Besides the benefits to us as consumers of fine organic foods, buying from organic farmers is definitely a boon to the farmers. Conventional farmers often see only a few pennies of the dollars spent to buy their foodstuffs. The retailer takes a cut, the wholesaler takes a cut, the shipper takes a cut, and the government takes a cut at several stages along the way. Some commodities are sold below cost, and government price supports are needed to keep farmers from going under. In fact, with some crops, farmers do go under because of lack of price supports. Organic growers get a lot more of your dollar when they sell direct to you at farmers’ markets, roadside stands, through Community Supported Agriculture, and straight from the farm. This helps create fair play for these farmers, because they don’t get the backing of government programs that help out big agribusiness, such as USDA’s daily pricing information for conventionally grown commodities.
But things are changing in favor of the organic farmer. In 2003, the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit organic research organization, launched the first wholesale price index of certified organic foods, called the New Farm Organic Price Index, which has been given the acronym OPX. OPX allows organic farmers to sell their products competitively, using prices for organically grown food being sold across their marketing region as a guide. The price data, updated weekly, draws from the best available public and private sources. OPX is available free of charge at
http://www.newfarm.org The web site will be of interest to organic cooks and professional chefs as it details interesting angles on organic production, wholesale prices, techniques, markets, and agricultural news.
If you visit, you’ll see that prices of organically grown and conventionally grown foods are listed side by side. OPX tracks organic foods in the same quality and packaging categories used by conventional foods, allowing for “apples to apples” comparisons. Also, buyers and sellers of certified organic food have regular pricing information from identified regions. These statistics take into account the quality, packaging, distance to market, value-added status, and relationships to buyers. The site managers hope that listing prices will help close the gap in price spreads between most organic and conventional foods and often among organic foods themselves.
OPX covers wholesale organic pricing in the New York–Boston corridor and the Pacific Northwest, two of the country’s largest market regions for organic fruit and vegetables. Prices listed on OPX are average prices gathered at wholesale distributors and retail markets. The index includes fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and meat. Seasonal items will appear on the index as they become available in the markets.
Knowing how organic food is produced not only gives you fodder for intelligent discussions with farmers at the farmers’ markets, but it helps to justify your choice of organic ingredients in your cooking.
It’s hard to remember now, but it wasn’t very long ago that our food choices were limited to standard varieties of the mainstays and staples of American cooking: potatoes, squash, corn, broccoli, chard, peppers, peas, and beans. Today small organic growers can deliver many kinds of interesting potatoes to their customers; baby squashes with the flowers still on; corn that stays sweet for days after you pick it; romanesco broccoli and broccoli raab as well as the standard big heads; chard with stalks in bright shades of white, pink, red, yellow, and tan; red, yellow, orange, and green sweet peppers along with five or six kinds of chilies; peas you can eat, pods and all; and slender haricots verts and other green beans with flavors far beyond mom’s string beans. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all we have for organic ingredients these days. It has only been in the last thirty years that this transformation has taken place in America. One reason is that we have, as a people, traveled widely in the world and brought ideas home. ....read more
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