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Julie Guthman

The author of Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (2000, 2014, University

of California Press), Julie Guthman has been a professor of Sociology and Community Studies at U.C.

Santa Cruz since 2003. She earned her PhD at U.C. Berkeley, studying with the radical geographers.

She is a self-professed foodie and admits to disastrous food farming techniques in her backyard, making

the opportunities to find well-crafted meals and wholesome foods at farmers markets all the more

important on a personal level. As her story shows, however, Julie takes very seriously the politics of the

food system, describing here the significant role that the organic movement has had, even as her book

stirred controversy about the illusions harbored regarding that movement. Even so, she wishes for a

greater threat to conventional agriculture that continues to apply pesticides onto fields and put

farmworkers at risk. Read on.

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Her Path into the Organic Field

Though I am not a farmer nor have ever been one, I have organics in my family background. My father

was a health food freak. He owned a health food store in the 1950s in L.A., before most people knew

what health food was, and he talked about organics, though I'm not sure we had much organic produce

in our household, nor was much available.

Still, exploring the world of organic was not something I was planning on doing when I went to graduate

school in geography. I intended to work on questions of the environment and development in Nepal. But

when I had a child, I decided to focus on something more “domestic.”

Through a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley on the restructuring of the global agro-food system in 1995,

I came into working on organics. For a group project, we were supposed to research a particular world

commodity. After some deliberation, my group convinced the professor to allow us to focus on organic

salad mix in California instead. But at the time we could find almost nothing written from a social

science perspective on organics.

So we went to UC Santa Cruz one day and talked to Bill Friedland, an Emeritus faculty in Community

Studies. He said, "What are you talking to me for? Go down to New Leaf Market. Talk to them. Then go

up the road to Route 1 Farms and talk to them." After talking to maybe fifteen growers and a couple

certifiers and several distributors, we quickly learned how much corporate agribusiness was getting

involved in organics. Our research was rich with empirical material. We submitted our paper on it to a

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European journal of rural sociology, called Sociologia Ruralis, and we were credited with presenting

two theses: the conventionalization thesis and the bifurcation thesis. It’s become the most cited article

on organics. People are still building on or rebutting it.

That began my career looking at organics. I remember going to my advisor thereafter, still looking for a

dissertation topic and thinking I might do something about rural restructuring in the Sierra Nevada. He

looked at me. "Are you crazy? This is a no-brainer."

I said, "What's the no-brainer?"

"You've got to do this work on organics."

And I did. While doing the dissertation research, I interviewed 150 growers throughout the state of

California, really paying attention to regional differences. It became a fantastic project.

Lettuce for $14 a Pound?!

In first looking at the organics movement, my perspective was in the vein of political economy. One

question that got me excited about the research came from going to Andronico's, a high-end grocery

store where the salad mix was selling for fourteen dollars a pound! These days it's three or four dollars a

pound. The stuff showing up in high-end restaurants as "organic salad mix" was equally remarkable.

I thought, "This is quite a phenomenon. What's going on here?" Curious about those dynamics, I wasn't

so much following a movement at first but the industry developing around it. I was intrigued by how

organics were becoming positioned in the public imagination, the belief in organic as the agrarian

answer to the industrialization of food, the antidote to corporate food. It was a call for a renaissance or

resuscitation of the family farm: small scale, necessarily more kind to workers, in all ways chemical

free. However, my initial findings through my dissertation research showed that really wasn't the case.

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Agrarian Imaginaries vs. Agrarian Industry

One of the reasons I called my book Agrarian Dreams is because I was intrigued by this marriage

between organics and agrarianism, organics promoted as the idea of a social justice solution to save the

small farm. Agrarianism is based on the idea of Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy, that a nation of

small farms would be more democratic and independent and would ultimately benefit everyone. As

organics became more like industrial agriculture, although far from completely like it, a lot of the

organic old guard felt a loss of what was happening to their dream, and they wanted to reposition

organic as something different from conventional agriculture, and so they drew on agrarianism.

Yet California never had a huge agrarian tradition. California was rarely settled by smallholders who

only used family labor to produce their own food or food for the market, as was true in most of the

Midwest. In California, wage labor was present on most farms from the get-go. So I was seeing a real

disconnect between the small farm imaginary and how agriculture was actually practiced in California.

It was curious to me that growers who were resisting the industrialization of organics were drawing on

an imaginary that didn't quite fit. And they were doing so in a way that skirted labor issues.

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Impacts on the Development of Organics

It's an interesting paradox that organics arose so strongly in one of the most

industrial agricultural regions in the world, in part as a response to that very

industrialization. But organics were also shaped by that industrialization.

