The Politics of Organic Farming: Populists, Evangelicals, and the Agriculture of the MiddleAuthor(s): laura sayreSource: Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 38-47Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2011.11.2.38 .Accessed: 06/06/2011 15:45

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nalist Barry Estabrook calls “the Obama administration’s schizophrenic approach to agriculture policy—making pr gestures toward sustainable farming with one hand while nudging ahead the agendas of agribusiness giants like Monsanto and Dow Chemical with the other .”1

But why, we might ask, does this come as such a surprise? Is it reasonable to assume that a Democratic president is more likely than a Republican one to implement meaningful changes in food and agricultural policy in the United States? If so—and I’ll say up front that I think the answer probably is yes, under the present circumstances—why exactly should this be the case? Why does so much of our public and media discourse in the United States assume that there is something inherently left-leaning about sustainable food? For it must be said that such an assumption runs counter to a good deal of evidence, both historic and contemporary, about the political affiliations of organic agriculture . As Philip Conford has shown in his book The Origins of the Organic Movement, many of the early advocates of nonchemical farming in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s were associated with conser-vative political movements, including fascism .2 Precisely to what extent today’s organic movement emerges from those early efforts is a difficult question to answer, but the fact remains that the contemporary organic food and agriculture movement is highly politically diverse . As a keynote speaker at the annual midwestern organic farming conference— the largest such gathering in the country—joked one year, organic agriculture in the United States today is one of the few movements with tripartisan support: the Organic Foods Production Act was passed in 1990, under the first Bush Administration; the first Proposed Organic Rule was published (and hotly contested) in 1997, during the Clinton years; and the Final Rule was finally implemented in October 2002, in the second year of George W . Bush’s ten-ure .3 (Green Party support is taken for granted but of course has not been put to the test of national leadership .)

I had a good view of this diversity a couple of years ago, when, as a writer and editor for NewFarm.org, an online

investigations | laura sayre

The Politics of Organic FarmingPopulists, Evangelicals, and the Agriculture of the Middle

If you think of the political spectrum as a circle, we’re right where the two ends meet.

—Dan Specht, organic corn, beef, and hog farmer, Clayton County, Iowa

The election of president obama was greeted with widespread enthusiasm on the part of the sustainable food movement: we’ve arrived, the feeling seemed to be; every-thing will be different now . Starry-eyed activists proposed that Michael Pollan could be appointed u.s. Secretary of Agriculture and were soon celebrating Michelle Obama’s decision to create an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn . When President Obama passed over Pollan and named former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture, the disappointment was quickly alleviated by the announcement that Kathleen Merrigan— a widely respected figure within the movement and one of the original authors of the u.s. organic standards—would be deputy secretary . Vilsack himself soon signaled his sup-port for sustainable food by starting another organic garden outside the offices of the usda, scheduling a series of cross-country listening sessions on questions of concern to the organic community and launching a Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign intended to strengthen local and regional food systems .

In more recent months, that heady optimism has begun to come down to earth . In January 2010 President Obama (like President Bush before him) reneged on a campaign commitment to establish an enforceable $250,000 per-farm cap on commodity payments; in April he used a recess appointment to fill the position of chief agricultural nego-tiator for the Office of the u.s. Trade Representative with a former vice president and lobbyist for the ag-chemical industry group CropLife America . There’s also concern that solicitor general and Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan may be pro-gm, her office having sided with Monsanto in a case about genetically modified alfalfa that came before the court last June . It all adds up to what jour-

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of either group . Recent studies have been at pains to point out that, contrary to popular belief, the consumption of organic products cuts across class and ethnic boundar-ies, although this by no means speaks directly to political affiliations . (Such studies implicitly challenge the assump-tion that organic food is “elitist” and therefore, according to American political stereotypes, consumed by “liberals .”)5 But even less is known for certain about the political outlook of organic farmers . The usda’s 2007 Census of Agriculture and 2008 Organic Production Survey asked questions about organic farmers’ sales, expenses, conserva-tion methods, and management challenges but not about voting habits or political convictions .

Anecdotally, however, within the movement, it’s widely recognized that organic farmers inhabit the full range of the political spectrum . Some observers suspect that the right-leaning contingency in fact outweighs the left . “Organic farming is conservative small-time rural farmers making food for white liberal yuppie and hippie types,” an Iowa-based independent organic inspector told me late in 2008 .

