The New York Times / April 9, 2000 / By BARNABY J. FEDER
KUTZTOWN, Pa. -- THE Rodale Institute's 330-acre research farm here got something it prefers to a bumper crop when a record drought struck eastern Pennsylvania last year.
Rodale plants crops with the goal of harvesting evidence that organic farming should be the wave of the future in agriculture. After the drought last summer, Rodale's parched organic plots yielded 24 to 30 bushels of soybeans an acre, well below the 40-bushel average of previous years for the research site, but Rodale could not have been happier. That was because yields on comparison plots just next to them that had been doused year after year with synthetic fertilizers and conventional farm chemicals had plummeted to 16 bushels.
"These are very significant findings for farmers around the world," exulted Jeff Moyer, Rodale's farm manager. "Our trials show that improving the quality of the soil through organic processes can mean the difference between a harvest or hardship in times of drought."
The results last year also reinforced long-term comparisons, begun by Rodale in 1981, that document how organic farming can be more profitable for small farmers -- even if yields are not always as high and, by some calculations, even without the premium prices that organic crops generally receive.
Good research news from bad weather. Sales growing faster than any other segment of the food industry. Consumer fears about biotechnology spurring interest. Low prices for commodity crops encouraging conventional farmers to take the organic plunge. Add it all up and there has never been a more receptive moment for organic farming.
So is the organic movement finally on track to becoming the mainstream enterprise that Rodale and other advocates have long envisioned? Hardly. Organics are starting from such a small base in the United States -- an estimated one-fifth of 1 percent of farmland and 1 percent of retail sales -- that it would take years of mind-boggling growth to gain a truly substantial share of the retail food sector, which the Department of Agriculture put at $756 billion in 1998.
Such growth is almost inconceivable, say agricultural economists and even many people in the organic movement. One reason is the many challenges of farming organically; another is the heavy investment in current farming methods. Perhaps most important, though, is the deep-seated suspicion of many organic farmers and consumers about anything that smacks of big business.
"Getting to 5 percent of food sales in 10 years would be miraculous," said Katherine DiMatteo, director of the Organic Trade Association in Greenfield, Mass. Many farmers, she and others said, will advertise organic practices, like not using pesticides, and siphon off potential organic customers without making the commitment to having their products comply with the certification requirements of monitoring groups.
If the industry is not on track to achieving market power, it is winning respect -- and that alone is something of a revolution in agriculture. From the 1950's to the early 1990's, farming without chemicals was widely derided in the United States as the province of hobbyists, the health-obsessed and misty-eyed urban and suburban refugees pursuing romantic dreams of rural life.
"It's not a niche market anymore in terms of consumer interest," said Harvey Hartman, a market researcher and retail industry consultant in Seattle. Surveys by his company, the Hartman Group, found last fall that 90 percent of American consumers were either buying organic products or considering doing so, up from 60 percent two years earlier.
Interest is stronger still in Europe and Japan, where fears are running high about the use of growth hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and genetic engineering in conventional agriculture. Sweden, one of several European countries that subsidize farmers in switching to organic methods, has set a goal of converting 20 percent of its farm acreage to organic farming by 2005.
In the United States, back-to-the-earth neophytes continue to set up organic farms, making organics the only sector of agriculture that is attracting new blood. But thousands of conventional farmers are also weighing the risks and benefits of heading down the organic path, lured by premium prices that are averaging 20 percent above those for conventional crops and sometimes many times more.
"Farmers have been losing money in conventional agriculture, and organic is looking profitable," said Mark Ritchie, director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. But the farmers who are making the switch are more of a trickle than a flood.
ONE barrier may be the new national standards that the Agriculture Department is proposing for the industry. The aim is to overcome the consumer confusion caused by having more than 40 different private and state groups, often with conflicting rules, certifying which products are organic. But the proposed national standard is so restrictive -- at the industry's own insistence -- that Ms. DiMatteo and other experts contend that some farmers now selling "organic" products may no longer qualify.
