By Harold Henderson
Ironically, Angelic Organics is now in danger because eight years ago the organic movement won a great victory: its leaders persuaded Congress to pass Title XVI of the 1990 farm bill, now better known as the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA). That law says that anybody who sells more than $5,000 of farm products a year can call them organic only if the USDA agrees. Violators can be fined up to $10,000. The law hasn’t gone into effect because the USDA hasn’t yet adopted regulations that would fill in the bill’s sketchy outline of what counts as organic and what doesn’t.
Organic farmers held out on the margins. They insisted that the life of the soil was important. They either put up with insect pests or sought out nonpesticide controls. They hoed or cultivated weeds instead of spraying them with herbicides. They planted cover crops and plowed them under or spread livestock manure instead of piling up artificial fertilizers on the soil. They preferred smaller, lighter farm equipment because it didn’t pack down the soil as much. They composted crop residues and locally available nutrient sources (seaweed, sawdust, cannery wastes) and applied them to the soil. All this is hard work. And little of it can be standardized, even from one field to the next.
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The activists huddled with Kathleen Merrigan, who worked for Vermont senator Patrick Leahy. Merrigan compiled the numerous existing organic standards and tried to work out a consensus, a heroic job. Some two dozen states and private groups were then defining and certifying organic food. They weren’t all equally competent, and they didn’t all agree on the fine points. “New Hampshire and Texas require dairy cows to be fed exclusively organic feed,” reported the Senate Agriculture Committee in 1990, “while Kansas, Maine, and South Dakota require unmedicated feed and California and Oregon specify time periods during which certain feed must be used.” Such variations “lead to consumer confusion and troubled interstate commerce.” And they made it hard to sell American organic foods overseas.