“That’s a caricature, but it’s only a partial caricature . I’ve seen a lot of McCain signs as I’ve been pulling into driveways

magazine devoted to sustainable and organic agriculture, I visited and interviewed dozens of organic farmers and attended most of the major organic farming conferences across the United States .4 It’s become a cliché to point out that “organic farming is not just hippies in Birkenstocks,” but this doesn’t convey the half of it . Organic farming is hippies in Birkenstocks, hippies in business suits, born-again Christians in Birkenstocks, everything in between, and a whole lot more besides . With both the 2012 Farm Bill and the 2012 presidential campaign fast approaching, it seems to me that if we are seriously interested in advancing the cause of organic and sustainable farming, we need to better appreciate this political diversity and to consider how it interacts with larger trends both within and beyond the agricultural sphere .

There are three challenges to gaining such an under-standing, two major and one minor . The first major challenge is that—as the “Pollan for Ag Secretary” cam-paign illustrates—organic farming as a consumer movement tends to overshadow organic farming as a producers’ move-ment, simply as a result of numbers . Know Your Farmer campaigns notwithstanding, and granted that the two groups overlap some, it is unclear to what extent the politics of the one mirrors that of the other . (I may know my farmer, but do I know how she votes? Should I know, if we both care about sustainable food?) The second challenge is that we have very little hard data about the political allegiances

Above: Electoral college map of the United States, 2008 presidential election results.© 2008 m.e.j. newman, department of physics and center for the study of complex systems, university of michigan, updated november 6, 2008.

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Growers Association . But it also creates a situation in which the political diversity of organic farmers is at once celebrated and not inquired into too closely .

But what if the political diversity of the organic farming movement is not just strategically useful but somehow structurally essential to the history and current practice of organic agriculture? What if it can help us understand why some farmers choose to transition to organic and why others decide not to? Why some consumers buy organic and others don’t? What if it can tell us something about how images of agriculture are used in mainstream political discourse? Or about how the politics of sustainable food are connected not just to energy policy or the public health care debate but also to the politics of rural America? These are the questions I pose here .

Political versus Agricultural Geographies

How, then, does the geography of organic agriculture com-pare, in broad terms, to u.s. political geography? It struck me after the 2008 presidential election that the ubiquitous map of the electoral-college results bore a strange similarity to the current distribution of organic farms in the United States . As if to confirm the idea of the sustainable food movement as a liberal preoccupation, at this gross level the world of organic farming correlates rather nicely to the Blue State world, with the West Coast, the Northeast, and the Upper Midwest dominating both . Nevada’s going blue seems a bit of an anomaly, as does North Dakota’s going

this year .” “I remember there being a conversation that…there were supposedly more organic farmers that were Republicans than were Democrats,” Ron Rosmann, a Democratic organic farmer who in 2008 made an unsuc-cessful run for the Iowa House, wrote to me in an e-mail after the election . “I have never been quite able to under-stand why that is, if it is indeed true?”

The third challenge, if in fact it is a challenge, is that the producers’ wing of the sustainable agriculture movement in particular has developed, over the past three or four decades, a highly successful “big tent” approach—a strategy of strengthening its numbers by overlooking internal differ-ences and searching for common ground . The cultural and political diversity of organic farming is justly understood to be an enormous asset for the organic movement, one that’s nicely consonant with organic farming’s emphasis on biological diversity . In practical policy terms, as Mark Lipson of the Organic Farming Research Foundation (ofrf)explained to me at the end of the Bush era, being able to work across party lines is critically important . When organizing D .C . fly-ins, for instance, it’s much more effec-tive to be able to schedule meetings of constituent farmers with congressional members of the same party . “The important thing we have tried to recognize, and to build into our outreach,” Lipson told me, “is that [organic farm-ers] are in every part of the country, red states and blue states .” Crucially, that broad geographic and political range

“translates into reach into the more mainstream commodity groups,” such as the Farm Bureau or the National Corn

