This week’s Know Your Farmer video of Skokomish Valley Farm details the success that results from many people working together toward a common vision.

The organic movement has a deep history of decentralized, small and productive farms that are vital to economic, social, and environmental health.

But there is a false agricultural narrative creeping in. It goes something like “small farms are nice, but only big farms can feed the world. Without the efficiencies of Big Ag, people will inevitably starve.” 

The notion of “cheap food” is used by corporations to justify chemical use, animal cruelty, pollution, low wages, sick farmworkers, and the displacement of millions of farmers off their land. But with all these side effects, should the food really be considered cheap?

Producers that flood the market with "cheap" food not only compromise our environmental health, but they also fail to feed people as promised. When farms become consolidated and isolated from communities for the sake of efficiency, food deserts — areas where people have extremely limited access to healthy food — are created and amplified. 

It is been disturbing to see the same flawed reasoning infiltrating the organic sector.

The organic brand is witnessing the perpetuation of the same “get big or get out” myth that has infected conventional farming. This time it goes something like, “In order to feed the world cheap organic food, we must compromise organic values and standards for greater efficiencies."

I don’t buy it. First of all, I have seen many Real Organic farms in my travels that have scaled up and still maintain the fundamental pillars of organic farming: health, ecology, fairness, and care. There is no need to compromise our standards. These standards are what people think they are buying when they choose organic. Real Organic farmers will fill the demand when real transparency exists in the marketplace.

Secondly, we must address the real costs of unchecked corporate capitalism. What are the consequences of consolidated wealth, decision making, and power? What are the environmental costs of extraction, heavy inputs, and fossil fuel use? What are the costs of nutrient run-off from soluble fertilizers?  What are the costs of animal confinement? Sometimes the efficiencies that consolidation can bring are not worth the social and environmental costs.

Real Organic farming is not impossible on bigger farms. But the intensive land stewardship of real organic inevitably results in the proliferation of much smaller farms than those dominating industrial agriculture today.

Soil systems thrive when billions of interdependent diverse microbes interact. We too must foster the diversity of farms within our movement. This will prevent the consolidation of organic into the hands of the powerful few selling a false promise of cheap organic. 

This is what the Real Organic Project is about. 

Yours in the dirt,
Linley

Linley Dixon
Associate Director / linley@realorganicproject.org
Real Organic Project / realorganicproject.org