAmerican agriculture produces winners and losers. Thegrowing scale and specialization of US farm structurefavors a wide array of chemical and farm machinerycompanies. The ability to capitalize farm programbene!ts into the value of farmland provides an economicadvantage to large landholders. Monocultural croppingsystems bene!t those companies that manufacture and sellsynthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Vertically integratedCAFOs bene!t large-scale feeders, meat packers andpoultry processors. A more ‘organic’ farm structure, onthe other hand, one characterized by widespread use oflegume-based crop rotations, integration of crops andanimals, smaller and more decentralized processing andmarketing facilities, smaller-scale machinery and largernumbers of small andmid-sized farms, would greatly alterthemix of winners and losers inUS agriculture. The stakesare high for the bene!ciaries of the current relatively‘non-organic’ farm structure, and they can be expected to!ght hard to keep in place those policies that have helpedshape it.US farm structure has evolved along with various

socioeconomic and political issues, including but notlimited to: agricultural commodity, tax, credit, andresearch and education policies. Relatively low energyprices (at least until recently), rapidly rising land pricesand the competitive nature of farming have oftenexacerbated a cost-price squeeze for producers, addingto the pressures (and opportunities) to expand the size oftheir operations and improve margins through enterprisespecialization, intensi!cation and mechanization128.The broad outlines of these institutional and policydynamics may be seen in the following highly abbreviatedsketch.


In"ationary land markets have encouraged farmers(especially those well-capitalized with access to credit) toexpand their operations through purchase of additionalland. Attractive interest-deduction policies have alsosupported farm-size expansion. Mechanization, whichhas accompanied the trend toward larger farms, has beenencouraged by investment tax credits and accelerated de-preciation schedules. Enhanced mechanization has helpedto reduce labor costs, while farm-size expansion hasallowed the costs for !xed investments to be spread acrossmoreacresorother specializedproduction enterprises.Theswitch to more specializedmonocultural cropping systemsand the elimination of crop–animal forage systems, onmost farms, is largely responsible for the intensi!ed use ofsynthetic fertilizers and pesticides.Monocultural croppingsystems such as corn, soybeans and wheat require use ofthese purchased inputs to provide crop nutrients andcontrol pests. Taken together, these alterations in farmstructure and management have helped to free farmersfrom the con!ning aspects of mixed crop–livestock opera-tions, making current trends attractive to many farmers.As one Midwest wag put it several years ago: ‘Farmersaround here work really, really hard—two months in thespring and two months in the fall.’ This comment by alarge-scale producer in Illinois serves to reinforce thenotion that current US farm structure enjoys widespreadsupport amongmany, if notmost, large-scale farmers, andfrom the input supply industry that supports them.Agricultural commodity policy has also tended to favor

larger farms specializing in monocultural cropping sys-tems132. Although commodity policy is incredibly com-plicated and has undergone numerous changes since the‘modern’ era of farm policy was !rst advanced during theNew Deal, two recurring features of commodity policy,crop bases and crop yields, have endured (with somemodi!cations) and often have in"uenced farmer decision-making regarding what crops to grow and how intensivelyto grow them. Essentially, the larger the crop base (on anyeligible commodity crop such as corn, wheat or cotton),and the larger the proven per-acre yield of any suchcommodity crop, the larger the payment received by theindividual producer. These two variables have acted asdirect incentives for farmers to establish relatively largeprogram crop acreage bases, to maintain those establishedbases at levels consistent with individual farm plans andfarm program strategies, and to generate maximum yieldson those acres, in part through intensive use of syntheticfertilizers and pesticides. Moreover, compared to crop–livestock operations, wherein at least a portion of certaincommodity crops such as corn may be fed to farmanimals, it is somewhat easier to prove crop yields per acrein monocultural cropping systems. In the latter case, cropsare marketed through local elevators or other commercialoutlets, thus providing farmers with weight slips as proofof yield.Finally, the accelerating wave of farm consolidations

