| CLOVER -- Love hurts.
And Fred Kirschenmann is having a lover's quarrel -- or two -- with the
industry he's spent years nurturing.
The North Dakota organic farmer was there when organic farmers first
started to organize nationally. And he was there when the law authorizing
national organic standards was written. He's even served on the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's National Organic Standards Board.
But he thinks the industry is headed in a direction that conventional
agriculture itself is turning away from.
"We're hell bent to industrialize ourselves. I think we've
forgotten what organic is," he told a group of more than 50 farmers
who attended the Farmers, Friends and the Land seminar Dec. 1 and 2.
In the rush to develop standards that will preserve the integrity of a
product for the market, organic growers are in danger of becoming part of
mainline agriculture -- mass produced, uniform and commodity based. The
evidence is on the grocery shelves, he said.
"If you go into a grocery store and look at organic food and
non-organic food, there's not much difference," Kirschenmann said.
"Consumers are not stupid. Someday they're going to eat an organic
gummy bear and another gummy bear and say, 'They taste the same, so why am
I paying 50 percent more if the only difference is the label?'"
The proposed national standards are helping drive the rush to
industrialization, particularly a clause that sets both floor and ceiling
standards. Putting a ceiling on national standards means smaller producers
and processors can't differentiate themselves in the market. That gives
the advantage to larger, better capitalized firms, Kirschenmann said.
He's also taking aim at what he calls the "enclave mentality"
-- where organic growers create "little islands of purity."
"I can't isolate my farm. The birds go back and forth, the
earthworms go back and forth, the bacteria go back and forth," he
said. "For me to say I'm going to have an 'organic' farm in the midst
of a landscape that's managed conventionally is ludicrous, it's
futile."
Instead, organic growers should be partnering with other organic farms
to develop "organic landscapes" using a watershed management
approach, he said.
The new national organic standards are expected to be out by the end of
year. Kirschenmann expects the standard to be something growers can live
with. Although one local organic dairy might be forced to change how it
does business. Under the proposed rules, all ruminant animals must be
pasture-based to meet the standard.
A lot of people have spent a lot of time on the standards but "now
we need to focus on these underlying things if we want to the organic
movement to continue to be on the forefront of where we want agriculture
to be," Kirschenmann said. |