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There are various problems with this approach, to be sure . One is that only certified organic farmers are readily mappable: farmers following organic practices but choos-ing not to get certified are not generally counted either by certifiers, state departments of agriculture, or the usda Economic Research Service . Estimates of the number of noncertified organic farmers suggest that their numbers may be roughly equal to or even greater than the number of certified organic farmers, although whether the two groups are trending along parallel lines is anyone’s guess .6 It may be, moreover—for reasons we will consider in a moment—that noncertified organic farmers are more likely to be political conservatives . Yet, not all certified organic farmers vote . Most Amish and many conservative Mennonites, for example—thought to be among the fastest-growing segments of the organic farming population—view disengagement from the mainstream political process as a matter of religious principle .7 Again, the high rates of organic farming in proximity to left-leaning urban centers, from college towns to larger cities, probably has more to do with access to concentrated market opportunities than with indigenous political sentiments among farmers . It

red, but otherwise, it’s a pretty good fit . Vermont is more strongly Democratic than New Hampshire and also more densely populated with organic farms; Wyoming is more strongly Republican than Colorado and has also proved less hospitable to organics . The two maps even coincide with respect to certain contemporary trends, with states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida seeing a relatively recent increase in numbers of organic farms and at the same time rejoining the Democratic fold .

State electoral outcomes are obviously a pretty crude indicator of local trends, however . Mark Newman’s map of the 2008 election results using shades of purple to indicate relative percentages of Democratic and Republican votes by county offers a better representation of closely contested areas (see below) . Here the relation between organic farm distribution and political party affiliation appears more complex: although strong localized concentrations of Democratic vot-ers and organic farms remain (Vermont, the San Francisco Bay area), we can also see that there are many organic farms in red and red-purple areas—central and northern Texas, southern and panhandle Idaho, parts of Montana, north-central Kentucky, western New York—as well as zones of blue with very few certified organic farms—the lower Mississippi River valley, the Big Bend region of Texas, the northern woods of Minnesota . We can imagine climatologi-cal or demographic explanations for these discontinuities, but these perhaps only highlight our own prejudices: why shouldn’t northeastern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters be a center for organic wild rice production, for example?

Below: Democratic (blue) and Republican (red) voting in the United States in the 2008 presidential election, by county, with shades of purple indicating relative percentages of each. Left: Certified Organic Operations in the United States, 2010. Each dot represents a place that has one or more organic farms. below: © 2008 m.e.j. newman, department of physics and center for the study of complex systems, university of michigan, updated november 6, 2008. left: courtesy of organic farming research foundation © 2011 google maps

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opposition to conventional or chemical farming, how is it compatible with so many different kinds of politics? Is the difference between conservative and progressive organic farmers merely social, not really political? Are Republican or conservative organic farmers, in other words, strictly social conservatives divided from their Democratic or progressive organic compatriots over issues like gay mar-riage, Roe v. Wade, the Second Amendment, and perhaps immigration rather than anything likely to affect farm man-agement or farm policy?

Here we should consider the example of Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in southwestern Virginia, a self-described

“Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist” and among the most prominent voices for noncertified or

“beyond” organic production and marketing systems as the basis for the sustainable food movement . Immortalized by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Salatin has been active in sustainable agriculture circles for decades and is a hero among many subgroups within the movement, including the Christian Homesteaders, a loosely affiliated association committed to “godliness, simplicity and self-reliance .”10 (The strongest common practical commitment among Christian Homesteaders is to homeschooling, but they typically also embrace rural living, growing one’s own food, alternative energy systems, and staying out of debt .) In the run-up to the 2008 election, Salatin officially endorsed Ron Paul, the gop presidential contender whose antiwar, pro–small government platform included opposition to the controversial National Animal Identification System and a promise to legalize interstate sales of raw milk . Salatin’s conservative social views occasionally rankle among left-leaning sustainable agriculture advocates: he caused a stir one year at Eco-Farm, the annual conference of the California-based Ecological Farming Association, when he mentioned during his keynote address that he couldn’t understand how organic farmers could be pro-choice . The deeply traditional gender division of labor at Polyface Farm also raises eyebrows within a broader movement that prides itself on the preponderance of women in leader-ship positions .11

Religiosity is thus a revealing trait within the politics of organic agriculture, tracing a line perhaps unexpected across typical characterizations of left and right . Michael Bell, in his ethnography of sustainable and organic farmers in the Midwest, notes that a survey he and his colleagues conducted of 705 Iowa farmers found that “sustainable farmers are, taken as a whole, more religious than conven-tional ones”—although, as he notes, they had no data on the farmers’ spiritual views before they transitioned away

seems possible, too, that with the rising number of small-farm entrants in recent years, these metropolitan areas may be just as important as sources of new farmers as they are as market attractants .