In California, agriculture has been dominated by high land values. That greatly shapes what growers can

do and how. Land values reflect the most valuable crop you can grow on that land. That's why, for

instance, you see acreage for wine grapes in Napa’s Carneros district selling for a couple hundred

thousand dollars, because the Carneros wine grapes get so much value in the market.

At the time I was doing my research, many growers I talked to had high land payments, and faced

shortfalls in the prices for what they were growing. So they were moving into organics as a way to get

more value from their land in order to make those land payments. But in doing so, growers were also

contributing to high land values. That's why I say that the organic movement was both a rejection of

industrialization of agriculture but also a response to it, playing into it in all sorts of ways.

Another dynamic that has shaped organics in California is that as more and more conventional growers

became interested in organics, they brought along many of the practices they were already employing.

If they were already using farm labor contractors, they would continue using farm labor contractors in

their organic fields. Many conventional growers were brought into organics because of relationships

with their usual buyers who were now saying, "Hey, look, I need you to grow xx many tons of organic

processing tomatoes for our salsa."

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The Conventionalization of Organics

One strong claim I made in Agrarian Dreams is that organics replicated what it set out to oppose. I do

believe that organic is better than conventional agriculture in many ways. It's not perfect, but organic

farmers do use fewer toxic pesticides, they treat their soil better, and they employ a lot of other

remarkable practices.

However, the key point here is that growers faced some “path dependencies” in the ways that agriculture

could be practiced, and the organic movement couldn't entirely avoid them. Particularly, as more

conventional growers were experimenting with organic, they brought along the capabilities, the

relationships, and the knowledge practices of conventional agriculture.

Another important piece of this industrialization of organics was that it wasn't entirely big corporate

agribusiness biting off chunks and becoming involved in organics. There was a lot of what I’d call

"home grown organic agribusiness," large farms that have done a tremendous job of bringing organics to

a wide range of people, but it's not in practice with the agrarian imaginaries. For example Earthbound

Farms started with two acres in Carmel Valley, and now they have several thousand acres in California,

Arizona, and Mexico. With their success, they became the punching bag for some in the organic

movement. I find the politics of that conflict ambiguous. To get more people eating organic food, and

more acreage in organic practices, it’s good that there’s such growth. Nonetheless, it was not in keeping

with this imagination of small, non-corporate farms.

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Policies and Politics of Organic Labeling

Ultimately I’d like to see more, if not all, of agriculture operate with practices closer to organic.

But I'm not convinced that growing the organic market is the way to get there. My critique lies with the

dynamics of the organic label. I don’t think that labeling is the right route to change. To understand my

point, it's crucial to look at the origins of the organic label.

At the beginning of this history, a group of growers got together and said, "Hey, we're doing things

differently, and it should have meaning in the marketplace. What do we want to call what we're doing?

We'll call it 'organic.'" That group of growers later became CCOF, California Certified Organic Farmers.

Oregon Tilth was getting going at about the same time. These groups were in communication. Many in

the organic movement wanted to get government recognition to differentiate themselves from other

labels, like "natural."

Meanwhile, organics began to have more cachet in the marketplace, especially following food scares

involving the use of Aldicarb on watermelons or the use of Alar on apples. Suddenly interest in organics

exploded. Then some growers claimed their stuff was organic. Quite a lot of consumers were skeptical

about whether these labels were really what they said they were. So the guys who came up with

standards said, "We have to have more assurance here because otherwise anybody can call themselves

organic." Moreover, many players wanted to sell in markets where you needed interstate or international

certification. Exporters would need to have some sort of federal oversight. Out of that phenomenon grew

a tremendously complex system of organic standards and verification.

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Other growers, particularly small growers, resisted this move toward government involvement because

they thought that working with the government was akin to sleeping with the enemy and they didn't feel

they needed those regulations. They could sell in direct markets and had trust-based marketing

arrangements. In fact, since the USDA has developed organic standards and put them into play, many

growers dropped the organic label and no longer even market themselves as organic because they don't

need to; they’re selling in markets where they are recognized for other qualities.

The growers who won out created a set of standards to market their produce, livestock, whatever, as

organic. But then they needed to have those standards verified so that consumers would know it means

something. That’s when the organic movement developed a system of third-party certification, which

means that independent agencies, like California Certified Organic Farmers, Oregon Tilth, Farm

Verified Organic, or Quality Assurance International, would come in and inspect organic producers and

make sure they live up to those standards. In return, growers would get the certification.

