The original goal of organic farming was to create sustainable local agriculture, where consumers know and trust the farmers, where farms protect the environment, where the supply lines from farm to table are short (the average distance food travels from farm to plate in America is 1,300 miles). Certification agencies like Oregon Tilth, California Certified Organic Farmers, and Northeast Organic Farmers Association (NOFA) began as regional groups dedicated to assuring the authenticity of local, seasonal organic foods. Today, certification agencies like Quality Assurance International in America and Eco-Cert in Germany are global in scope. Linda Baker, writing in the online journal Salon (July 29, 2002), described an American certification agent for Eco-Cert who found himself in Japan inspecting a food processor who was importing soybeans from China to process into goods for export to Europe. He said to Eco-Cert, “Isn’t this a little unsustainable?” The expenditure of fossil fuels to move foods over long distances and fly certification agents around the world is expensive—and the cost of certification reflects this. It is not sustainable as environmentalists think of that term.

"Sustainability” had its genesis in a 1910 book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, which described how Chinese truck farms near large cities recycled every scrap of organic matter—including night soil—through composting processes, back to the land. By doing so, their farms remained fertile and productive year after year, for forty centuries. Sustainability became a goal of the organic movement as it developed through the 1950s and 1960s. If food production were kept local and organic wastes were captured and recycled, the terrible destruction of America’s topsoil that was going on then (and continues on conventional farms) could possibly be halted and reversed. For my part, I started something called the National Soil Fertility Program in the mid-1970s that aimed to have the USDA identify all the sources of compostables in America and steer them to composting centers for eventual return to the land. I remember importuning the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture as he left a meeting in Washington, D.C. I wanted to hand him information about the program. He refused the copy and brushed me aside, saying, “I’m not interested in that [expletive][expletive].”

A deep conflict has arisen between the big organic producers who ship food globally and small, local farmers who find the cost of complying with the USDA and paying for certification prohibitive. (The organic certifier New Jersey NOFA, for instance, charges $285 the first year and $235 in subsequent years to certify farms grossing less than $5,000; farms grossing between $750,000 and $1 million pay $2,000 plus 2.5 percent of sales.) Many see that now that the government is involved in defining what’s organic, the race to lower standards is on. Unless organic standards are kept strict, the term organic will become meaningless as more and more compromises are made. And lower standards will not apply only to the USDA’s National Organic Standards, they will apply to every certification agency in the country. The enabling legislation is written so that no local group—such as the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association or California Certified Organic Farmers may impose stricter standards than those imposed by USDA. By contrast, most federal safety regulations set minimum standards. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, for instance, encourages manufacturers of products covered by its regulations to exceed federal standards and promote themselves to consumers that way.

Many small organic farmers, therefore, smell a rat. A big “problem in the long run is that the USDA program may so debase the meaning of organic that growers won’t want to be involved unless they grow for markets that specifically require [the USDA seal], like big stores or processors,” says Bill Duesing, president of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association Interstate Council (including NOFA chapters in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire). “I think the federal takeover of ‘organic’ presents a very large challenge to define and communicate the values that are important to NOFA members and aren’t addressed in the federal standards—local eating, family farms, low and solar energy use, labor issues, polyculture, sustainability, connection to community, knowledge, and control. Although it would be good if all food were grown organically, that won’t address the above important issues if we just end up with industrial organic, which continues to put great distance between growers and eaters while increasing ignorance in the general population about our relationship with the earth.” In England, by way of contrast, the Soil Association’s organic standards are stricter than those in the United States—farmers can’t use peat moss for fear of destroying the environment; they can’t use dried blood because it’s too high in nitrogen. For years the English have worried that long transportation of food, “excessive food miles,” will damage the environment.  ....read more