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organic farming
The USDA and Corrupt Organic Certifiers Are Betraying Farmers and Consumers
Corporate agribusinesses are playing fast and loose with the rules by choosing friendly compliant certifiers—and when they are caught in the act, the USDA often fails to take action.
Oct 13, 2024
Some of the oldest and largest U.S. Department of Agriculture-accredited certifiers have partnered with corporate agribusiness to change the working definition of organics, allowing large livestock factories; certified, uninspected imports; and soilless hydroponic produce grown in giant industrial greenhouses to be certified organic.
Organic certifiers are mixing lobbying, marketing, and activism with their certification responsibilities, and taking payola from the clients they certify. They are also certifying “producer groups” in Eastern Europe, Central America, and Asia without inspecting and certifying each individual farm.
This is against the law and an egregious conflict of interest—and it’s crushing U.S. farmers in the marketplace while raking in billions of dollars in profit for these large certifiers.
The corrupt practices employed by these certifiers have left authentic organic farmers, who focus on sound soil stewardship and humane animal husbandry based on pasture, highly disadvantaged in the marketplace.
In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA), tasking the USDA with oversight of dozens of certifiers to ensure their independence and harmonization of standards.
Fast forward to today and the USDA is now allowing a handful of the largest certifiers to collude with corporate agribusiness to industrialize or import the organic food supply at the expense of high standards and the livelihoods of U.S. farmers who adhere to them.
As executive director of OrganicEye, an organic industry watchdog, I’ve witnessed family-scale organic farmers who abide by the USDA’s organic standards get crushed in the marketplace by dubious organic imports allowed into the U.S. without the certification or inspection that federal law requires.
In September, OrganicEye requested that the USDA Office of Inspector General investigate the National Organic Program for failing to prevent corporate influence—including financial payments made to certifiers over and above inspection fees—and failing to enforce other USDA regulations that prevent conflicts of interest, thus lowering the quality of certified organic food.
OrganicEye recently filed a third formal legal complaint against a certifier, Florida Organic Growers (FOG), and their certification arm, Quality Certification Services (QCS), for accepting contributions, conference sponsorships, and other payments over and above certification fees from operations they oversee.
FOG has joined two of the other largest “independent” certifiers in the country, California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) and Oregon Tilth, in selling out hard-working produce and livestock farmers by certifying giant industrial operations, many allegedly flagrantly breaking the law. Legal complaints against all three are currently pending.
When money changes hands between agribusiness clients and the profiting organizations that certify them, we call that “payola,” classically defined as corruption. These certifiers are acting as agents of the USDA. And the regulators in Washington responsible for auditing them are looking the other way.
Large organic certifiers should not be partnering with corporate agribusiness and cashing in on the growth of organics, especially while other certifiers are upholding the traditionally high standards.
In its first action to reign in certification abuses, OrganicEye filed an administrative law complaint against CCOF, the nation’s largest certifier, in November 2023 to address this out-of-control certification system.
We’ve seen organizations like CCOF, Oregon Tilth, and FOG morph from being among the founding farmer-led groups facilitating the growth of organic farming in the U.S. to multimillion-dollar business enterprises certifying multibillion-dollar corporate agribusinesses.
Recent IRS filings show these certification giants have reaped tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue while “masquerading” as tax-exempt public charities, with the vast preponderance of income derived from service fees paid by their business clients.
In addition to the controversies surrounding certification of livestock factories, a number of prominent certifiers, along with the industry’s primary lobby group, the Organic Trade Association, executed a stealthy campaign in 2017 that resulted in regulators allowing mammoth hydroponic greenhouses (soilless production) to be certified as organic, despite statutory and regulatory language requiring careful soil stewardship before a farm can be certified as organic under the USDA program.
That rich, organically-curated soil microbiome is the foundation of organic farming practices, resulting in superior nutrition density and flavor. That’s lacking in hydroponics, which uses liquid fertilizers derived from materials like conventional soybean meal.