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A lot of contention revolved around that very piece. Conflicts developed in the certification market itself

in terms of how fees were charged, the distance between the inspector and the grower, and whether they

were too friendly to those they were supposed to regulate. California Certified Organic Farmers, for

example, was not really third-party certified. In fact, CCOF would have other growers come in and

inspect organic growers in a kind of peer review. That means it was really second-party, because they

weren't completely disinterested. Some growers and organizations working with newly transitioning

conventional growers saw that and insisted, "This isn’t really third-party certification."

Later regulations also insured that retailers and distributors were meeting organic standards. The system

became highly contested, with huge debates about what sort of materials could be considered organic or

not. Often the decision fell on the lines of what is synthetic or not. That's a complicated question

because what determines whether something is natural or synthetic is never very clear. Still a critical

piece was that if you agreed to abide by organic standards, you agreed not to use certain materials, and

you agreed to a farm plan where you sought to improve the soil -- it was voluntary -- once you agreed,

you as a producer would get rewarded in the marketplace with a certification from a third-party certifier.

Then you could sell your food for more. That's how organic agriculture was incentivized. But a system

based on incentives also created all sorts of contradictions.

First of all, as other producers saw that more money could be made on organics (which is still true today

in certain crops), they’d jump in, so eventually those high prices fell. This situation also created a tricky

dynamic, which is that if you’re in, you want to maintain those standards and keep others out, because

the way to continue receiving those high prices depends on others not joining in.

The voluntary label created other problematic dynamics. That is, organics were expensive by design: if

you abide by this label, you get a higher price in the market. That means consumers are paying more for

that premium, so you have to appeal to wealthier consumers who can afford to buy into the organic

marketplace, whether because they believe they’re getting pesticide-free produce or because they think

it's environmentally better.

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Organic Certification Faces Moral Dilemmas

Organic standards were originally fought out among the certifiers who had many discussions about what

should be included in organic practices. As conventional agribusiness got involved in organics, many

raised concerns that the standards would be watered down. And indeed, some say there’s been an

erosion of organic practices and regulations because of conventional agribusiness involvement. Others

were simply disappointed that organic wasn’t what they had imagined. One of their responses was to try

to raise organic standards. In doing so, they wanted to increase the barrier to entry to organics.

So, there were fights, for example, about how long the transition period should be, the rule regarding

when you can claim your crop is organic. The rule was that three years have to pass since you last used a

non-allowable substance. Some folks wanted to reduce the transition period to one year, while the old

guard wanted to increase the transition period – to impose even higher standards. But that's that paradox

again: if we want more people eating organic food and more acreage of organically treated soil, we need

to encourage these sorts of transitions. Naturally, the newer players were very confused by this

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resistance. They said, "Wait a minute! You wanted us to convert to organic. We thought this was what

you wanted, and now you’re trying to make it hard for us?"

Another fight within organics was whether organics should address labor issues. I think that if you want

to transform agriculture, using fewer pesticides and treating soil better, among other factors, the labor

issue has to be addressed. But a lot of growers said, "Hold on! We said we’d be kind to the soil and

reduce pesticides. This isn’t about labor." Still, consumers expected organic growing to be better for

farmworkers. The growers responded, "We are kind to labor because we don't expose our workers to

pesticides.” As it happens, labor conditions and wages on organic farms are rarely any better than they

are on conventional farms – and sometimes they are worse.

So other labels arose not only to address concerns about labor justice, but also about fair trade, wildlife

protection, and so forth. Many of these new labels were driven by disappointment that organic didn't go

far enough and were devised as a way to protect the products and markets of those trying to do more.

That seems a good thing, but then you reproduce that fundamental tension that persists in the organic

movement between those who want to go deeper and farther versus those who want to bring organic to a

much wider audience but maybe not in such a perfect or rarefied way.

Furthermore, while the organic growers are abiding by this voluntary vigilance, all the rest of agriculture

goes largely unregulated. I say that carefully because there is a lot of regulation in agriculture, but non-

organic farmers can use many highly toxic substances, and by doing so they can grow food that is

cheaper in the market. So we have this system where some can afford to buy their way out, and

everybody else gets the dregs. I think that’s the most difficult moral dilemma of organics. If we had a

better system of regulation that pushed growers away from using the most toxic materials, and if we had

more programs that incentivize improved production, we could have a much wider swath of consumers

eating what is presumably healthier and less toxic food.