Perhaps, then, the politics of organic farmers are broadly reflective of the politics of those regions in which organic farmers are located, and there is no necessary relation between political outlook and farming methods . Some observers have pointed out that, as a practical matter, organic farming tends to do well in areas that are hillier or more rugged—like Vermont or southwestern Wisconsin—since these have been less amenable to the expansion and consolidation trends of conventional farming, which typi-cally render farms more difficult to transition to organic . This is particularly relevant with respect to the decoupling of crop and livestock farming that has increasingly char-acterized nonorganic farming systems over the past twenty or thirty years . In the Midwest, farms that have given up livestock, stopped making hay, and gone to a straight corn-soybeans “rotation” will no longer have the equipment and know-how required to resume the longer crop sequences, including small grains and pasture or hay, that are essential for organic production . “The success of organic practices is often closely correlated to landscape heterogeneity,” as Timothy Vos put it in a 2000 paper .8 Does landscape het-erogeneity also foster a particular way of being and acting in the world, irrespective of political affiliation—or coter-minous with that zone where the two ends of the political spectrum bend around to meet? Much has been written about the politics of organic farming as a worldview or ideology; about the ecological mindset . Vos’s paper is one example, written in the early years of the proposed National Organic Program (nop):

The controversy over the proposed rule represents an argument

between different ideological positions and concomitant knowledge

systems, different visions of what agriculture is and can be, and of what

the middle landscape should look like . For at least fifty years, rural

space has been dominated, and transformed, by the productionist para-

digm of industrial agriculture… . In this context, organic farming can

be thought of as a kind of “ecological resistance movement”…, both

challenging the hegemony of the agro-industrial paradigm, and propos-

ing and exploring alternative society-nature relations .9

But if the organic vision is so intimately linked to specific views of nature, so interestingly tied to politics and ideology, how is it embraced by individuals of such widely divergent ideological viewpoints? If there is such a thing as an ideology of organic farming, one that defines itself in

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(Organic) Farmers and Political Engagement

This characterization of organic farmers thus begins to take on a notable resemblance to traditional agrarian-ism—the idea that farmers make the best citizens, that they possess an intrinsic virtue based on their close working relationship with the natural world and their independence from corporate and consumer culture . How skeptical should we be of this resemblance? Julie Guthman, in her 2004 book, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, argues that we should be very skep-tical indeed, demonstrating how the organic sector relies on “an agrarian populist imaginary” to conceal from itself its fundamental implication in the capitalist exploitation of both land and labor—how, in other words, organic farming has “replicated what it set out to oppose .”13 But Guthman’s argument is specific to California, the state exhibiting the most advanced stage of organic agriculture in the United States (in both extensive and intensive terms) and one that, as she emphasizes, “never had an agrarian tradi-tion .”14 Is an agrarian organic imaginary on surer ground in other parts of the country? Or, to put the question differently, is organic agriculture successfully reimagining the agrarian tradition?15

For it is, after all, the agrarian tradition itself that inhab-its that space where the two ends of the political spectrum bend around to meet . This is why histories of the organic movement can be told either as histories of conservative, even reactionary campaigns to restore a “traditional” coun-tryside (as in Conford’s account of the movement’s early years in Britain) or as histories of progressive, even revolu-tionary campaigns to challenge the status quo (as in Warren Belasco’s Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry) . It’s also probably why, again despite the media assumption of the left-leaning bias of sustainable food, a handful of prominent conservative thinkers have come to embrace organic farming and food .