The corrupt practices employed by these certifiers have left authentic organic farmers, who focus on sound soil stewardship and humane animal husbandry based on pasture, highly disadvantaged in the marketplace. With many small organic farms struggling economically—and hundreds more being forced out altogether—the devastating impacts are clear.
It doesn’t have to be this way. And not all certifiers are behaving badly.
For example, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is universally viewed as one of the most ethical certifiers. They do not approve hydroponic greenhouses or factory farms as organic.
Since OrganicEye began publishing its research concerning alleged improprieties at the nation’s largest certifiers, we have received numerous inquiries from farmers indicating interest in switching certifiers.
We hope that our research inspires ethical farmers and certified organic business operations to consider switching their allegiance and economic patronage to certifiers who share their values and interpretations of federal law.
In the meantime, consumers and eaters can use the same guide that we have prepared for farmers to help identify some of the most creditable organic food in the marketplace. Federal law requires every package with the word “organic” on the front label to include the name of the certifier supervising the production process. This is commonly found on the back or side panel near the ingredient list.
With the USDA delegating so much authority to certifiers, there are now effectively two organic labels: corporate brands affiliated with OTA lobbyists and certified by their members, motivated by profit and industry growth, and other ethical brands that have not lost touch with the foundational precepts of the organic movement.
OrganicEye is offering free consulting and other resources to farmers around the country who are switching their patronage to certifiers who share their values rather than undercutting their livelihoods.
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“Vegetarian”…Why Not “Planetarian”?
Only with democracy—specifically a living democracy—can we transform our wasteful, destructive food system to ensure everyone’s fair access to healthy, ecologically grown food.
May 22, 2023
"Planetarian. What’s that?”
I am eager to explain. In the late sixties, as I struggled to find my path, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb had just exploded, admonishing humanity for overpopulating the Earth and creating food scarcity. Soon, several friends even pledged never to have kids.
So, I had to know: Was Ehrlich right?
I dug in at U.C. Berkeley’s agricultural library with my dad’s slide rule in hand, asking: Is it true that we’re running out of food?
No. Emphatically no, I soon learned.
We did then—and do now—produce enough food for all. Yet decade after decade we turn abundance into scarcity for too many: Today, 1.3 billion people—1 in 6 of us—lack consistent access to the calories we need. And safe and healthy diets? They’re out of reach for almost 40 percent of humanity, and the crisis is predicted to worsen.
Why?
Simply put, our world’s gross power inequities—political and economic—are the root cause. As the richest 1 percent control about half the world’s wealth, food policies serve elite interests, not commonsense or our planet’s health.
When our dietary habits incorporate environmental, justice, and health awareness as well as animal welfare, might we be "planetarians"?
One result? Staggering inefficiency.
Humans directly eat only about half the calories we produce. And the other half? While some become biofuel, in the U.S. we devote three-fourths of agricultural land to livestock production. And, of every 100 feed calories that cows eat, we get only three calories back in that burger or steak on our plate. With dairy cows, we get less than half the calories they’re fed.
The big picture?
Worldwide, almost 80 percent of our agricultural land produces livestock that give us only 18 percent of our calories.
Other costs include vast environmental harms: Producing animal foods generates greenhouse gas emissions 10 to 60 times greater than producing plant-based foods. Plus, 60 percent of biodiversity loss worldwide is caused by livestock. Moreover, livestock grazing is responsible for almost 40 percent of global deforestation, worsening the climate and biodiversity crises. Natural historian David Attenborough warns us we are facing the 6th great species extinction, which requires a dietary shift toward plant food.
Plus, “industrialized livestock” generate 85 percent of soil erosion, also a major threat.
Next, water. Our heating climate diminishes fresh water supplies; yet to produce just one pound of beef we use 1,800 gallons of water. Globally, “animal agriculture” accounts for nearly a fifth of all freshwater use. Here in the U.S. cattle farming uses more than half the water drawn from the Colorado River, for example, even as area’s current water crisis already threatens many farms and puts dozens of fish species at risk.