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The Trajectory of the Organic Movement

I see the movement as originating as a farmer’s movement, a bunch of growers who said, "We want to

be recognized for growing things differently, more healthily.” Many drew on older philosophies relating

to biodynamics and ideas about the soil, including those of the Rodales. The early organic growers had a

philosophy that a more robust, healthy, and high-tilth soil would make for better plant growth and allow

the soil to regenerate over generations. The movement wasn't first imagined as an anti-pesticide

movement.

The connection to pesticides in part came from the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, which got folks

interested in pesticides. Eventually organic morphed into being more about no synthetic pesticides than

a philosophy of the soil. Obviously, these things are related; the presumption is that if you're kinder to

your soil, you'll need fewer inputs of pesticides. Today, most consumers buy organics because they

believe they're getting a pesticide-free product.

You can read a lot into the organic movement by seeing its stages of growth. Looking through early

CCOF archives, I found about 56 organic farmers in California in the late 1970s who were supplying

health food stores and co-ops. When I began my dissertation research in 1997, the California

Department of Agriculture had registered 1533 organic farmers. By 2015 there were nearly 3900.

So what caused that massive growth? The 1980s saw a huge transition from organics being found solely

in health food markets to high-end restaurants and upscale retail grocery stores.

Organic went from being a sign of rebellion to a sign of distinction. In many

ways, the emergence of the foodie revolution started with organics, with

restaurateurs like Alice Waters, one of the first to source her food from organic

farmers.

Alice had a huge influence. But we cannot underestimate the role that restaurateurs more generally

played on developing the organic movement and industry. They transformed this food from being

stunted carrots in a health food store to gorgeous mesclun on a plate. At first, only a few restaurateurs

featured organics, like Stars and Chez Panisse. Now you go to many upscale restaurants anywhere in the

country and the menu will feature organic greens from such and such farm up the road. The '80s

restaurant revolution further engendered interest among upscale consumers who also wanted to find

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salad mix in the grocery store. After that, you started seeing a few other organic commodities in

conventional supermarkets.

Another thing that affected the growth of organics was the 1980s farm crisis. We think of the farm crisis

as mainly affecting Midwest farmers, but it did have impact in California as well. Farm prices for

commodity crops, including basic crops like cotton, soy, and corn, fell tremendously because farmers

had overplanted in the 1970s. Danny Duncan, from Cal-Organic, is a conventional cotton grower who

moved into organics right out of that farm crisis. He was looking for a higher value crop, so he started

growing organics. Throughout the '80s and '90s prices for organics remained high, so a lot of growers

said, "I need to get in on those high-value crops." Those prices spurred a huge wave of conversions.

Following the growth of organics in restaurants and fiascos from the farm crisis, more interest grew in

organics, including from more buyers and retailers. The natural foods chain, Wild Oats, for example,

grew substantially in the late '80s. Whole Foods got started around then, too. In the early '90s, these

natural food retailers began to grow and consolidate. Whole Foods became a major player and started

snatching up other operations, like Wild Oats.

When those retailers came on the scene, they needed an array of products for their markets. They were

no longer just greengrocers featuring organic salad mix. They needed organic salsas, cereals, milk –

organic just-about-everything. (Livestock came quite a bit later.) So these big stores supported another

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huge wave of growth by demanding organic products from processors and distributors. In turn, these

processors and distributors needed supply. So they turned to conventional growers and said, "Will you

grow organic product for me?” Those growers usually didn't care about organic or not, but they were

used to working with their buyers, so they’d say, "Sure." That’s when you start to see huge transitions to

organic; a lot of it was for the processing market.

Impacts of Conventionalizing, Industrializing, Bifurcating

Though Whole Foods today claims that they work with local growers, they began to do so only after

they were pushed into it. In any case, their growth helped create a market for the Earthbounds and the

Paviches of the world, the farmers who could reliably grow in volume. However, when they start

working with conventional growers, the small growers got left out. Earthbound Farms is the classic

story. They started doing this bagged salad mix; and they bought components of radicchio from this guy,

and tatsoi from that guy, and baby romaine from another. But as the company got bigger, the small

growers who had first helped them make their organic fortunes on salad mix fell out of the mix.

Another factor in this shake-out of small growers in the salad mix market was food safety law. You hear

these stories of the old growers who were washing the salad mix in a bathtub. I remember seeing a

photograph of this guy with bare arms, swishing around the salad mix. But then there was a huge food

safety crackdown, with very specific regulations about how to process salad mix. Only the large growers

and shippers, like Earthbound, had the capacity to carry out all that quality assurance.