“Conservatives should become agrarians again,” writes Paul Weyrich, a cofounder of the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation, arguing that conservatives have les-sons to learn from both the Mennonite community and the organic farming movement . “Agrarian life is a whole culture, not just a way to make a living, and we should seek to protect that culture and make it available to more fami-lies .”16 National Review writer Rod Dreher has coined the term “crunchy conservatives,” or crunchy cons, to describe the conservative wing of the organic movement, of which he counts himself an enthusiastic member . (“When I heard about Slow Food”—founded by an Italian Marxist—“I

from conventional farming .12 Some observers imply that conservative organic farmers are more likely to be farm-ers who are “in it for the money”; they have converted to organic primarily for the economic opportunities it offers rather than for any philosophical or ideological reasons . But the Christian conservative organic farmers I have met don’t fit that mold . Many organic farmers who con-fess that they initially transitioned because it promised a better income (and I have known both Democrats and Republicans who fall into this category) are eloquent in articulating both the personal satisfaction they feel in not using (or paying for) agricultural chemicals and the ecological wonderment they have experienced in discover-ing that organic methods work . A Wisconsin organic (and Christian conservative) dairy farmer I interviewed once spoke about his banker’s repeated efforts to get him to take on debt to scale up his operation and his own repeated refusals: he considered it ludicrous to assume that because he was a successful small dairy farmer, he should naturally seek to become a successful large one . Bell, again, discusses the “conversion” experiences described by nearly every organic or sustainable farmer in his study group: moments of intense personal or professional crisis, often brought on by the economic strains of conventional farm-ing, followed by an epiphany and a steady reorientation of their farm management around more humane, sustain-able principles .

Whether they are religious or not, socially progressive or socially conservative, then, organic farmers seem to share two things: a sense of independence, based on their relatively low reliance on external inputs and their freedom from corporate dictates; and a sense of humility, based on the fragility of farming within larger ecological and eco-nomic systems . The potential contradiction between these two attitudes is perhaps what produces the heterogeneous politics of organic farming . “To be successful as an organic farmer you do really have to be conservative, or maybe frugal is the better word, on day-to-day financial decisions,” Ron Rosmann, the Democratic organic farmer candidate for the Iowa legislature, told me . “This is where the word ‘low-input’ gains significance .” He continued: “I found that I called myself a ‘conservative’ Democrat while door-knock-ing . In other words, conservative in economic decisions and balancing our budget and living within our means .” Bell characterizes sustainable farmers as being more open to dialogue: with consumers, with one another, with extension researchers, with their local communities, even within their own farm operations .

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Peters in her 1979 study of the movement . “[T]he over-whelming message was organic farming as nonpartisan, and certainly nondisruptive . . . .Rodale never tied the spirit of the organic movement to any political commitments that might shake his already slender chances of support .” When J .I .’s son Robert Rodale took over the reins from his father about 1970, he continued this tradition of political agnosticism, steering carefully down the center of the various currents of the organic movement . “You can be a Republican, Democrat or whatever and do an effective job of waking up the politicians to the problems of organic growers, and the opportunities that natural methods represent,” he wrote in one of his editorials in the magazine in 1972 .18 The Rodales’ substantial influence on the representation and understanding of organic farming in the United States, in other words, had a distinctly centrist and even actively depoliticizing character .

thought, Man, if this isn’t the quintessential crunchy-con phenomenon, I don’t know what is,” Dreher exclaims, in a typical comment .)17 While this kind of conservative enthu-siasm may only make some on the left more uncomfortable with agrarianism’s checkered legacy, what’s important to note is the broadness of the appeal, the size, and the power of this apparent common ground .

In the United States in particular, as I indicated earlier, the organic movement has long experience in downplaying its political divisions . Beginning in the 1940s, the work of J .I . Rodale as a popularizer of the organic movement included two acts of synthesis: first, to merge the two intel-lectual traditions underlying nonchemical farming in Europe—the work of Sir Albert Howard in England with that of Rudolf Steiner on the Continent; and second, to blur the lines between the various strains of radicalism, progressivism, and agrarianism that would give force to the organic movement in the United States . “In the pages of Organic Gardening and Farming [Rodale’s landmark serial publication, founded in 1942], the organic farmer was politi-cally no different from any other farmer,” writes Suzanne

Above: A corn maze created by Al Stickley in the months running up to the 2008 Presidential election, at Stickley Farm in Bluff City, Tennessee.courtesy of al stickley

