Watered Down Organic
Food Chain Radio Show #1186
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Watered Down Organic!
Guest: Dave Chapman, Real Organic Project
There is a lot of money in the word organic – $50 billion dollars a year – and that’s just here in the USA.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Watered Down Organic: Will it be possible to keep organic – organic?
The reason there is a lot of money in the word organic is that consumers believe the word organic means something.
Folks believe the word organic means food that has been grown and processed with integrity.
But, when one is in the business of growing and processing food, the integrity technology gets to be pretty expensive. Growers and food processors of organic foods are always on the look out for ways to cut the costs.
One of the easiest ways to cut the costs of integrity is to pack one’s bags full of money and head to Washington, DC.
All that money, going to Washington, DC, leads us to ask:
Leave a comment below: Will it be possible to keep organic – organic?
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Can’t we just kidnap Monsanto’s CEO and Board of Directors and feed them a straight diet of Roundup-ready, Round-up sprayed wheat for a month, then turn them loose?
I don’t see things getting watered down, every year, our inspection is more oronus and time consuming than ever.
What waters down organic and affecting us the most is availability of organic in most grocery stores, and at very competitive prices compared to conventional. Large scale California Growers and Growers in My state of WA, have shifted production models.
The own rules of organic, follow the money, growing practices are a secondary concern. Can we really expect anything less from government nowadays, they follow the money, they get their cut.
Access to skilled farm labor is a much bigger issue at this time in the world of small scale or large scale farming.
Greenhouse growing with organic or conventional is the future of ag. business, don’t like that… blame the housing crisis, or the chinese, or what ever other foreign investor who buys up large tracts of farmland and plants a monocrop… these are land banks… Real american based farmers will be using greenhouses and going for higher returns, because desirable farmland is too expensive for American owned farmers nowadays.
So lets tackle real issues facing ag first, like access to labor, and affordable quality land, and water rights. Then and only then we can have an honest conversation about the details of what organic really is.
We can also GUT the FSMA of 2010, a program meant directly to put most mid-scale farms out of business through over regulation and shifting blame for food safety back to the farmer instead of the consumer where it should be.