Again, when we first wrote that article on organics in the mid-'90s, we were seeing a rapid entry of

home-grown "agribusiness," not only Earthbound Farms but also other firms. At the time, we made the

claim that organics was conventionalizing at a rapid place, and so organics looked a lot more like

conventional agriculture than people imagined. We were seeing bigger firms growing on larger acreage,

with more monocropping, and using practices that we might associate with industrial agriculture.

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For example, we saw less attention to integrative practices. Monocrop fields can be very challenging to

grow with some crops, but in some crops growers can do what we call input substitution. They’ll find a

material allowable by organic standards, and rather than use a disallowed pesticide, they’ll use that

instead. For instance, growers were using sodium nitrate for fertilizer, which was allowable because it’s

found “in nature.” The resulting practice didn't look very different from conventional agriculture. It

seemed to be a reduction of organic to inputs: focus on inputs rather than on the whole integrative

processes that we associate with agro-ecology. This approach to organics was very crop-specific,

because some crops were very easy to grow organically by just substituting an allowable organic input.

There was a huge growth in organic raisins, for example. Raisins don't blemish, so if you don't use some

of the inputs, there’s really no loss. It’s harder to avoid using a fungicide with fresh table grapes or any

harder-to-grow crops.

What resulted is what I've called “bifurcation,” which has also been widely debated in the scholarly

literature. Here I refer to the phenomenon where some organic growers became much more like, or

stayed the same as, conventional growers, while other growers remained dedicated to agro-ecological

techniques and smaller farm models.

What's interesting about bifurcation is that the conventionalization of organics led

to an initial loss for small organic farmers. When salad mix and other items

became a big business, many little guys fell out of the market because they

couldn't meet the food safety standards, or the big buyers preferred to go with

more experienced growers. As a result, many small farmers started producing for

their own niche -- selling through direct marketing, for example; farmers markets;

community-supported agriculture; farm stands; or small local grocers -- and didn't

get wiped out at all. Some have done quite well.

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Consumer Impact As It Affects Organic

When I did the second edition of Agrarian Dreams, I looked at new statistics to see what had happened.

I found a significant flattening of growth in the organic sector between 2007 and 2009, right around the

terrible recession. The flattening came particularly from folks who buy organic at Costco or Walmart.

When I spoke to growers for the second edition, those who farm both organically and conventionally, a

lot of them stopped growing organically in that period because the prices weren't there. The demand

wasn't there. Since some of those growers will pretty much grow whatever buyers ask them to grow,

they got out of organics during that period. However, the growers whose niche is the more direct

marketing route flourished quite well during that time, because they have dedicated consumers who are

going to buy organics no matter what.

Having a bifurcated market makes some sense because it means that we’re getting less expensive

organic food to a mass market through the big growers, which is important, while those who want the

aesthetic of direct-marketed organic food can have that, too. But most of the rest of our food is being

produced in the worst possible ways. And that food goes to people who can least afford organic foods.

One important thing to understand here is that if you look at how much land is grown with organics in

the United States, it's really minute. There has been tremendous growth in organics over the years. The

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statistic everybody uses is 20 percent growth per year in organic sales. Growth did flatten out during the

recession, but since then it has returned. However, when I did the research for the second edition, using

USDA statistics I found only one percent of US farmland in organics, although something like two or

three percent of California farmland was organic. I recently read a report by the California Department

of Food and Agriculture that stated that acreage in organic production in California increased by 46%

between 2008 and 2015, while it dropped by 10% overall in the US.

These statistics are kind of weird! So how to explain them? One explanation is that organic sales have

increased much more robustly than organic acreage, because a lot of value-added products are being

produced in organics. Organic imports (think coffee, bananas, mangos) also contribute to the growth of

sales. But I also think that the 20% growth rate is exaggerated, even in California where growth is

robust.

Another odd statistic is that recent studies show that something like 70 percent of American consumers

buy organics at least occasionally. So how do you square this one percent in organic acreage with 70

percent who claim they buy it? Still, there’s no question that consumers actually have had a huge

impact and have grown the organic movement. But changing how we grow agriculture does not all

depend on consumer demand. In other countries we see much more acreage in organic production than

in the U.S. because they have a more robust policy environment for organics. Policies can encourage

conversions, including subsidizing parts of organics. Switzerland and Austria have a higher percent of

farms in organic production because they have better policy support. In the US, there’s so much fear

about federal involvement.

Strawberries and Soil

The role of consumer response has been interesting in my more recent strawberry research. I closely

followed the battle over methyl iodide, a chemical that was supposed to substitute for methyl bromide,

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which is a fumigant used in California strawberry production. Methyl bromide was slotted for phase-out

because it's an ozone-depleting substance, not in accordance with the Montreal Protocol.