and other changes in US farm structure in the years during

and following World War II133 continue to have a nega-tive impact upon contemporary debates regarding thenature of modern organic farming. During this transi-tional period, the number of farmers who left the farm insearch of employment in nearby towns and villages (evenlarge cities) increased sharply. Employment opportunitiesoutside of agriculture expanded rapidly after theWar, andthe prospect of 40-hour work weeks, paid vacations and aregular pay check appealed to many farmers, especiallywhen compared to the !nancial uncertainty and endlesswork associated with the small, con!ning, relativelyprimitive crop–livestock farming enterprises character-istic of that era in the US agricultural heartland. Duringthis period, the now familiar corn–soybeans (and Miami)crop rotation, often the subject of light banter aroundtoday’s rural Midwestern coffee shops, would haveseemed fanciful. The lingering images from this periodof large numbers of small-scale farmers leaving the farmat a time when much of agriculture was still relatively‘organic,’ when such systems were being replaced with thechemical technologies that later would come to dominateAmerican agriculture, have continued to distort percep-tions of modern organic farming. The reluctance ofconventional agriculture to acknowledge the scienti!callydocumented agronomic, ecological and performancecharacteristics of contemporary organic farming, or toconsider ways in which these modern systems could bemore widely and productively integrated into the overallstructure of American agriculture, continue to pose animportant political barrier to the expansion of organicfarming in the US, as well as in many other regions of theworld.

Closing Reflections on the Evolutionof Organic Agriculture in the US

As noted throughout this retrospective, organic agricul-ture in the US has changed dramatically over the pastthree decades. Thirty years ago few would have predictedthat the meaning, image and practice of organic farmingwould have evolved so completely into a market-driven,legally de!ned production system, and that companiessuch as WalMart and Costco would be marketing cer-ti!ed, organically grown products. Furthermore, in 1980,predictions that these products would bear a certi!ed labelof authenticity from USDA would have been seen asdelusional. Similarly, the development of formal researchprograms within USDA and the land-grant universitysystem of direct relevance to organic agriculture—programs that, as discussed earlier, are now approachingfairly substantial levels of support—would have seemedequally unlikely. In the early 1980s a top USDA scienceadministrator con!dently predicted that there wouldnever be an organic research program in the Department.Conventional agricultural scientists of the period appar-ently believed that both organic and conventional farmers


were well served by much past and current agriculturalresearch [p. 28]134.Successes of the kind noted throughout this account

would seem to suggest that efforts by its opponents to haltthe growth of organic farming have failed, and in someimportant respects, they did fail. Organic agriculture nowrepresents a well-established, legally de!ned, and popularfarming and food industry. That industry, however, bearsonly slight resemblance to the meanings and purposesattached to organic farming in the years surroundingpublication of the 1980 USDA Report and Recommen-dations on Organic Farming9. Clearly, at that time, theemphasis among proponents of organic agriculture wasfocused primarily on the potential contributions of thesesystems to address the broad environmental, energy and!nancial pressures building throughout American agri-culture, not upon the structure, growth and de!nition ofcerti!ed organic farming systems. Certi!cation programsthen were in their infancy and the marketing infrastruc-ture for organically grown food was only beginning to !ndits way into the mainstream. For many within con-ventional farming circles, the imagery of these "edginginstitutions reinforced the belief that organic agriculturewas irrelevant to the broader needs of US agriculture, andthat organic technologies were best suited for backyardgardeners, roadside stands, and as some said dis-paragingly, ‘little old ladies in white tennis shoes.’Overcoming this negative and distorted imagery maynow be seen as one of organic farming’s most importantachievements over the past three decades.The successful commercial (and to some extent sym-

bolic) transformation of organic farming notwithstand-ing, it seems important to ask why organic farmingadvocacy appears to have been far less successful in itsefforts to foster the wider integration of organic technol-ogies into conventional farming systems, the primaryintent of many early proponents, including congressionalsponsors of organic agriculture policy initiatives andparticipants involved in the twomajor scienti!c reviews ofthat period9,70. Roughly 1% of US farm and ranchland ismanaged using organic methods, according to the latest!gures from USDA’s Economic Research Service109.What accounts for this strikingly low percentage?Several possible explanations come tomind. First, these

