Organics in the News

All organic livestock must eat organic feed and pasture. They must be raised in conditions that allow them access to the outdoors.

She needs that soil to grow vegetables to sell; that soil, in turn, needs her help to heal. The relationship she and her husband, Lonny Dietz, have with their land on a bluff near Elba goes much deeper than a living -- it's a way of life. After years of neglect, that land needs them to bring it back to life to produce lettuce, carrots, cabbage, tomatoes and other vegetables.

"I look at the ground as being alive, and we want to do everything we can to make it more alive," she said. "If you don't have the soil, the rest won't come."

The two are among hundreds who farm organically in this region, partly because it's a way to make a living, but also to improve the land itself. They get a premium price for their produce, meat or milk but also get the extra boost of knowing they are improving the earth. Some are certified as organic; others, such as the Dietzes, farm that way but haven't done the paperwork and inspections to be certified. Lonny Dietz calls it "biological" farming compared with conventional farming.

Farmers have until May 29 to sign up for new NRCS support for conservation practices in organic farming systems. These can be part of organic conversion or expanding practices in an existing organic farm plan. Items including crop rotation, cover crops, IPM and rotational grazing are covered on a nationwide basis, and will be paid at higher rates for organic implementation.

Applications will be ranked separately for new farms and expanding practices, and will be based on National Organic Program objectives on resource concerns and core conservation practices.

When the Agriculture Department released its 2007 census recently, the news appeared surprisingly good: For the first time since World War II, the United States did not lose farms, it gained them — 75,810, to be exact, for a total of 2.2 million.

But on closer inspection, the numbers aren’t so hopeful. The discrepancy stems from this tricky question: What is a farm? The census has changed its definition nine times since 1850, most recently to “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year.”

In the future, farmers’ importance will only grow. Their intimate, human-scale knowledge of the land is what will allow agriculture to adapt to climate change. And as the cheap energy that industrial agriculture depends on disappears, it is farmers, with their small-scale innovation and sheer manual labor, who will feed us. Why do we care about having more farmers? Because deep down we know they are essential to a functioning food system.

She says it's the only way the agriculture industry in Canada has any chance of survival.

Standing in the four acres of field behind her Grande-Digue home, Rowena Hopkins, a former chemistry teacher, is an organic farmer.

And while Canada has lost 17,550 farms in just five years according to most recent census numbers - a total of 257 in New Brunswick - the numbers go the other way when talking organic.

The number of certified organic farms in the country grew by 1,325 in the same time frame. New Brunswick alone had a 68 per cent increase.

It may sound like niche production taken to an extreme, but the fact is, 52-year-old Wiswall has it down to a science. Years ago, the Middlebury grad determined that he could earn more growing dandelions than cultivating popular greens such as spinach and cilantro. “We have good demand for it,” he explains. “It’s not a big market, but we grow enough to saturate the market.”

This kind of tactic dovetails with Wiswall’s philosophy of farming “smart, not hard.” By microtargeting their efforts, he’s shown, savvy farmers can flourish crop by small crop.

This November Chelsea Green will release the fruit of Wiswall’s experience, The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook, complete with worksheets on CD-ROM. With numerous speaking and consulting gigs under his belt, Wiswall feels qualified to offer advice on one of the riskiest — and, around here, trendiest — professions. “[The book] will hopefully keep people from repeating the same mistakes that I made, and give them a leg up and some shortcuts so they can get to a profitable state much quicker than they would have otherwise,” he says.

I am a farmer. While I find that this has come to mean many other things to other people – that I have become also a trainer and teacher, and to some a sort of food philosopher – I do like nothing better than to get my hands into good rich soil and sow the seeds of hope.

So, spring always enlivens me and gives me the energy to make haste, to feel confidence, to take full advantage of another all-too-short Wisconsin summer.

This spring, however, much more so than in past springs, I feel my hope and confidence mixed with a sense of greater urgency. This spring, I know that my work will be all the more important, for the simple but profound reason that more people are hungry.

For years I have argued that our food system is broken, and I have tried to teach what I believe must be done to fix it. This year, and last, we have begun seeing the unfortunate results of systemic breakdown. We have seen it in higher prices for those who can less afford to pay, in lines at local food pantries, churches and missions, and in the anxious eyes of people who have suddenly become unemployed. We have seen it, too, in nationwide outbreaks of food-borne illness in products as unlikely as spinach and peanuts.

The Obama administration is pledging $50 million to help interested farmers nationwide adopt organic agricultural practices.

Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan announced the funds Tuesday while speaking to the USDA's National Organic Standards Board. The funding will be part of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, a voluntary resources conservation program.

The USDA will accept applications May 11-29 from farmers who want to make the transition to organic and those who want to expand their operations.

Practices eligible for funding include rotating crops, the planting of cover crops, managing pests and nutrients and enhancing pasture grasses through controlled grazing.

The map of organic farms in the United States is clustered into a few geographic centers, a strikingly different pattern than the map of all farms, which spreads densely over many regions.

Jimmy Carter had his herb garden, and Hillary Rodham Clinton had a small rooftop garden planted in pots, but this is the first real vegetable garden planted at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden inspired millions of Americans to start victory gardens of their own.

Obama's garden has already exerted a similarly inspirational ripple effect. Politicians and advocacy groups are jumping on the bandwagon here in the U.S., and admirers as far away as Australia have begun clamoring for gardens on the grounds of their own houses of leadership.

"I'm beyond satisfied," says Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International. In early 2008, Doiron organized an initiative, dubbed "Eat the View," to gather signatures encouraging the next first family to replace a section of the White House lawn with a vegetable garden. Worldwide, more than 100,000 people signed on.

In foodie circles, Doiron has been applauded as the dog that caught the car, but he wears his success lightly.

At such a time, it seems only appropriate that our CRAFT visit this week was to Farmgirl Farm, a young CSA farm whose grower, Laura Meister, spoke to us about the challenges and successes of her farm’s first 5 years. Beforehand, as we stood in a circle and introduced our company of bright-eyed young apprentices, Laura asked us to state whether we hoped to start our own farm someday, and if so how soon. Suffice it to say that we are an ambitious bunch.

Laura came to Farmgirl Farm without such grand designs. She signed on for the farm’s first season as a partner to an old friend, whose dream it was to run a small CSA farm. The white lie that she was “just helping for a year” proved “the blindfold that you need for such a crazy thing,” Laura laughingly explained. By the end of the year, her friend had pulled out, due to health problems and personal reasons. But Laura remained, took an ag business class that winter, and came into her second season with even more passion than the first.