Meat-centered diets also directly damage our health: In 2015, the WHO declared red meat a probable carcinogen and processed meat a carcinogen.
In sharp contrast, plant-centered diets have been shown to lower body weight, boost the immune system, and decrease cancer risk, coronary heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. So, no surprise: A plant-centered diet is associated with “lower risk of all-cause mortality” in U.S. adults.
It makes no sense. Why would we humans—supposedly the brightest species—actively shrink our food supply?
Why?
Because the deeper scarcity we’ve failed to address is that of democracy. On political rights and civil liberties, Freedom House—confounded by Eleanor Roosevelt—ranks us way behind nations we think of as peers. The U.S. comes in 59th between Panama and Samoa. Yet, only with democracy can we transform our wasteful, destructive food system to ensure everyone’s fair access to healthy, ecologically grown food.
Thus, much of my life energies have gone toward what I call “living democracy” in which we each have both economic and political power.
So, how does shifting my diet serve democracy?
In nourishing ourselves we make multiple choices daily. That alone gives food special power. With each choice I know I am sending signals back through the food chain for sane, fair use of our Earth.
Suddenly, my every bite has delicious purpose. As a vegetarian, I’ve loved knowing I was protecting animals and avoiding massive waste. But now I wonder whether “vegetarian” captures the full impact of such food choices. So, what if we reconceive good eating as not just “plant-based,” but “planet-healing”?
When our dietary habits incorporate environmental, justice, and health awareness as well as animal welfare, might we be "planetarians"?
I believe that with every step aligning our lives with our deepest truths, we become more convincing to ourselves and thus to others—and more likely to take our next step and the next…with ever greater courage. And that’s exactly what our planet needs now more than ever.
So, “planetarian” feels great.
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Climate Policy's on Shaky Ground in the Farm Bill
As the struggle against fossil fuels carries on in our states and communities, the quest for serious action in Washington on climate and ecological renewal will focus largely on the national push for a radically new kind of Farm Bill.
Mar 19, 2023
Members of Congress have begun drafting the 2023 "Farm Bill," and they’ll be wrangling over it through most of the year. This legislation, passed into law anew every fifth year or so since the 1930s, has had far-reaching influence on food and farming in the United States. Each version of the bill is given its own name; the previous one, for example, was called the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. Given the nature of the early debate over this bill-in-the-making, it might end up deserving to be called the Food and Climate Bill of 2023.
Over the next two years, any legislation explicitly aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will be dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. By default, the Farm Bill may now be the playing field for the only climate game in town, according to Washington-watchers such as Peter Lehner, who represents the group Earthjustice. He told Politico last month, “The farm bill is probably going to be the piece of legislation in the next two years with the biggest impact on the climate and the environment.”
Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act beefed up several of the Farm Bill’s climate-related conservation programs to the tune of an additional $20 billion. And the Washington Post has reported that a task force of more than 80 “climate-conscious House Democrats” is working to further extend the bill’s green impact, with additional protection for existing forests; planting of new stands of trees; conservation of soil, water, and biodiversity; and research on protecting crops against climatic disasters, including drought.
Meanwhile, March 6–8, a coalition of 20 sustainable ag and farmworker groups under the banner Farmers for Climate Action held a “Rally for Resilience” in D.C. Their message: “The next Farm Bill needs to explicitly empower farmers to address climate change, by providing resources, assistance, and incentives that will allow them to lead the way in implementing proven climate solutions.”
Climate politics get dirtier
Because there are farmers and ag-related industries in every state, whether red, blue, or purple, Farm Bills routinely pass with broad bipartisan support. It’s typical, therefore, for Congress members representing rural red states to make common cause with those who represent populous blue states with big ag economies, such as California, Illinois, and Michigan. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly “food stamps”) and the Women’s, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program also are parts of the Farm Bill, further extending its political base of support.