data regarding the percentage of US farm and ranchlandunder organic management refer only to certi!ed systems.Second, as noted previously, major political, ideologicaland technological developments over the past severaldecades have clouded efforts to de!ne what constitutesa sustainable agriculture. Three decades ago organic-type technologies (such as long-term rotations includinglegumes and other green manure crops, along withintegrated livestock operations) were widely viewed asessential features of a sustainable agriculture. Improvedsoil, water and air quality, enhanced wildlife habitat, soilerosion control, energy conservation, safer food and ruraleconomic vitality were often said to "ow from these kinds

of reduced-chemical systems. Today, however, propo-nents of these traditional organic methods and systemscan no longer lay exclusive claim to sustainability.Conventional agriculture has argued successfully thatmajor features of its systems, such as conservation tillage,precision agriculture, biotechnology, less toxic pesticidesand maximum yields, represent the modern elements of asustainable agriculture. Clearly, the politics of sustain-ability have undermined efforts by proponents of organicfarming to extend the reach of organic technologiesmore broadly throughout all of agriculture. As a result,organic agriculture has come to symbolize certi!edsystems associated largely, if not exclusively, with theorganic foods marketplace. In those locations and in thoseinstances where organic farming techniques are beingintegrated into otherwise conventional farming enter-prises, they will almost certainly be called something else,making it dif!cult, if not impossible, to determine theextent to which non-certi!ed organic methods are beingmore widely used throughout US agriculture.Third, as we have seen throughout this retrospective,

symbolism and linguistics have often played crucial rolesin the politics of organic agriculture, creating both posi-tive and negative consequences for the industry. Whilemany conventional agriculturists continue to reject anddisparage organic farming, distorting its image andlimiting its broader application, the American consumerhas enthusiastically embraced organic products and muchof its ideology. For most consumers of organic products,the symbolism and technology of organic farming arehighly appealing, and while such consumers may not besteeped in the history and traditions of organic agricul-ture, the word organic itself has come to represent andproject positive images and important personal meanings.Most consumers of organic foods and other organicproducts believe they know what organic means, and thatis enough for most of them.Finally, with respect to the issue of incorporating

organic methods into conventional farming systems,proponents of organic agriculture may have had moresuccess than is generally recognized. For example,analyses included in the 2010 NRC report on sustainableagriculture would seem to suggest the kinds of productionalternatives seen as valid elements of a sustainableagriculture among the elite ranks of US agriculturalscientists [Chapter 5]36. While devoting only 12 pages ofthis chapter to organic farming systems per se, the NRCCommittee devoted an additional 16 pages to such topicsas integrated crop–livestock systems, management-inten-sive rotational grazing systems and low-con!nementintegrated hog-producing systems (28 pages in total), allin a 48-page chapter (including 10 pages of references)entitled, ‘Examples of farming system types for improvingsustainability’ [pp. 221–269]. Only the most determinedopponents of organic agriculture are likely to argue thatthese system types do not represent legitimate productionoptions long associated with idealized models of organic


farming systems. Meanwhile, as long as the science,ideology and politics of American agriculture tend to limituse of the word organic to certi!ed, market-drivensystems, organic adherents may have to accept the factthat other terms will be used to describe many of organicfarming’s long-standing agronomic methods and prin-ciples, and perhaps even some aspects of its ideologyas well.

Acknowledgements. We are grateful for partial funding supportfrom USDA’s Economic Research Service. We thank alsothe following individuals who agreed to be interviewed andwho shared insights and provided perspective on various aspectsof this complicated history: Bob Scocroft, Eliott Coleman,Ferd Hoefner, Dick and Sharon Thompson, Mark Lipson,Michael Sligh, and Steve Ela. To those who reviewed andcommented upon an earlier draft, James F. Parr, RobertI. Papendick, Rick Welsh, Bob Scocroft, John Doran, andMaureen Hinkle, we express our thanks. We appreciate also theconstructive and helpful comments from three anonymousreviewers. Finally, we thank Katherine (Kitty) Smith forencouraging this undertaking and for offering useful suggestionsall along the way.

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