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book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front is a good summary of the antigovern-ment position: its cover illustration features an overall-clad, straw-hatted figure standing in the center of a generalized farm landscape, raising his arms to the sky in frustration as an army tank labeled “u.s.d.a.”—complete with a soldier taking aim from the top hatch—barrels down the road in his direction .21 Salatin regards the usda National Organic Program as hopelessly co-opted and the usda as a whole as irrelevant to the crafting of a sustainable agriculture . While he may not go as far as the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards, who has proposed slashing the usda’s budget by 90 percent, he makes it clear that he considers government interfer-ence—from labor laws to building and zoning codes to food safety requirements—to be the principal impediment to the development of strong, integrated local economies with small farms at their heart .22

There are at least two major problems with Salatin’s position as a basis for saving the family farm, of course: first, it suggests that all farmers can and should do all of their marketing locally, which is not realistic for many farmers in the middle of the country; and second, it ignores the serious environmental and social abuses perpetrated on the countryside by poorly regulated agricultural and industrial sectors . If both Republican and Democratic organic farm-ers share a high degree of fiscal conservatism, Democratic ones are more likely to look to government for solutions, whereas Republican ones are more likely to lean into a libertarian position that lumps corporations and govern-ment in the same corrupt category . While libertarians embrace self-reliance as an invigorating condition of rural life, populists point to the many ways in which the self-reliance of rural peoples is being increasingly put to the test: by the near-total dominance of genetically modified crops and associated genetic pollution; by consolidation in the livestock and meat-packing sectors; by ever-larger and more numerous megadairies and confinement hog facilities . To quote Ron Rosmann again, “I based much of my campaign theme on issues of fairness in tax structure[s] . . .strong envi-ronmental issues with water quality, [and] a blend of state and local control on cafos . . . .I said we have got to have more good paying jobs in our rural areas . I said that organic and local foods could play a role in that and certainly that renewable energy jobs could as well .”

The question usually posed for organic farming today is why it’s not more progressive in its political impact: why and how it has fallen short of its full transformative potential for the food and farming system . The debates leading up to the 2008 Farm Bill featured some strong differences of

Paradoxically, however, another one of the distinguish-ing characteristics of organic farmers is their high level of political engagement . (I invite anyone who doubts this to subscribe to one of the movement’s many listservs: your Inbox will never be the same .) The strange irony of organic farmers’ political engagement, in turn, lies in its stark con-trast to their actual numbers: in 2008 the usda counted 14,540 organic farms and ranches in the United States .19 If this suggests a total figure for both certified and noncertified producers of, say, 30,000, that would represent about 1 .5 percent of total farmers in the United States . Curiously, then, the ratio of organic farmers to nonorganic farmers in the United States is roughly similar to the ratio of farm-ers to nonfarmers, while their relative political presence is similarly outsized in both cases . (Somebody noted during the 2008 presidential campaign that Latinos now outnum-ber farmers in Iowa; there are about 119,000 residents of Hispanic descent and about 90,000 farmers . Nevertheless, farmers are seen as icons both within the state and out-side its borders, whereas Latinos remain almost invisible .) Historically, farmers’ disproportionate cultural capital in America is linked both to Jeffersonian agrarianism and to late-nineteenth-century populism, in which farmers made a compelling case about the damaging effects of corporate power on American democracy .20 As anachronistic as it may be in fact, farmers’ powerful hold on a kind of sym-bolic political authority is reenacted every four years in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses, in which farmers stand in for Iowans, Iowans stand in for Midwesterners, and Midwesterners stand in for mainstream America . Organic farmer Jon Tester’s 2006 win in Montana—he is now the only active farmer in Congress—is another small but significant sign that at least in the middle of the country, organic agriculture is overtaking “conventional” farming in its status as being seen as more authentically “agrarian .” And not without some justification: unsubsidized, family-scale farming in the Midwest and West has for some time now been profitable only by being organic or making use of some other value-added marketing strategy (such as direct or cooperative marketing of grass-fed beef) .

