Guiding Philosophy

Why Local Mendocino Renegade Certification
Rather Than National USDA Organic Certification?

Excerpted and summarized from two Letters To The Editor, Acres USA, by, first, a consumer, and then an organic movement insider.

In all my reading, I understood “organic” to mean: no synthetic, biocidal, soil-damaging, animal-and-human-metabolism-damaging chemicals. And hopefully soil-nutrient-increasing and soil-life-enhancing inputs and methods would be used. Every customer who heard of organic more than 10 years ago recognized the movement and the method as being just as important as the product.

I never supported the concept of federal regulation. We were warned that asking the federal government to regulate organic agriculture was asking for trouble. What did the organic movement think was going to happen? And you can’t say you weren’t warned.

I thought California, Oregon Tilth, and others were doing a good job of developing national relevant standards. I wish the organic movement had worked on getting every state, state by state, one at a time, to adopt the California or Tilth model. “National” didn’t have to mean “federal.”

But the organic standards were federalized. Am I wrong to think that the long-range corporate-federal game is to destroy public trust in organic by destroying the standards, thereby exterminating organic farming in fact AND in theory? To now allow the subversion of standards – as recently passed by the USDA – by making lawful the inclusion of unhealthful synthetic chemical contaminants in certified organic prepared foods, makes one wonder when that principle will be extended to organic farming in the field itself, including the use of various fertilizers containing EPA-sanctioned factory waste.

So what do I expect for organic agriculture and organic food? Realistically, I expect more of the same until organic agriculture has been safely exterminated. I don’t buy prepared organic food. If I want prepared, I just buy conventional. What I buy organic is the scratch ingredients to make my own food at home. I try to buy from growers who were already organic from before the federal law.

If the organic movement fails to take back its right to create its own good name and set its own good standards, then the movement will be exterminated, and every successor law passed to take down every successor movement. In which case, all a farmer can do will be to fully disclose everything he does and everything he uses, and call his product “Full Disclosure.” If he can get an inspector to certify that he really, truly has disclosed every little thing he does or uses, then he could call himself “Certified Full Disclosure.” That may be the only way out for individuals who hope to survive the federal extermination of their movement.

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In the early 1970s, those of us who opted out of mainline societal tracks and went back to the land sought guidance. J.I. Rodale had popularized a set of agricultural strategies termed “organic.” These methodologies fit our collective mindset, which was to step away from the reckless, profit-driven, industrialized world. We sought refuge from the storm, a quieter, more serene way of being that owujld align us with nature. Other voices from a previous renegade generation became our teachers: Sir Albert Howard, Wendell Berry, and our aged neighbors who could still remember how to garden and farm before there were tractors and trucks and cars. These people collectively gave us a basis for gardening and farming without the use of toxic technologies. For our collective group, the old teachers and old ways made sense. We absorbed them and tried to live close to the natural processes of the land, utilizing that organic dynamic as our path to the good life. Problem is, our principled life began to catch on.

By 1973 we renegades here in the Pacific Northwest felt the isolated need to come together. A call was sent out. A meeting was held in Arlington, Washington, at which organizers expected maybe 100 people. Over 600 arrived. From that enthusiasm was born a few months later the regional Tilth movement. Similar organizations were born in similar ways around that time throughout the country. The act of organizing focused our collective energies. Organic practices were our common mantra. The first time this “organic consciousness’ was expressed as a legal definition was in the implementation of the Oregon Organic labeling Law, the oldest in the United States. Thus, legal protection for the word “organic” goes back to the early 1970s.

Why was that an important step? When a community of conscious interests codifies those interests, then moves to protect them, a level of innocence is removed. Forever. What had been a belief in a wholesome, maybe even pure, methodology or process suddenly enters the realm of all that is brokered, manipulated, grabbed by any who would assume power.

I remember feeling strange, a bit corrupted, every time the new mantra “The Organic Industry” was spoken. The word “organic” had moved from a sensibility inclusive of a lifestyle to a mere marketing label. Meeting rooms gradually included representatives of the food industry. As we made rules for “organic processing,” compromises were necessitated by available technologies. But “our processors” needed standards by which they could continue to grow.

So I have come to distinguish between “Classic Organic” and “Industrial Organic.” More importantly, I strongly believe in the durability of classic organic practices and the eventual demise of industrial organic.

Industrial Organic is too much a replica of the supermarket system and mentality developed during the era of cheap petroleum. Like all industries focused on profit, Industrial Organic is totally reliant on warehousing and trucking networks. The trade association of food processors and their organic monocrop suppliers is totally vulnerable when petroleum scarcities send prices skyrocketing in the very near future. Without cheap fuel coupled with cheap labor (the labor factor forcing the import of higher and higher percentages of the organic market foods), this industrialized monster we have created will go the way of extinction. Ten years from now, giants like the 6,000-cow organic dairy in Colorado will not survive the expense of scarce petroleum. Already in the Northwest, our largest onion producers have gone out of business due to shipping costs. The future will lie in the hands of Classic Organic survivors. The best examples of human survival and interaction without petroleum as a crutch are small villages. There exist many examples around this world, mostly in “underdeveloped” countries, or regions of countries.

Take an inventory of everything you do, everything you have, that is petroleum dependent. Take an inventory of how much of your food, fiber and fuel comes from someplace different than your local watershed. Classic Organic would have us creating communities of survival rather than markets of dependencies.

Industrial Organic as a whole only happened because of warehousing, shipping and distribution available during a period of cheap oil. We face a very, very, different organic future. I see neither the leadership nor the collective will necessary to design and build the next organic future. And it appears to me and to others that any conscious changes will have to happen quickly. Hopefully that leadership will emerge.