Other hurdles are deeply rooted. "Everything in agriculture has been built around a simplified rotation of one or two crops," said Rich Welsh, an agriculture economist and rural sociologist at the Henry A. Wallace Institute in Beltsville, Md. To grow more crops in rotation -- a requirement for organic certification -- farmers would need to develop an array of new markets and systems for storing and distributing their products.
Labor could also be a barrier to growth, at least in the United States. Rapid expansion could leave the industry short of qualified inspectors to certify organic products. And many organic crops require periodic weeding by hand or other labor-intensive care.
"When we got started, we thought it was a good thing that it needs more people," said Thomas Beddard, of Chambersburg, Pa., who started Lady Moon Farm with his wife 14 years ago. Now, having become the East Coast's biggest organic vegetable grower, with 400 acres split between Florida and Pennsylvania, he frets about the consequences of his success.
"It's clear we are reliant on poor immigrants and that the work is brutal," Mr. Beddard said.
Perhaps the biggest barrier is the difficult transition from conventional to organic production. When they stop using chemicals on their land, farmers initially get sharply reduced yields. Research by Rodale and others shows that it takes three to five years for organic soil to be built up to high fertility levels and perhaps longer for farmers to learn how to deal with the weed, pest and disease problems they have to confront without chemical help. During the first three years, under nearly universal certification rules, the crop cannot be labeled as organic unless it is grown on previously unfarmed land, meaning that the farmer cannot sell it for a premium price. Some farmers also struggle to figure out how to market their crops.
"One of the hardest things about the organic industry is getting the information you need to get into it," said Gary Reding, a fifth-generation Indiana farmer who is converting 250 of his farm's 600 acres to organics.
For all the hurdles, experts say, organics could easily achieve an influential share of 10 percent or more in some parts of the industry. In fact, they already account for nearly one-third of all herb production, according to the Agriculture Department, and high percentages of specialty grains and vegetables.
More important, although once dismissed as clownish, negligent farming, the organic movement is now seen as an innovative standard setter that is pulling all of conventional agriculture toward higher environmental standards and more sustainable practices. This year, for the first time, the Agriculture Department has budgeted $5.5 million specifically for organics research; state universities are scrambling to get their extension agents, who advise farmers, up to speed.
"The trend is to adopt a lot of organic practices in conventional agriculture," said John Diener, who has put 20 percent of his diversified farm in Fresno County, Calif., into Greenway Organic Farms, a 2,000-acre partnership with two neighboring farms. "We've cut the use of commercial phosphate fertilizers on the conventional farm by two-thirds since we started with organic."
And organic farming could be essential to maintaining small farms in the developed world. The premium prices that organic products command can help small farmers earn enough to stay afloat as agriculture in general moves toward the industrial model of ever-larger farms producing food as cheaply as possible, often under contract to a meatpacker or food processor.
FINDING ways to make small organic farmers efficient has been a focus for Rodale and most other organics researchers.
"We're coming from the premise that it's bad for 10 percent of the farmers to produce 80 percent of the food," Mr. Moyer said recently, as Rodale planned to plant this year's crops.
Organic farmers might never have a better chance to gain public support. Their market centers on a growing demographic group -- wealthy baby boomers drawn to what Mr. Hartman calls "healthy lifestyles." These people are willing to pay more for products that they believe are healthier or fresher, better for the environment and more humane for livestock. Many people also see supporting small, local farms as a social good.
Some big companies are also throwing money into raising organics' profile. General Mills acquired Small Planet Foods, the producer of Cascadian Farms and other organic brands, and H. J. Heinz recently bought 19 percent of the Hain Food Group, which makes a variety of organic and "natural" products.
"Visibility with consumers has been a limiting factor," said David Neuman, vice president of sales and marketing for Nature's Path, which distributes organic breakfast cereals and other foods, primarily to natural-food stores. "General Mills put $15 million into marketing Sunrise, their new organic cereal, last year and they did $40 million in sales," Mr. Neuman said -- an amount more than his company brought in for all 30 brands it sells. "They can force-feed the distribution system."