The question is, what’s the best way forward for the organic movement, in political terms? The politics of organic farming is frequently presented as Big Organic versus Beyond Organic, Aurora Organic Dairy versus Joel Salatin, with the former group perpetually threatening the integrity of the organic label and the latter group protest-ing federal control of the word “organic” full stop . What this opposition obscures is a deeper debate about the appropriate and necessary roles of government . Salatin’s

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notes

1. Barry Estabrook, “How Obama Sold the Farm,” blogging for The Atlantic, 1 April 2010, at www .theatlantic .com/food/archive/2010/04/how-obama-sold-the-farm/38288/ .

2. Many of the founders of the Soil Association, in 1946, were members of the Kinship in Husbandry, an English nationalist group whose members looked forward to a neotraditional, monarchist, pseudofeudal social and agrarian order featuring anti-Semitic and eugenicist elements . Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2001) . See also Matthew Reed, “Fight the Future! How Contemporary Campaigns of the uk Organic Movement Have Arisen from Their Composting of the Past,” Sociologia Ruralis 41, no . 1 (January 2001): 131–145; and Conford, “‘Somewhere Quite Different’: The Seventies Generation of Organic Activists and Their Context,” Rural History 19, no . 2 (2008): 217–234 . There is also an active discussion among historians about the “greenness” of the Nazi Party . For example, Mark Cioc, Franz-Josef Brueggemeier, and Thomas Zeller, eds ., How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); and Piers H .G . Stephens, “Blood Not Soil: Anna Bramwell and the ‘Myth of Hitler’s Green Party,’” Organization & Environment 14, no . 2 (June 2001): 173–187 . Stephens questions the supposed link between Nazism and Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic teachings .

3. This was Jim Riddle, founder of the Independent Organic Inspectors Association and former chair of the National Organic Standards Board, the advi-sory body to the usda National Organic Program .

4. This essay draws on that experience as well as on additional interviews and research .

5. John Stevens-Garmon, Chung L . Huang, and Bling-Hwan Lin, “Organic Demand: A Profile of Consumers in the Fresh Produce Market,” Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm and Resource Issues 22, no . 2 (2007), accessed online at www .choicesmagazine .org/2007-2/grabbag/2007-2-05 .htm . See also Carolyn Dimitri and Catharine Greene, “Recent Growth Patterns in the u.s. Organic Foods Market,” usda Economic Research Service Agricultural Information Bulletin no . aib 777, September 2002 .

6. Catharine Greene and Amy Kremen, u.s. Organic Farming in 2000–01: Adoption of Certified Systems, usda Economic Research Service Agricultural Information Bulletin no . aib 780, April 2003, cite data from the (pre–National Organic Program) California system requiring noncertified organic producers to register with the state; at that time certified producers represented 41 percent of total organic registrants . Current groupings of “noncertified organic” farmers include the peer-to-peer “alternative certification” network known as Certified Naturally Grown, which now has nearly five hundred member farms in forty-seven states; and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York’s Farmer’s Pledge designation .

7. As a Mennonite colleague once explained it to me, this is “based on the Anabaptist ‘two-kingdom’ theology, which reasons that God’s law is higher than human law, that the allegiance of the Christian is always first to God and there-fore can’t be to governments, so we aren’t really citizens of the state—we just happen to be living here .”

8. Timothy Vos, “Visions of the Middle Landscape: Organic Farming and the Politics of Nature,” Agriculture and Human Values 17, no . 3 (2000): 251 .

9. Ibid ., 246 .

10. Hal Smith, “The Christian Homesteading Movement,” Mother Earth News, March–April 1971, at http://www .motherearthnews .com/Nature-Community/ 1971-03-01/The-Christian-Homesteading-Movement .aspx, and Christian Homesteaders Association, http://www .christianhomesteaders .org/index .html .

11. A number of people within the organic farming community have shared with me the opinion that Michael Pollan “really got snowed by Joel Salatin .” “I was there once in June,” one organic farmer said, “and it was a mess . And you don’t want to be a woman on that farm .”

