Appetite for organic food proves insatiable

A long-running debate
The dilemma of how to fill the gap between organic supply and demand is part of a long-running debate within America’s booming organic industry. For many enthusiasts, organic is about more than the food on their plates; it’s a way to improve the environment where they live and help keep small-scale farmers in business.

“If organic is something created in the image of sustainable agriculture, we certainly haven’t accomplished that yet,” said Urvashi Rangan, a scientist for Consumers Union. “What people do have to understand is if that stuff comes in from overseas, and it’s got an organic label on it, it had to meet USDA standards in order to get here.”

The issue causes mixed feelings for Travis Forgues, an organic dairy farmer in Vermont.

“I don’t like the idea of it coming in from out of this country, but I don’t want them to stop growing organic because of that,” Forgues said. “I want people to say, ‘Let’s do that here, give a farmer another avenue to make a livable wage.”’

A member of the farmer-owned Organic Valley cooperative, Forgues got his dairy farm certified nearly 10 years ago. Organic Valley supplies milk to Stonyfield.

Switching to organic is a difficult proposition. Vegetable grower Scott Woodard is learning through trial and error on his Putnam Valley, N.Y., farm. One costly mistake: Conventional farmers can plant seeds when they want and use pesticides to kill hungry insect larvae. If Woodard had waited three weeks to plant, the bugs that ate his seeds would have hatched and left. Organic seeds can be double the price of conventional.

“There’s not a lot of information out there,” Woodard said. “We try to do the best we can. Sometimes it’s too late, but then we learn for next time.”

Boosting organic farming
Stonyfield and Organic Valley are working to increase the number of organic farms, paying farmers to help them switch or boost production. Stonyfield, together with farmer-owned cooperative Organic Valley, expects to spend around $2 million on incentives and technical help in 2006, Hirshberg said.

Other companies offer similar help. And the industry’s Organic Trade Association is trying to become more of a resource for individual farmers.

Caren Wilcox, the group’s executive director, described how an Illinois farmer showed up in May at an industry show in Chicago.

“He said, ‘I want to get certified. Help me,”’ Wilcox said. “It was a smart thing to do, but the fact that he had to get into his car and go down to McCormick Center says something about the availability of information.”

In the meantime, manufacturers like Clif Bar and Stonyfield still prefer to buy organic ingredients, wherever they come from, instead of conventional crops in the U.S.

“Anybody who’s helping to take toxins out of the biosphere and use less poisonous chemicals in agriculture is a hero of mine,” Hirshberg said. “There’s enormous opportunity here for everybody to win, large and small.”

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