Organic farming today is where public education was in 1978.

Public education had just passed it’s heyday. No one knew it, of course. Everyone took for granted that it would always be as great in the future as it had in the past. But just as the passing of Prop 13 signaled the beginning of the end for California’s locally controlled, locally financed, excellent public education system, so too the passing of the Federal Organics Act of 2002 was the beginning of the end of the small farmer.

Up until 2002, although standards were irregular, farmers were free to create their own versions of what “organic” meant to them, just like local school districts were allowed, within reason, to create their own ideas of “educated”.

Some schools were located within big cities, and had big city problems that small towns didn’t have. They might have had classes on large banking, public transportation, city planning, building city parks, pollution, and so on. Smaller districts might have concentrated on agriculture, improving roads, small local business, coaching, teaching, the extended family structure. They concentrated on what was going on in the local level, because they lived it and could see where they needed attention.

To some farmers,  like the Amish, spreading barnyard waste fresh from the corrals was a time-honored tradition. They didn’t compost every drop they spread- too time consuming, to energy intensive. Who cares, they said, it breaks down in their soil anyway. Just give some time between the spreading and the next planting.

Others, like small-livestock producers in the Midwest, spread rabbit, poultry, or other small game type manure fresh with bedding on their fields, beds, rows, trees, wherever they felt like it. They saw organic as more than just compost- they saw it as saving energy as well as saving money. It didn’t mean anything if they couldn’t create their own system.

Other farmers spread whatever they could find- leaves, chaff, onion tops, radish or sugar beet waste, fish waste, rodent waste, horse, mule, cow, goat, sheep, any waste they could find, and they spread it on in whatever fashion suited them and their system. But not anymore. Now, the waste you spread has severe restrictions, and this push towards farm “sterility” will do nothing towards food safety, which is in the hands of the food processors, not the farmers. Buying expensive compost, forcing farmers to prove when and how they spread what on their fields, this paper trail works against the small farmer. Why should I have to prove anything to anybody about what works for me? Test my food- fine- at your expense, not mine. But if my food is safe, then get off my property and leave me alone.

Some livestock producers fed their livestock such foodstuffs as corn tortillas, expired bread, chips, bagels- all good enough for people to eat, but, according, to the Organic Association, not “organic” enough for livestock to eat. This notion that in order to produce “organic” products, you have to use “organic” inputs is the greatest pile of bullshit to ever be encountered in the Farming Industry. We have spawned a whole new sub-industry of people running around creating organic corn to feed organic cattle, organic seed to sow for organic farmers, organic straw for organic pigs to chew on. This destroys the farmers creativity, initiative, use of local waste products, defeats a farmers micro-system he or she might use, encourages conformity, an unwillingness to rock the boat. Spreading fresh manure is discouraged. Compost in encouraged, even if it is cost prohibitive. Organic seed must be used to grow organic food. And stupider rules- fish caught in the wild can’t be called organic, because it can’t be verified that they have been eating organic feed.

Organic was never, ever about a product. It was never ” I have organic lettuce. I have organic carrots.” It was ” I run an organic farm”. Customers were curious, what is organic, they would ask? What makes your farm organic?  Farmers could then explain how they saw organic. It couldn’t be one size fits all, any more than all schools were  one size fits all. It was a system, a set-up, a theory, a vision. It was all-inclusive. You couldn’t separate your outputs from your inputs. It was a way of making everything work together to create a final product for the consumer. You sold your farm, your way of doing it, you didn’t sell your product. You sold a better way.

Today, organic products are the test-scores of the organic farming industry. You are judged not by your system, your way of doing it, but by your final product. No one cares anymore how you did it, just show me what you have. A test score works the same- No one wants to know who the students are, what their system is, where they are going, how they see the world- Just show me the test score. It’s a cheap, lazy, easy way to judge a school, a district, a teacher, a student. Show me the test score and I will know all I need to know. Just like today’s consumer being told” Buy the tomato. Buy the peach.  You don’t have to think! You don’t have to know the Farmer! You don’t have to know the system! It’s all the same, same-o, same-o. ”

 We now have organic “consultants”, people who once tried to farm, failed, and now give advice, for a price, to other farmers who have not failed. We have organic “certifiers”, people who slowly walk around your farm, inspecting, lifting, poking, asking questions, deciding, deliberating, giving the impression they have knowledge you don’t have. All for a price. We have organic compost makers, organic seed cleaners, organic officials, organic fertilizer makers, organic pesticide makers, organic advisers, organic teachers. We now have all these thousands of people who, prior to 2002, mostly didn’t exist. The farmer barely matters  anymore, he or she exists only to support the organic trade groups, the lobbyists, the entire leech-group beneath him or her. In years to come the small farmer will be moot- you won’t need his skill, her experience, her unique way of turning a patch of land into food and profit. Everything will be spelled out in manuals, and the dumbest rock in the field will follow the book, do this, plant that, harvest now. Creating food will no longer be an art, a wonder, a speciality, a hard-earned skill honed over years of trial and error. It will be a set of rules put out by a centralized group of people in Washington, most who have never farmed. They, like the public education officials on Sacramento, will run the family farm from an office in town, not from the back of a shovel. The Organic Association has been created not help farmers, but to farm farmers. We, as farmers, are the commodity used and abused.