12. Michael Mayerfeld Bell, Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 159 .

13. Julie Guthman, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 176, 3 .

14. Ibid ., 174 .

opinion as to how organic farming should best negotiate its priorities within the larger goals of agri-food system reform . Midwestern progressive Democratic organic farmers, among other subgroups, are adamant that meaningful commod-ity payment limitations would be the single most effective measure in arresting the pace of consolidation and corpo-ratization in u.s. agriculture . Yet, organic agriculture has begun to achieve success in reaching more modest goals, such as moderate increases in federal funding for organic research, the continuation of the organic certification cost-share program, and some conservation funding targeted for organic practices . “Many people have asked if the incremental gains for organic and sustainable agriculture are worth the price of perpetuating the many large-scale flaws that are also embodied in the bill,” wrote the ofrf Policy team in its fall 2008 newsletter, after the Farm Bill finally passed .

Early in 2007, a key Congressional staffer asked us, “What do you really

want? Do you want to get a better share of the pie? Or do you want to

blow up the whole process?” It was a tough question, in part because

the prospect of the process blowing up seemed almost plausible at that

point . But what if it had blown up? There was no assurance that we

could engineer a better outcome . . . .Our approach was to fight for a fair

share while tunneling under some of the policy structures that hold

back bigger changes, opening some cracks and undermining those

structures for future dismantling .23

The “O” of a political spectrum envisioned as a circle is a fitting symbol for an agriculture based on holistic man-agement, closed nutrient loops, and the maximization of ecosystem services . As the organic movement gains politi-cal clout—as it secures its hold on the popular agrarian imaginary—it needs to mobilize both its conservative and its progressive wings to achieve more complete food system reform . (It’s worth noting that in New Zealand, one of the very few industrialized countries to have abolished agri-cultural subsidies, the blow was struck by the Conservative government; it was widely understood that the Labour Party could never do such a thing .) The political debate concealed within the organic movement needs to come out in the open, while organic consumers need to familiarize themselves more fully with the details of a political agenda that has been built up through long, hard work by organic and sustainable farmers over the past forty years . As Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition told a New York Times reporter in March 2009, “We just want to make sure that interest in that symbolic action [the White House organic garden] can be channeled into some of the more difficult policy challenges” that remain .24g

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19. usda National Agricultural Statistics Service 2008 Organic Production Survey . Of these, 10,903 were certified and 3,637 were exempt from certification .

20. For an interesting discussion of the recent resurgence of agrarian populism as a reaction against corporate power in North Dakota, see Ted Nace, “Breadbasket of Democracy,” Orion, May–June 2006 .

21. Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front (Swope, va: Polyface, 2007) .

22. The proposal is part of Edwards’s “Downsizing the Federal Government” project, outlined in a book of that title of 2005 . For details, see http://www .cato .org/downsizing/agriculture/spending_cuts .html and related pages .

23. Mark Lipson, Tracy Lerman, and Zach Baker, “2008 Farm Bill: After Long Haul, Big Wins for Organic,” Organic Farming Research Foundation Information Bulletin, Fall 2008, 15 .

24. Quoted in Andrew Martin, “Is a Food Revolution Now in Season?” New York Times, 21 March 2009 .

15. Amy Guptill and Rick Welsh have suggested that marketing networks like ofarm (the Organic Farmers’ Association for Relationship Marketing, founded in 2001 and made up of eight organic farmers’ cooperatives in the Midwest and Great Plains) could represent a viable alternative to the “conventionalization of organics .” Guptill and Welsh, “Is Relationship Marketing an Alternative to the Corporatization of Organics? A Case Study of ofarm,” in Food and the Mid-Level Farm: Renewing an Agriculture of the Middle, ed . Thomas A . Lyson, G .W . Stevenson, and Rick Welsh (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2008), 60 . The success of Organic Valley/cropp, the nation’s largest organic cooperative, based in La Farge, Wisconsin, is another instance of a practical solution to the twin demands of sophisticated market access and democratic producer engagement .

16. Paul Weyrich, “Country Life,” World Magazine, 5 September 2005, at http://www .worldmag .com/webextra/11423 .

17. Rod Dreher, “Crunchy Cons: Picking up Organic Vegetables in Your National Review Tote Bag,” National Review, 30 September 2002; and Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 63 .

18. Suzanne Peters, “The Land in Trust” (Ph .D . diss ., McGill University, 1979), 115–116, 203; the latter quoting Robert Rodale, “Compost and Politics DO Mix,” Organic Gardening and Farming 21 (November 1972): 30 .