I looked at the 53,000 public comments regarding registration of methyl iodide. Almost all but a handful

opposed methyl iodide. It's remarkable how many people wrote as consumers to the effect of, "I will

never buy another strawberry again," or "I don't want your cancer-coated strawberry in my baby's body."

However, the fact is that methyl iodide, which is a nasty chemical, does not affect consumers. It's a pre-

plant soil fumigant, a gas used in the soil to sterilize soil. Methyl iodide is not sprayed on crops, so no

residues show up on a strawberry. So commenters on the chemical were often acting in their capacity as

consumers, when the folks who were most at risk for the use of methyl iodide were farm workers and

applicators and neighbors. Still, because of public reaction, many growers would not adopt methyl

iodide and that contributed to the eventual withdrawal of methyl iodide from the US market, following a

highly contentious lawsuit over the Department of Pesticide Regulation’s handling of the registration

process. Arysta LifeSciences, the owner of the chemical, found it to be “economically unviable.”

Some strawberry growers have held on to the last remaining inventories of methyl bromide, while others

have moved to the remaining available fumigants, chloropicrin and Telone. Still others are moving into

organics and for the old reasons. They say the market is better for organics, and it is. One study put out

by UC researchers showed it costs about the same to grow organic and conventional strawberries; but

growers can get $15,000 dollars more per acre in revenue! They might have much lower yields, but the

profits are better.

At the same time, strawberries are very difficult to grow organically. One problem is the soil pathogens

that the soil fumigants are designed to eradicate. They tend to reappear and are particularly virulent in

drought-stressed plants. It took a long time to figure out how to grow organic strawberries successfully.

Successful organic strawberry farmers don’t grow on the same block year after year but grow in

complicated rotations of maybe every four or five years. They put in brassicas as cover crops,

particularly broccoli, in advance of the strawberry crop, because brassicas have a mild fumigation

quality. If you really like strawberries, you have to eat your broccoli!

Some growers are moving from conventional into organic strawberries. They are doing so mainly for the

market and but also because they want to see if they can grow without fumigants. Yet they are not doing

those long rotations of four or five years. Instead, they do two- or three-year rotations, and they try to

find new ground that hasn't been treated or grown on to plant strawberries there. I don't know how

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sustainable that model is. A lot of people are converting, and they're doing great right now, but who

knows what's going to happen in a few years when those pathogens reappear?

Another interesting phenomenon is that conventional growers, including conventional strawberry

growers, say that they can integrate the best of organic and conventional techniques. They justify the use

of soil fumigants like methyl bromide by saying that sterilizing the soil wipes out all the bad stuff,

allowing them to introduce the friendly microbes. When I conducted my earlier organics research I

talked to several big-name growers who used methyl bromide right before they started their transition to

their organic operation. They said they wiped out all the crap in the soil so they could start it “fresh.”

I've even heard it analogized to a tuberculosis patient: You sterilize the sheets so that you can start fresh

and reintroduce biota. It's a contradiction. The folks who categorically oppose soil fumigation recognize

that you're wiping out soil health.

Regulation-Forcing Conditions Invite Using New Techniques

The issue with strawberries reminds me that another reason growers moved into organics is what I

would call "regulation forcing conditions." They were worried that particular tools they use, such as

organophosphate pesticides, would be taken away, so they began experimenting with organic

techniques. That's true with strawberry growers today, as well. We're seeing some strawberry growers

experimenting with organic techniques, not that they necessarily want to be organic growers, but they're

looking for technologies that they can use, should there be a crackdown on fumigants.

This is hugely important, because it suggests that regulation and governance can strongly affect grower

practices. For a long time, the organic sector was not very attentive to policy. It depended more on

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market-driven changes for agriculture. But policy matters. It is clear that pesticide regulation has pushed

some growers into innovating with organic techniques.

Some new technologies being developed as replacements for fumigants have had success. But they're

very specific to certain climatic and soil conditions; and none have really been scaled up. For instance,

anaerobic soil disinfestation – or ASD – is being tested throughout California by some of my colleagues

at UC Santa Cruz. ASD basically puts a lot of carbon and water into the soil, and then you cover it with

plastic. It's still a kind of fumigation because the carbon crowds out the pathogens. It takes a lot of

carbon sources, though. Researchers have used rice bran successfully as a carbon source, but the

amount of rice bran available is limited, should this program be scaled up. And a lot of water gets used

at a time when we have ongoing drought. It's not an agro-ecological technique by a long shot. Is it better

than fumigants? For sure, since fumigants are very toxic. But it's a far cry from an integrative technique.