The word Organic was created to mean whatever the farmer decided it meant, following a few simple rules.It was never about sterility, or never any pesticides. The early farmers in England didn’t see anything wrong with spraying a little bit of this or that to stave off blight, or a bit of herbicide to kill a poisonous group of plants. But they were against the indiscriminate use of toxic sprays. Spraying from airplanes. Fumigants sterilizing the soil. Drenching everything in Roundup. Spraying fruits 3 and 4 times per season. They were against the laziest approach, and wanted the farmer to take a long range approach.Feed the soil first. Spray as little as possible. Recycle farm waste into farm inputs. Sustainability. Don’t overgraze or over plant. Rotate. Accept a smaller yield for a constant yield every year.

Now, the word organic has been stolen. Once in the public domain, it is now the property of the US government. They stole it and auctioned it off to the highest bidder. It means less now, to be organic, than it did in the past, when you had to create an organic version of yourself. Today, it’s already created, cookie cutter versions of organic farmers, handed down through USDA rules on what organic now means. Another graceful art defeated, another culture slowly eroded by greed, by fear, by conformity, by lack of education. The USA is a land slowly caving in on itself. Other countries, other cultures protect their farmers, work hard to set an ideal for the next generation to look up to. In the USA, we look up to the Almighty Dollar, and who can grab and hold on tightest. Watch close today, and you’ll see the disappearance of the Independent Farmer, and our regression back to the share-cropper. The Corporations own most of the USA, and now they want to own the farmer too. Watch the once proud,  angry, strong, resolute Independent Farmer forced to kneel and bow and scrape before the mighty United States Government and it’s ally, the Corporation. Watch it.   Watch it, I said!  Watch it and you’ll never stop weeping.

If you want to see and understand the direction organic farming is going,   look no further than the rise and fall of Public Education.

 My home state of California once held the title of Greatest Public Education in the Country. From K-12 to higher education, it was the crown jewel of the United States. Other states tried to copy it, other countries closely examined it, it was a wonder. From 1950 thru 1960, California was in it’s golden age of education. California teachers were the best paid in the country. A California teaching credential guaranteed you could teach in any state in the union, and in most countries. In the mid 60’s, half of all California graduates went on the higher education, compared to a third in the rest of the US. 20 schools were being built a day to educate the swelling population, including one of the greatest accomplishments- The UC system and the Cal State system, a group of colleges built in various places in the state, priced low enough that almost anyone could afford to go. It was a heady time.

Today, California ranks near the bottom. A California teaching credential is seen as a liability, not an asset. Teachers are fleeing en masse to better opportunities elsewhere as salaries have dropped, and their power and dignity stripped. . Schools are crumbling to the ground, with leaky roofs, oudated computers, torn carpet, broken desks. Teacher turnover is incredibly high. No longer is the small school built for the local 500-1000 students. Mega schools, built to house 5000 and up are built, because it’s cheaper to build one massive school than five small ones. Kids are squeezed, crushed, ignored, bullied, left alone, and then pushed, prodded, manipulated, and “taught” to do one thing, and one thing only- get a high test score. And today’s California high school graduates? Only 29% will go on to finish college and receive a degree, a stunning, shocking, sad number.

This is not the fault of the teacher. California teachers are some of the best in the country still. The problem started with funding first- Prop 13 was passed in 1978, which cut funding to local schools by half by reducing property tax on the homeowner. The public simply turned their collective economic backs on a school system which had so enriched them and enriched their state.

Massive waves of immigration also caught the system unaware. Different languages, different customs, mostly poor people, searching for the American Dream.  Educational Foundations started, not for profit groups, which raised money for schools, blurring the lines between public and private schools began, with richer school districts affording more experienced teachers, better facilities, smaller classes, and happier students. Prop 13 changed funding for the schools. It took local money and local control away from the local school districts.  Now, the state controlled the purse strings, not the local school districts.