Controversy arises nonetheless, most often in debates over the bill’s conservation provisions. Agribusiness, for example, often sees protection of soil, air, water, and biodiversity in rural areas as detracting from or interfering with the Farm Bill’s focus on boosting production of the major commodity crops and keeping food prices low. And now that climate action is increasingly finding a home in the conservation section, pushback from the right has increased.
The chair of the House Agriculture Committee, G. T. Thompson (R-PA) has vowed to minimize climate policy in this year’s Farm Bill, while cutting other conservation programs in favor of traditional industry-friendly spending. According toEENews, “Some Republicans are eyeing the farm bill as a chance to redirect climate money to other agriculture programs, such as crop subsidies, while other conservative lawmakers want across-the-board spending cuts.” The hardliners may even try to rescind the $20 billion for climate mitigation that the Inflation Reduction Act has directed toward the Farm Bill.
Climate denial is alive and well in Congress. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), who now chairs the conservation subcommittee of the ag committee, told Politico, somewhat fuzzily, that “CO2 is not responsible. Especially American-produced CO2, I mean we’re a tiny part of the whole thing.” Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) is trying to divert attention to just about any remotely ag-related issue that doesn’t involve climate protection. Pointing his colleagues toward a couple of favorite targets of right-wing hostility, he has called for investigations into the purchase of U.S. farmland by Chinese interests and for cuts in SNAP benefits to low-income families. Meanwhile, five House members led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL) got even meaner, with a letter to President Biden urging him to “enact work requirements” for SNAP recipients.
Feed people, not steers and SUVs
Farm Bill debates are often complex, technical, and littered with clumsy acronyms, commodity-market arcana, and bureaucratic jargon. Only the nerdiest Congress-watchers have the attention span and patience to go deep enough into the weeds (literally, in some parts of the bill) to understand what it’s all about. Even in Congress, only a minority of members and staff have solid familiarity with the issues. This year, nearly half the members of the House of Representatives have almost zero Farm Bill experience, as they were not in office during the last debate, five years ago. But with climate at the center of this year’s debate, members on both sides of the aisle, whether well-schooled in ag issues or not, are now wading into the fray.
Most of the policies that are needed to flip U.S. agriculture’s climate impact from deleterious to beneficial are good and necessary in their own right. Even if there were no climate emergency, the nation should be adopting agricultural policies that, along with cutting emissions, can improve soil health; prevent erosion and water pollution; curb the ongoing wipeout of biodiversity; and prevent agriculture from further disrupting the global nitrogen and phosphorous cycles.
The first step would be to stop doing things that not only generate greenhouse-gas emissions but also wreak ecological havoc of other sorts. If you don’t mind taking just a few steps into those weeds with me for a moment, I’d like to cite scientists at the University of Georgia and the University of New Mexico who have argued convincingly for deep cuts in the production of fuel ethanol and meat—especially grain-fed beef—actions that, they show, could achieve the greatest reductions of fossil energy use (and therefore of greenhouse gas emissions) in agriculture. The quantity of energy contained in the fossil fuels used to produce feed grains for cattle exceeds by an order of magnitude the amount of energy contained in the beef that’s produced by those cattle and sold. And the production and delivery of fuel ethanol, from the cornfield to the gas pump, requires as much or more energy (mostly from fossil fuels) as the ethanol will supply to a vehicle’s engine.
Beef and ethanol also have a broad range of other disastrous environmental impacts.
Therefore, the most effective action Congress could take is to stop using the Farm Bill’s conservation funds to support these and other ecologically harmful, climate-busting agricultural practices. For example, the 2018 Farm Bill supported one such practice: confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), such as cattle feedlots and factory farms for swine and poultry. These super-polluting facilities have deeply negative impacts on both local environments and the global climate. The 2023 bill should end all support for CAFOs. And rather than pursue the expansion of ethanol production, as the Department of Agriculture is requesting, Congress should flush ethanol completely out of ag policy.
We can’t get there with annual crops
Agriculture generates only 11 percent of total U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, so reducing emissions from the farm sector, important as it is, can go only so far toward driving total U.S. emissions toward zero quickly and steeply. However, unlike other sectors of the economy, farming also has the potential to help mitigate climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through nature’s preferred method of carbon sequestration: photosynthesis.