Another thing that strawberry growers have experimented with is growing in soil-less substrate, like peat

or coconut. It's moving toward more greenhouse or hydroponic-type growing. We don’t do it much in

California because it doesn't make much sense here. Strawberry growing is so lucrative in California

because you have a nine-month season, particularly in the central coast and Salinas and Watsonville,

when they can pick strawberries from February until November. When you have a great climate and

great soils, moving to greenhouses and soil-less substrate makes very little sense.

However, what's intriguing about growing in substrate is that you can grow in waist-high trays. A lot of

hydroponic operations have much better ergonomic working conditions. Strawberry workers in the

fields have the worst back-breaking conditions, always bent over those long rows. Some alternatives are

showing up, like the cart that Emmanuel Mercado invented, where you can pick in a prone position. So

there can be a third way between industrial agriculture and organics that also benefits workers.

The story of strawberries is significant for organics for several reasons. One is because the strawberry

industry's entry into organics is a good example of bifurcation, but of bifurcation that doesn't quite work.

These guys are dabbling in organics but not really doing integrative techniques. I don't think they’re

long for this world in organics. Two, it’s a story of how policy and technology-forcing regulation can

change grower practices.

But it also holds lessons about roads less traveled for the organic movement. The methyl iodide fight

was very interesting to me, one of the first battles in a long time where activists got contentious. They

brought in the unusual suspects. They worked with farm worker groups, public health groups, and anti-

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pesticide groups. They had a victory around methyl iodide, but that had nothing to do with getting

people to buy different strawberries, though that’s how the public interpreted it, as a consumer issue. It

was actually a different kind of politics that the organic movement has all but neglected.

The Future of Organic

Look at where we’ve come: the '70s was the grass-roots movement; the '80s was the yuppie explosion

and more generalized attraction to organics; the '90s was the movement of conventional growers into

organics; and since 2000, organics has shifted into mainstreaming.

The change in the way organic is regarded can best be captured by looking at two very famous

secretaries of agriculture. Writing in the early 1970s, Earl Butz said something like, "Sure, we can grow

organic, but we have to figure out which 50 million people will die." In contrast, under Tom Vilsack's

administration for the USDA, the USDA adopted an organic standard, and he began to promote it as an

important niche market to rejuvenate US agriculture.1

I wanted to write a second edition of Agrarian Dreams to see what had happened in the fifteen years

since the first edition came out in 2004. One thing that jumped out at me is that organics have gained

much more legitimacy. When I originally did the research, many growers were still skeptical of organics

and thought it was fringe farming. Now, even growers who don’t completely believe in it see it as a

force to be reckoned with. Also in those fifteen years, organic went from being limited to natural food

1 Earl Butz served as the Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He advocated corporate-

farming development. Tom Vilsack served as Secretary of Agriculture from 2009 until 2016 under President

Obama.

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stores, like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, to being featured in stores like Walmart and Costco. You find it

everywhere. Many consumers now see organic as something they might want to try.

That legitimacy is also recognized in public policy, in my mind insufficiently, but organics have been

legitimated by the federal government. You see people moving between spheres, like Mark Lipson, who

used to work for the Organic Farming Research Foundation, becoming an advisor to the USDA.

In those fifteen years the organic sector has continued to grow, although it's still a marginal percentage

of production in the United States. A lot of organic startup companies either grew quite a bit or were

bought out by major food manufacturers. Phil Howard at Michigan State has done wonderful work

documenting the buyouts and mergers. General Mills owns many organic brands, as does Kellogg and

Hain Celestial. Many major brands now own several organic lines or started their own, like Safeway’s

“O” or Trader Joe's organics. So that’s another way we see the mainstreaming of organics. It has always

seemed like a fairly white, elite kind of venture, so I'm surprised by the degree to which organics have

grown, sprouting offspring with community gardens and farmers markets everywhere.

For a long time the USDA was very reluctant to have an organic standard because that would disparage

the rest of the food supply. At some point, people convinced the USDA that it's just another niche, a

different way for agriculture to grow its markets. But that reinforces my point:

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Having organics safely side-by-side with conventional agriculture diminishes

what organics can do to undermine the conventional and unhealthy agricultural

supply. Organic is not a threat, but I think conventional agriculture needs a threat.

As for the future, while specialty food consumption like organics does follow economic trends, interest

in organic is here to stay. Even mainstream consumers now think something is better about organic,

even if they can’t identify what it is.

The public tends to project onto organics what they want it to be. The fact that it just sprang up

serendipitously, spontaneously, says something about its pliability. There was little strategy about

building it as a “movement.” There were strategic thinkers, but as a whole it’s really grassroots in that

sense that it sprang up. Yet it was a growing movement. Organizations held regular conferences, like the

Ecological Farming Conference, where people bonded and felt themselves part of the movement.

But simply counting on the organic market to continue to grow strong on its own will never work

because there are too many countervailing forces. From my perspective, to really challenge the worst

aspects of conventional agriculture will take strategic thinking and action, as we've seen with successes

by activists against the biotechnology industry. Some activists are focusing more on the policy arena.

For instance, they hold discussions about the Farm Bill, discussions that didn't exist ten or twelve years

ago. So the organic movement has unquestionably matured.

A key question is whether there is sufficient unity to have a sustainable alternative to conventional

agriculture. There are still so many different visions for where organics should go, with tensions around

deepening it, spreading it, making it more ecological, more integrative. Yet looking at the most pressing

issues around food and agriculture around the world, much more needs to be done. We see massive food

insecurity due to drought or war; major land grabs by major corporations going into other countries and

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buying land to produce cash crops; malnutrition; climate change. It isn’t clear that the organic

movement can address these.

The organic movement has been terrifically successful at learning to grow and

distribute organic food in better ways. We have much better food in the markets

and at restaurants than ever before. But if organic was about doing more than

producing better food in better ways, if it was about changing the world by

changing the food system, I think it has fallen short.

Over the years, I’ve watched how my students’ interest in the food system change with the latest

iteration of alternative food movements. First, they were very interested in organics. Then it was fair

trade. Then food security came along, which included the idea of bringing producers and consumers

together and cutting out the middle man. That approach aimed both to support farmers and address the

needs of low-income consumers, but it actually didn't address their needs. Now you have food justice

movements to focus on low-income consumers and address food deserts. Some found the organic food

movement too white, which brought new education around racism in the food movement.

So it’s hard to talk about unity in the food movement when you have such big issues and vested

interests. Some people still aspire for the food movement to be a social change movement that will

address issues of labor, food insecurity, and justice. The organic movement is in no position to do that. It

will take other sorts of movements.

In fact, I don't think of organics as a social movement much anymore but as a business. There's no

question that we need sustainable agriculture. Should a social movement come along with the force to

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really impact food production around the world, they’ll borrow techniques developed by organic

farmers, but the organic industry won’t take the lead. Earthbound Farms, for example, does not care

about food insecurity.

Still, the success of the organic industry gives reason to be quite hopeful about the future. Interest is

growing in organic foods and will continue to do so. One success of the organic movement has been

developing really good farming techniques. Compare it to my backyard, full of aphids on my lemon tree

and squirrels eating my figs. We haven't harvested one good olive in three years! I admire what those

growers have figured out about how to address these pests in relatively benign ways. Those techniques

and the knowledge transfer are really important.

Hope & Grit

There’s a lot of concern about the aging of the farm population. The Greenhorn movement sounds like a

great solution for that, with a new generation interested in farming, but it's unclear whether they're in it

for the long haul. I see a lot of students very excited about farming. They treat farmers as rock stars.

Seriously! Some claim they love farming and say how important it is to put their hands in the soil. But I

worry whether these new greenhorns will stay in it. Many of the children of those who have been

farming long-term on multi-generation farms are getting out of farming because it’s rough going.

The reality includes all sorts of obstacles to farming, including access to land, capital, markets. A former

student was visiting the other day. When I first met him several years ago he was saying, "I want to

grow my own food and teach people how to grow, too.” Now he wants to get out of farming after a few

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years. Farming is hard work! It's hard to get into some farmers markets, for example, because they’re

regulated. It's a competitive business. On one hand, you want farmers markets to grow, yet they regulate

how many growers they'll allow in order to keep their prices up. There's a lot of romance about farming,

but to do it for a lifetime is very difficult.

We have to be very concerned about not only developing all the alternatives in

our food system, helping organic food production grow ever stronger, but also

thwarting the worst parts of conventional agriculture. That takes policy work,

going up against the worst sort of practices and substances used. Together, doing

oppositional politics alongside building alternatives provides the best hope of

moving to a food production system in which many more people have access to

higher-quality food, and more land is grown in a kinder, gentler manner.

Ultimately, I’d like to see better agriculture rather than perfect agriculture.