With power of the purse, the state set out, seeking to “improve” the schools. No longer did the local principal or superintendent have broad discretionary powers. Policy began being rigidly set by people up in Sacramento, people who had never been in a classroom as a teacher. So now you have non-teachers, non educators,  setting policy for schools and teachers.

Fads started-  The first was Whole Language Reform, which tried to teach kids how to read without first teaching them how to read- by going about it backwards. People at the state level who had never taught a day were now convinced that this was the way you teach children to read. You give them a book, push them to read without first sounding out words, or being taught the skill of  reading. Like throwing your 14 year old kid the keys to the car, and saying ” Let’s go. We’ll learn as we get out on the road”. Of course, thats exactly what we do with sex education today. We don’t teach them anything of value, and then when they turn 18 we say” Ok, now go and be sexual”. But that’s another subject.

Whole Language Reform failed miserably. In 1995 California had the lowest reading scores in the nation. An embarassed state finally scrapped it.

 Without consulting anybody local, state officials decided next to simply reduce class size. Spending a billion dollars a year, starting in 1996, the offered $650 per student to any K-3 school whose classes held less than 20 students each. They believed that this simple act would give teachers less of a work load, thus giving more instructional and individual attention from the teacher to the student.

But things are not that simple. By reducing class size, you increase the need for more classrooms. And having more classrooms means you need more teachers. And needing more teachers means you need more money to pay them. And needing more money to pay them means you have to cut back on other services, because $650 per student wasn’t nearly enough to pay more teachers.  And because you needed more money to pay those teachers means you needed more students worth $650 each. And, of course, more $650 students means you have to crowd more students into classrooms, which means you can’t keep class sizes under 20 kids.  Schools were caught in the revolving door of portable classrooms, unqualified teachers, cutting back on services, reducing salaries, needing more than you get, robbing peter to pay paul, a never ending cycle of always having less than you need.

And today? Test scores, the Holy Grail of Education. Test them, test them, test them. Test, baby, test. That is the mantra. As though testing prepares a student to do anything but- learn how to take a test. This absurd, stupid, ignorant way of educating children and young adults could only be dreamed up by people who have no experience working in a classroom. A standardizes test score says exactly nothing about a student and everything about a state official justifying a large salary, desperate for a way to “educate” students, throwing peas up against a wall, hoping some of them stick.

I won’t even comment on No Child Left Behind- There are so many children left behind that only someone of George Bush’s character could dream up something like this- another non-teacher, another unqualified person setting policy, a person who doesn’t have to deal with more rules, more regulations that don’t work on an everyday basis.

By ceding control of education to a centralized group of people who don’t understand education, California’s once mighty and proud school system today is completly and utterly broken. Today, California still ranks near the bottom. Dropouts are high. Students can’t afford college, or come out with  thousands of dollars in debt. The schools are still falling apart. Tension is high. And still, people who have never taught but are paid six figure salaries up in Sacramento are setting policy for a wide range of towns, cities, cultures, and economic disparities.

In California today, the fastest growing industry is incarceration, where prison spending is up 17%, while funding for education has fallen even further, with the Governer holding back funds he promised 2 years ago.  The small elementary school near my farm, where my kids went to school, has closed because of lack of funds, and three others are going to close. More kids will spend the next 12 years crowded into already  over crowded schools, and everyone wonders why they don’t want to go to college. Schools are closing, and prisons are opening- that’s California’s future.

 ( Many thanks to The Merrow Report, ” From First to Worst”, for these statistics and information )

So what the hell does this have to do with farming, Rick?

We have been asked many times why we are not certified as organic anymore. Good question.

When we decided to leave it behind, I wrote an article in the Press Enterprise about our reasons, and the reasons why it no longer worked for us. I got a lot of feedback from my customers who said they sympathized with us, and understood. I have had more time to reflect on our reasons,  and I can be more articulate about our decision.

Here is some background first-

1. The whole basis for the organic movement, which started in England in the late 30’s and early 40’s, was about recycling waste from your farm, including manure from the animals, chaff and stem from the grains, table food waste, crop harvest waste, leaves, cuttings, and so on into your fields to enrich and fertilize them for the next crop. That’s it. Called the Law of Return by Sir Albert Howard, it was simple, straightforward, and emphasized the farm as a unit, a whole, and you could and should not split the farm into separate entities. Thus if you grow lettuce, for example, you are relying on residue from livestock, trees, table waste and such, to incorporate into your lettuce beds.

2. No one took organic seriously until after Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. She argued that the indiscriminate use of pesticides were killing song birds in forests and fields next to farmer’s fields. Note that she was against the “indiscriminate” use of pesticides.

3. When organic started becoming noticed, it was ridiculed as not producing enough to feed very large amounts of people, i.e. the world. Conventional farming was the way to go, with artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and so on. They said that if all farms went to organic, we wouldn’t be able to feed everybody.  This was absurd logic, as the original pioneers of organic never intended to produce huge yields of food. They simply wanted less outside farm inputs, less pesticide use, and a sustainable model to regrow year after year without a large drop in yield.

4. Organic was laughed at until it started making money. Then it was taken seriously. It was not taken seriously because other farmers believed in it. Only because it was making money for organic farmers.

The passing of the Federal Organics Act in 2002 was a death knell for the small farmer. We told our fellow farmers time and again it would mean the end of the small family farms, but driven by visions of big paydays, and the belief that it was the “right thing”, they embraced it with open arms.

5. Organic food exploded from 1996 until 2006, plateaued, and now is dropping off, as we predicted. It has lost it’s status as an “art”, and is now seen as routine by customers who only know it as “no pesticides”. And most farmers, even early farmers, use that hook to explain how organic farms work, The general public has no idea of what is involved, and farmers are wrongly selling their products to customers instead of selling their farms.

Our personal reasons for leaving are these-

1. Our concept of independence refuses to allow our farm to be run by the federal government.

2. The costs, which are substantial, go the federal government, in part, to support the organic food export business of the United States. That is, food that is sent overseas, to Japan, to the Soviet Union, to China, to South America, to Thailand. What is organic about flying organic carrots to Japan that were grown in California?

3. Nowhere in the bylaws and the rules of the FOA does it mention what most farmers are most ignorant about and in need of education-  water and energy. Knowledge of these areas are critical to success on a farm, and take far more skill to manage than soil fertility. There is a soil test to guide us, but there is no one size fits all water or energy test.

4. Much is spent in the FOA upholding the lofty ideals of soil sustainability, but not a word is said about something much more important- economic sustainability. Building fertile soil is fine, and necessary, but it means nothing if the farmer is losing money and going broke. Farmers leave farming not because they can’t grow great crops, but because they lack strong profits, either through ignorance, fewer good markets, rising costs, or simply, lack of a good, sound, long term business plan. Stop viewing the organic farm through the prism of the product. Stop testing the soil, and instead test the farmer’s business sense.

5. Large companies have consolidated into mega- farms to take control of certain organic sectors- view the chart here. This would have been impossible with a loose, unregulated free market group of small family farms. But now it is all to common.

6. Small family farms will disappear, as they have no real way to control and sell what organic means to them. This one size fits all mentality and show me the paper trail regulations are the leg up large corporations needed to control this organic market. Small farmers will simply drop out, being unable to afford the certification costs, or the constant paperwork, or the cost of doing business.

7. Organic farming was a specialty, an art, using niche marketing and specialty crops, along with local fertilizers and waste products. Because of  new restrictions regarding the spreading of manure, and the push towards compost, including strict record keeping and the assumption that raw manure is ultimately toxic, farmers will be forced to buy compost. Even the smallest of farms will be unable to make all the compost he/she needs. This added expense is just another dollar in someone else’s pocket other than the farmer.

8. The last avenue the small organic farmer has is the Farmer’s Market System. Once a fabulous way to sell products, keep local money local, introduce yourself to the community, and really have a direct impact on society, they too, have slowed down. Farmers used to be able to do 1-4 markets and make a good living, but now, the same farmers need double the number of markets to achieve the same results. With new farmers coming in with no business skills, they seek to ride the coattails of the “organic” movement, not realizing you sell your business, not your product. Quickly becoming disillusioned, the leave soon after, and another future farmer is gone. No one cares, no one is educated, no one realizes how one less small farmer means one more step the corporations make in controlling this food supply, from seed to table.

9. We’re not against farming organically. We are all for it, because we do it everyday. And we are not against making sure farmers are held accountable. We take our farming seriously. But we are against setting standards that reward the deepest pockets, and that promote conformity and fear. If there are a thousand farms, then there are a thousand ways to farm, and they should be encouraged to follow their path accordingly. But if that happened, then money would be wonderfully  scattered across the country, held in thousands of hands, local farmers,ranchers, merchants, carpenters, townspeople . Local business would work with local money, schools would have local money, money would circulate within many different hands within the same towns.

But now it’s harder, and may be impossible. The passing of the federal organics act has made it easier for the very few to control the very many. Now, money goes to the people at the top, concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, leaving less for the people at the bottom. Every dollar spent to benefit this act pushes the small farmer closer and closer to a slow, sure financial death. You have all seen the beginning of the end for the small farmer. Watch it and weep.