To use U.S. farmlands and forests as reservoirs for atmospheric carbon would help to reverse a massive loss of soil carbon that began long before the age of mechanized agriculture. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, native grasslands and forestlands across North America were plowed up to make way for corn, wheat, cotton, and other annual crops—replacing vast, biodiverse, perennial ecosystems with plantings of annual monocultures. Extensive root systems, alive year-round, were killed off across hundreds of millions of acres, to be replaced by the sparser, ephemeral root systems of crops that had to be resown with every growing season. For much of the year, there were now only spindly seedling roots or no living roots at all to support the soil ecosystems that had thrived before the arrival of the plow. Consequently, over subsequent decades, countless tons of carbon that had been captured by plants over millions of years went back up into the atmosphere.
Accumulating enough carbon in the soil to mitigate climate change effectively will require switching from annual to perennial crops across most of U.S. farm country, to get soils even part way back to their robust state. Fortunately, the necessity for perennial agriculture is being expressed more widely in this year’s Farm Bill discussion than in previous years, with both the scientific community and grassroots climate and sustainable-agriculture groups calling for more perennial farming systems.
For example, a coalition called Farm Bill Law Enterprise, “a national partnership of law school programs working toward a farm bill that reflects the long-term needs of our society,” is arguing that perennial agriculture must be one of the highest priorities in the 2023 bill. In its report, titled simply, “Climate and Conservation,” the group pushes for perennial forage crops; interplanting of tree crops with annual crops; “forest farming and multi-story cropping”; perennial fruits and vegetables; and perennial cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds. The group goes on to urge more funding for research and development of perennial agriculture in the U.S. Department of Agriculture itself, especially on grain crops, and for “research on the economic and social conditions critical to development of perennial agriculture systems and markets.”
Needed: A fifty-year Farm Bill
Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture by ditching products such as fuel ethanol and grain-fed beef would mesh nicely with the use of perennial crops to capture more atmospheric carbon and store more of it in living roots deep in the soil. If U.S. farmers were to stop producing the bazillions of bushels of corn and soybeans that go into feeding cattle and biofuel plants, tens of millions of acres would be newly available for growing perennial range, hay, and pasture crops. From those, more modest quantities of grass-fed beef and dairy products could be produced. And each year, more and more of the lands liberated from annual feed grains could be sown to perennial food-grain crops.
Wes Jackson and Fred Kirschenmann envisioned this sort of grand transition in their proposal for a “Fifty-Year Farm Bill” in 2009. But at the time, the breeding of perennial food-grain crops (which would be necessary to achieve that last step in the transition) was just getting started. That process is now well underway.
Over the past two decades, efforts to domesticate and breed perennial grain-producing crops have progressed from their beginnings at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas (where I work), to be taken up by research networks worldwide. These networks now include more than 50 researchers across North America and five other continents, and solid results are emerging. Development of perennial wheat is accelerating. A perennial cousin of wheat known as Kernza® is under pilot production in the U.S. Plains, the upper Midwest, and Europe. Highly productive perennial rice varieties are being grown on tens of thousands of acres in China and on a smaller scale in East Africa as well. Breeding and ecological work are continuing, with perennial food legumes and perennial grain sorghum under development, in addition to the wheat and rice.
* * *
The need to start a precipitous phase-out of oil, gas, and coal is more acute than ever, but federal legislation will remain out of reach as long as there’s a climate-hostile House majority. So, as the struggle against fossil fuels carries on in our states and communities, the quest for serious action in Washington on climate and ecological renewal will focus largely on the national push for a radically new kind of Farm Bill.
It is essential both to purge fossil fuels and to perennialize agriculture. No two policies are more crucial to preventing ecological meltdown.
The original version of this article was published by City Lights Books as part of their ‘In Real Time’ series and appears at Common Dreams with permission.
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