Lately, supermarket chains that once had no interest in stocking organic products have been scrambling to line up reliable suppliers in the highly fragmented industry, especially for the produce aisles. They are competing with upstart retail chains like Whole Foods and Wild Oats Inc., which heavily promote their broad selections of organic goods.
In addition to that generally supportive climate, organic farmers are getting a boost from having what appears to be the perfect public enemy: genetic engineering. Critics of biotechnology, with the support of many organic farmers, have popularized a David-versus-Goliath image of small organic farms threatened with extinction by the products of giant agribusinesses like Monsanto, Novartis and DuPont. Drifting bioengineered pollen will pollute organic crops, they say, and insects will destroy what is left after feeding on transgenic corn and developing resistance to natural pesticides.
The Agriculture Department -- the public-sector face of the agricultural establishment -- helped spotlight the confrontation. Ignoring advice from the organics sector, it issued proposed national organic food standards two years ago that would have allowed ingredients from genetically altered plants and animals. After being inundated with 275,000 negative comments, the agency issued a new proposal this year that would ban transgenic ingredients.
THE controversy lured many biotechnology supporters into denigrating organic farming. They have argued that the public should accept biotechnology because farming without it -- especially organic farming -- is too inefficient to feed the world.
The arguments assume that feeding the world is a priority for everyone in agriculture. That may not be the case for organic farmers. In contrast to the Internet world, where it seems as if every small enterprise would be thrilled to be bought out by a large, wealthy competitor, organic farming circles are engaged in constant, bitter debates over whether big farmers, giant food processors and supermarket chains should be welcomed into the business. Many fear that such a development -- which could accelerate growth rapidly -- will erode the price premiums upon which they rely for survival.
"There's a fundamental conflict because, to a lot of people, this is supposed to be the alternative to the industrial agriculture system," said Charles Benbrook, a consultant in Sand Point, Idaho, who has been a prominent proponent of organic farming. "Is this about getting better food grown in an environmental way to the most people possible, or is it about creating an alternative food system that is small, local and sensitive to issues like social justice?"
If feeding the world organically becomes the main objective, many people in the organic sector say that the blanket opposition to genetic engineering might soften before long. Some organic farmers say genetic engineering has already created some products that they should be allowed to use, like Ecogen Inc.'s pesticides extracted from genetically-altered bacteria grown in fermenters. Such products, the proponents say, are simply more efficiently produced forms of sprays that organic farmers already use.
Others say genetic engineering should be considered where breakthrough gains for sustainable farming might be achieved, such as inventing a perennial form of wheat that could be mowed rather than harvested and replanted each year.
"Among organic farmers the views about transgenics range from 'no, never' to 'not yet,' " said Brian Baker, policy director of the Organic Material Review Institute, a nonprofit group in Eugene, Ore., that rates the acceptability of materials for organic farming.
The partisans of the small and local have the high ground when it comes to poetic thinking; some of them talk, for instance, of developing a society based on "foodsheds," just as the ecology of rivers is based on watersheds -- but the marketplace seems to be moving away from them. Many organic farmers on the East Coast say they are under heavy pressure from larger operations in California and imports from Mexico.
"All the same patterns that affect conventional agriculture are happening in organic," said Jim Crawford, whose New Morning Farm in Hustontown, Pa., is the headquarters for the Tuscarora Organic Growers Cooperative, which represents 20 farms in the area. "We're not even selling that we are organic at this point. We are selling freshness, quality and nearness to our markets."
Mr. Crawford added that sales to restaurants in the mid-Atlantic corridor had jumped from zero to 60 percent of the co-op's total revenue in the last four years.
Even the nation's biggest organic farmers, like the Lundberg family in California's Central Valley, have no intention of betting the entire farm on the organic business.
"About 55 to 60 percent of our sales are organic," said Bryce Lundberg, whose family currently grows organic rice on about 6,000 acres near Richvale, Calif. Although organic sales are way up from the 1970's, their share of the total farm revenue is down from 75 percent because major weed problems forced the Lundbergs to sharply reduce organic production for several years.
"It's a little more profitable, but much higher risk," said Tim O'Donnell, the Lundbergs' vice president of sales and marketing. "There's years when you could lose everything."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company:
