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How Big Food Stole Organic, and the Fight to Reclaim It with Dave Chapman
241 Plays5 months ago
In the 1990s, the success of the US organic movement seemed undeniable. Demand for healthy, chemical-free produce skyrocketed amidst public health concerns and a growing environmental consciousness. As a consequence, many small organic farmers could make a real living selling healthy produce and restoring farmland in the process.
In the decades since, however, the story has gotten much more complicated.
Corporate co-optation, lax government oversight, and splinters within the movement itself have created a new set of challenges for organic farmers and activists - challenges our guest today is helping lead the fight to overcome.
Dave Chapman is a lifelong organic farmer, and Co-Director and Board Chair of the Real Organic Project, an organization dedicated to reigniting and reconnecting the organic movement. In this episode, he takes us through the history of the organic movement, where it is today, the differences and similarities between organic and “regenerative”, and where the movement can go from here.
In this episode, we cover:
- The history of organic, tracing its roots from indigenous practices to modern day agriculture.
- The original definition of organic and the fight to maintain those core principles through the Real Organic Project.
- The longtime debate over certification and institutionalization.
- The organic boom, the entrance of Big Food into the marketplace, and the challenge of enforcement.
- “Regenerative,” and the risk of cooptation of any new label.
- The difference between building brands and building movements, and an insight into what that movement can look like.
- And much more...
Learn more about Dave and the Real Organic Podcast at the Real Organic Project.
More about Dave:
Dave Chapman is a lifelong organic farmer who runs Long Wind Farm in Vermont. They grow the best tasting organic tomatoes in the country in the fertile soil underneath a glass greenhouse. He is the Co-Director and Board Chair of the Real Organic Project, dedicated to reigniting and reconnecting the organic movement. He leads the Real Organic Podcast, providing a platform for many organic farmers, eaters, scientists, authors, educators, activists, and chefs. He was a co-founder of Vermont Organic Farmers in 1985, and was among those first certified by the USDA’s National Organic Program in 2003. He served on the Policy Committee of the Organic Farmers Association for 6 years. He also served on the USDA Hydroponic Organic Taskforce. He has worked for years as an advocate for reform of the National Organic Program. He has met with Secretary Vilsack seeking reform of the organic program. His latest project is the creation of the Tomato Masterclass, a training for farmers working to create a stronger economic base for their market gardens. In his spare time he practices tai chi to stay sane and healthy.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller of You Should Have a Podcast, who also wrote our theme song.
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Transcript
Persuading Major Companies to Expand Organic Programs
00:00:01
Speaker
Is it our goal to try and persuade the big players, you know, the Cargill's and the General Mills and the Nestle's of the world that they should start organic programs and expand them? The really big question is if we invite them in to sit at our table, will we change them or will they change us?
Introduction to Agrarian Futures Podcast
00:00:33
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
Admiration for the Real Organic Project
00:01:02
Speaker
Welcome Dave to this podcast. We're really excited to have you today. I am a huge fan of the work that you've been doing at the Real Organic Project and also of your podcast in general. To get us started, we've heard you talk about organic as a movement and how
00:01:22
Speaker
organic needs to be a movement and perhaps that's what it's lost over the last 10 or so years. So could you kind of tell us what you mean by that and your history with that having been there since the beginning of the organic movement in the U.S.?
History of Organic Farming
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah, great. Thank you, Emma. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I can't say I've been here since the beginning. I'm old, but I'm not that old. So I think I got started with organic as really kind of first gardening and then farming back in the 70s. And it's when I came to Vermont. I was been living in Washington state and I came to Vermont
00:02:02
Speaker
And there was a lot of energy, a lot of young energy. And it was still the backwash or the aftershocks of the Vietnam era. Vietnam was just a huge, huge thing in our history. And I'm old enough to remember it. And this time where there was a huge shift in what people believed, what they wanted to do, young people at the time, their beliefs in what kind of food we should eat and how you should make a living and what
00:02:30
Speaker
what basic life values were going to be. These were all shifting and they're shifting quickly and dramatically. And of course there was a lot of sex, drugs and rock and roll tied into that. So it was a party. It was fun, but it was also very serious. And out of one of the things that came into that tumult was, was organic farming, which had already been in the U S for 15 years. Maybe by then it was really brought over from England as a movement or as a something.
00:02:59
Speaker
And when it came to the US from England, at first it was kind of this thing that was done on a very small level, and you would get organic food in these strange health food stores, which were basically, they sold pills, they sold vitamins. And we can't even imagine, they had these little bags of whole wheat flour, and they started to talk about organic, because people didn't want the chemicals, they didn't want the toxins. And then it,
00:03:29
Speaker
Everything blew up in the Vietnam era. And I came after that. And when I started farming, there was no certification or anything.
Challenges in Sourcing Organic Products
00:03:38
Speaker
So it was purely a movement. And I was one of many young people. I actually did grow up on a farm, but most people didn't. They'd never touched a tract or anything.
00:03:49
Speaker
But they had this idea that surely we could do it differently than go and get food that was produced on big farms with a lot of chemicals and then processed by these big companies, these multinationals, and then distributed and sold. Surely we could do things differently and better. And we should, we should do things differently. So I was part of that. And we started to eat very differently and we ate a lot of
00:04:15
Speaker
whole grains and organic vegetables, organic grains. And there was no certification. So we were just choosing to do it differently. And we had these early food co-ops where we'd get together because we wanted to buy this food. And you couldn't get it in a store. You couldn't get organic. It's not in a supermarket.
00:04:35
Speaker
There was no space on the shelves for that. And so we wanted it. So we started going, I think we can get some actually organic grain from this guy who doesn't use any pesticides at all. And this cheese comes from this righteous dairy, and they do things right. And so that's how it worked. And that's how it came in. And then I started doing it, and I wanted to do it for a living.
The Birth of Organic Certification
00:05:00
Speaker
I wanted to make a living doing this.
00:05:02
Speaker
As I went along, organic was growing. We formed our own certification because we wanted to find a way, an easier way than going through food co-op. A co-op back then was more like a CSA. It wasn't like a co-op supermarket. It was like somebody's garage.
00:05:20
Speaker
and you'd go and everyone would volunteer and you'd cut up the cheese and put it in Jimmy's box and Jane's box. So we wanted to find some way that maybe we could go to a store and get the stuff that we wanted to get. And of course, those of us who were farming wanted to find a way that we could make a living, that we could connect with the people who wanted to eat that kind of food. That's how it happened for me. And after
00:05:45
Speaker
maybe 15 years, the National Organic Program came into existence, well maybe 20 years, they came into existence and started federal certification of organic. And we can talk about whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. It's not a simple thing.
00:06:00
Speaker
So you started farming along with a large group of dynamic, hopeful, optimistic young people in the 80s and 90s that wanted to create this revolution.
90s Organic Market Boom
00:06:10
Speaker
From my understanding in the 90s, organic really started to grow. And you had a lot of farms and companies. I was working for Organic Valley. That's when they got started and they grew.
00:06:23
Speaker
they were doing very well like the demand was growing in the grocery stores more and more grocery stores were taking in organic products it seems to me like a quite a good era for organic farmers and then. In the two thousands at some point things started to sour a little bit can you tell us about that or if i if i even got that right.
00:06:42
Speaker
I think you got it right. And of course it wasn't like simple. It didn't just happen that one day real organic farming wasn't doing well. Indeed, once the USDA got involved, the market continued to grow and grow and grow and grow. And I believe that the USDA's involvement helped that happen.
00:07:02
Speaker
So there was money, some money, you know, being spent by the government to support organic farming. A pittance compared to what was being spent to support chemical farming. A tiny pittance, but nonetheless it was something. And
00:07:19
Speaker
It's interesting to look at what are the problems. The basic obvious problem is that organic started to have success in the marketplace. And every time there was some kind of a food scare, a pesticide scare, an alarm scare, it was like, boom, everybody suddenly said, oh my God, I don't want to poison my kid. I need to find some organic food.
00:07:41
Speaker
It was always the parents who were the most sensitive market to go, we need to do a better job because we love our kid and we don't want to poison the kid. As there started to be success in the marketplace, other companies, big companies, started to say, I think maybe we could make some money here.
Integrating Major Companies into Organic Markets
00:08:02
Speaker
How could we become part of this?
00:08:05
Speaker
And we have to say, okay, good, we would like to change the world. So this is a really interesting question. Is it our goal to try and persuade the big players, you know, the Cargill's and the General Mills and the Nestle's of the world that they should start organic programs and expand them? And the really big question is if we invite them in to sit at our table, will we change them or will they change us?
00:08:35
Speaker
I believe that the answer is, in the end, we're going to do most of the changing because they're not going to change very easily. Yes, we will create some change, but these are massive organizations and they're essentially amoral. I'm not saying that the people who run them are amoral, but organizations are amoral.
00:08:55
Speaker
Once you have a group of 20 people, they're going to follow the mission. Their mission is to make money. So at the same time that organic started to succeed in the marketplace, and it did. Dairy is a very good example. Back in 2016, it looked like Vermont was going to go organic in its dairy industry.
00:09:15
Speaker
because the small farmers, and Vermont is mostly small farmers, could not make a living in the conventional market, but they could make a pretty good living in the organic market. And how exciting was that? It was like, look, it's working. Everything's working just according to the plan. Unfortunately, there was something else going on, which is those big players came in and they saw the market opportunity, these are not stupid people,
00:09:44
Speaker
And they started to figure out how they could influence the process to make it more profitable for them. So what was the least amount they could change what they do? How could they substitute approved inputs for prohibited inputs?
00:10:01
Speaker
If they fed the cows organic grain, was that considered organic? Could they still keep them packed into a barn? And for a long time, the answer was yes, they could.
Scrutiny of Large-Scale Organic Practices
00:10:12
Speaker
And now, theoretically, the answer is no, and yet that still seems to be what they're doing.
00:10:18
Speaker
So those big confinement operations for poultry, for cattle, for pigs, which are sold under brands like Horizon and Applegate, and every supermarket chain now has an organic brand, a house brand.
00:10:35
Speaker
and they buy from the Aurora dairies of the world and they're paying a little bit less than somebody like Organic Valley and their stuff is cheaper, but it's enough cheaper that Organic Valley can't actually charge what they need to charge what they used to charge in order for their farmers to make a living. Can you talk a little bit about Aurora? What does that operation look like?
00:10:59
Speaker
Aurora's a big company. I don't know, they got like four mega dairies. I know they have 4,000 cow dairies. They probably have 10,000 cow dairies. And they'll be milking probably 24-7, three times a day, day and night, just keep milking and milking. And mostly the cows are fed on imported feedstock, which is gonna be a lot of grain and some hay and haylage and silage, but a lot of grain.
00:11:28
Speaker
And there are pasturing requirements with the organic standards, right? And so even a dairy of that size would technically have to hold to those pasturing requirements. I think it's 30% of their feed intake for 120 days during the growing season or something like that.
00:11:45
Speaker
But if it's a 4,000 or 10,000 head dairy, that seems impossible to actually do. How do they get around that? And then I guess tied to that question is, where do you see problems with the USDA standard versus the enforcement of the standards?
00:12:02
Speaker
The biggest problem is the enforcement. It's certainly in dairy, it's enforcement. And the great research on this, the great expose was done by Peter Worsky in the Washington Post. And he did a multi-series group of articles
00:12:19
Speaker
on the problems in organic. And one of them starred our friends at Aurora. And the Post did a lot of research. They did flyovers, photographing in the middle of a nice day. And there were hardly any cows out in pasture. They were still all in confinement. And they tested the milk. And the milk tested showing it did not have the kind of conjugated linoleic acids that a pasture-fed cow would have. It looked like CAFO milk.
00:12:48
Speaker
And it was CAFO milk. But they did this whole story, and it was very good. It's well worth going back and reading it. Nothing has changed that I'm aware of. So yes, there's a big enforcement problem. I spent some years trying to reform the National Organic Program, and I failed. We had one victory, and it was only a half victory. And mostly we failed. We failed to have them even call a moratorium on certifying hydroponics.
00:13:16
Speaker
They have not yet made any meaningful shift in shutting down the fraudulent grain imports, and Aurora is still getting certified. And so is Herb Brooks, which at one point at least produced one out of ten of every certified organic egg sold in America, this one facility, two stories.
00:13:38
Speaker
chickens who like literally have never been outside in their lives. And that certified is organic and it's wrong. And we all know it's wrong.
00:13:47
Speaker
Dave, would you say that in a way we're dealing with different definitions of organic? I'm curious to hear your definition of organic. In my lifetime, I've mostly operated out of the assumption that organic means that there's no pesticides, no chemicals applied to the food as a lay person's definition of organic. But it seems that there's considerably more. Could you share a little bit from your perspective there?
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, of course. So the organic farming has been going on for thousands of years. It's not new and nobody invented it. It's, I would say, the best of indigenous agriculture. And there's a book called Farmers for 40 Centuries.
00:14:32
Speaker
And it was a guy from the USDA who went, I think, around 1910, somewhere around then. And he went to Southeast Asia, and he traveled around and saw this land that had been farmed for 4,000 years under considerable population pressure. And it was still highly productive, highly fertile, and it was entirely nonchemical. So we knew it was possible. And the people who created the organic movement
00:15:00
Speaker
as a post-organic farming, which was old indigenous agriculture, right? But the people who created this as a movement were reacting to the chemical invasion. And they're going, this can't be right. And they weren't just talking about insecticides. They were talking about fertility. Like when you add some nitrogen fertilizer to the soil, you shut down the life in the soil.
00:15:25
Speaker
You shut it down. And when you add fungicides, you certainly shut it down. And amazing pictures of how the life in the soil changes and what the relationship is of all those microbes to the roots of the plant. And so you end up in a chemical system with a bare root. And you end up in a good organic system with a root that's just teeming with life around it in the root zone.
00:15:51
Speaker
and it's got this beautiful drooling sticky stuff going from root to root that's exuding photosynthetes, products of photosynthesis that the plant has put out through the root and it's gone into the microbes and they're exuding it. So the plant is giving those microbes life, the energy, which it creates through photosynthesis without which we all die. And as it turns out,
00:16:16
Speaker
We have co-evolved as part of this beautiful, beautiful system of a living soil in which plants grown in that way provide us with the nutrition that we need. They're nutritionally dense and nutritionally diverse.
00:16:33
Speaker
So people eating these diets, if you ate a whole food diet that was grown in healthy soil, you would be much healthier. And there's lots of research to indicate that, but it's not very popular research in the food industry today. That's what organic farming was
Foundation of Organic Farming
00:16:49
Speaker
about. So Albert Howard wrote two books. One was called an Agricultural Testament. The other was called Soil and Health.
00:16:56
Speaker
So these people cared about what's the impact of the food you eat. And they didn't, they didn't talk that much about pesticides. Yes, of course they didn't want pesticides, no pesticides, but it wasn't just a reaction to what you shouldn't put on your food. It was a reaction to what you must put into the soil in a way that you will grow the food that doesn't need pesticides. And another woman who was writing at that time
00:17:22
Speaker
was Eve Balfour, she wrote a book called The Living Soil. These are hugely important books, and as you go back and read them, they're still very readable. They didn't have the sophistication of microbiology that we now have, but all of the research in the last 80 years has pretty much confirmed that they were right. The top soil microbiologists now go, oh, she was right, she was right, and we can explain it much better now.
00:17:52
Speaker
So that's what organic farming is. It's not just the absence of chemicals. So this is a complicated subject. And I understand that when we try and sell this to the world, you know, when Bob and Jane go to the store and they want to get some food for their kid, they want the food without pesticides. And it's an easy sell. It's an easy pitch. But it's not the only pitch. It is important.
00:18:15
Speaker
There's still pesticide use has not gone down. It's going up and up and up. Herbicide use is through the roof. It's just going at a meteorific rise. But there's more than that.
00:18:28
Speaker
So in this definition of organic, we're talking less about are there chemicals applied, but we're talking more about this is related to organic matter and organic life in the soil. We're talking about biological farming, right? Farming in tandem in collaboration with the soil biology, with plant biology, rather than treating the soil as an inert substrate.
00:18:52
Speaker
that we're then feeding the plant directly through our man-made chemicals. We want to be working with biology and with natural systems rather than with man-made chemical input systems.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yes, some of the ways in which organic is being seriously challenged is when people come in, and certainly the companies do this. There are college courses in California. They're called organic agriculture. And they're entirely about, what can you substitute for this chemical that's allowed? What can you substitute for that chemical that's allowed? And they're essentially creating an agriculture that's entirely input dependent.
00:19:31
Speaker
And that's not what organic agriculture is. There was a famous debate, we will say, between the founder of the Soil Association, which was the first big organization in England to promote organic farming. Her name was Eve Balfour. She wrote The Living Soil.
00:19:49
Speaker
And a younger guy came in and joined. His name was Patrick Holden, and he was one of the young Turks, the young people coming out of the late 60s and early 70s who wanted to be organic farmers. And their discussion, their debate was whether or not there should be certification. This is an important issue. And Lady Eve said, I don't think so, because how can you define this stuff? It's so complex.
00:20:15
Speaker
We're going to create these standards, and what's going to happen is it's going to bring in money from people who really don't care about what we're talking about, and it's going to degrade organic. He said, yeah, but I need to make a living, Lady Eve, and I need to find a way to sell my milk and carrots to people who don't know me.
00:20:38
Speaker
And I need a label so they can go, oh, I trust this. And when Patrick told this to me, I said, well, Patrick, I think you were both right. I think Lady Eve was absolutely right. And I think you were absolutely right. So we have to learn to live with a contradiction and guard against both of the extremes. I think that we do need certification. I think it serves an important role and
00:21:04
Speaker
We must understand that it will be abused and we have to become activists in dealing with that and say, no, no, no, that's not okay.
Need for Organic Certification
00:21:14
Speaker
So I think that those are both real. And, you know, I have friends who are one extreme or the other.
00:21:20
Speaker
I think Elliot Coleman would probably say, we don't need certification. We just need to know each other. And Elliot has developed a beautiful thing where people come to his farm and buy their food. And I wish I lived there because it's the best food in the country. But not everybody is Elliot and not everybody has the marketing chops to pull that off.
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, I see your point about kind of having to accept both sides. And I think I personally experienced that in my life. I think on the one hand, the distancing is a huge problem. When you go to a grocery store, you're just buying some organic products from some anonymous farm in California or something, and there's absolutely no connection. On the other hand, like you said, not everyone can go to a farm to pick up all their food.
00:22:06
Speaker
And i personally when i do see a real organic project label in the supermarket i do trust it but one of the reasons i trust it is because i think there's not much of a market incentive for people to adopt it so as a farmer.
00:22:22
Speaker
I know that if a farmer chose to get certified, it's probably because he cares about it from a principal's perspective. So I'm just wondering if part of the problem here is when any label becomes marketable.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yes, Emma. That's right. Tom Vilsack. I had a meeting with Tom. We didn't agree about much. But he said, well, aren't we going to need a real, real organic project? And I said, we might. We might need a real, real, real organic project. We might. Because we might have to keep reinventing ourselves. But I don't feel like getting a new word
00:23:03
Speaker
because we will never protect a new word. Same problem. The moment we begin to succeed, and I would say this is what's happening to regenerative right now, is the sharks will come swimming in very quickly and tear it apart. So I don't have a perfect answer, except that we have to keep educating ourselves
00:23:25
Speaker
and each other so that we're not such gullible prey for the sharks. And we have to get more sophisticated in our understanding and then in our decision making.
Real Organic Project's Mission
00:23:38
Speaker
We have to become food activists who are saying, you know what? I'm going to pay more for that food. I'm going to go out of my way to get that food. I want to support that farm because they're doing what I want. I think they're bringing life to the planet instead of death. So I think that we have to do all of that. And these conversations are the beginning of that, but they're not the end of that.
00:24:00
Speaker
I want to get into the regenerative, the label, or the claims around it, but I'm curious to learn about what are the goals of the Real Organic Project? Is it to create your own label? Do you also want to be influencing USDA Organic to create incentive for them to really do the enforcements right on what they have stated? What does that look like?
00:24:23
Speaker
First of all, this is not about building a brand. This is about building a movement. And that's just a very important distinction. Nonetheless, in order to build the movement, we are going to have to build brands. And again, that same contradiction. We're not all going to know each other. And even if you know who it is you buy all your vegetables from, who grows your coffee? And we can think of lots of things that aren't
00:24:48
Speaker
going to be strictly local. And you might be such a local for that you go, I don't want to eat coffee. I don't drink coffee. I don't want to ever have an orange again unless I hitchhike down to Florida or whatever, walk to Florida. But while they don't have oranges in Florida anymore, you might have to go to California.
00:25:05
Speaker
Most of us do get food from people we don't know and even people who are fairly strong about this. So I do believe that the food system is a reality and it's not all wrong to have something that's beyond hyper local.
00:25:20
Speaker
but it should be based as much as possible being hyper-local and then regional. I mean, even better than hyper-local is grow it yourself, if you can, and then on and on and on. But there are lots of people, they can't possibly grow it themselves. They don't have any land at all. They don't have a yard. So we have to build a food system that will work for everybody. So you ask, what is the goal of the Real Organic Project? It is to build a big enough movement
00:25:49
Speaker
that we can get the food we want and deserve. And that is possible to grow. And it's even economical. It won't be the cheapest food possible. The cheapest food possible will always be it. Somebody's going to pay for that cheapness.
00:26:04
Speaker
Right? First, people are going to pay to the farm workers. So if the food is worth so little, the first thing that happens is the wages get cut. I interviewed two guys from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. They were fantastic. What heroes. And they said, we started out by protesting the farmers in Florida who were running these horrible farms and treating the workers so badly. But the truth is,
00:26:31
Speaker
We realized they didn't have many choices. I mean, they didn't have to be such assholes, but they didn't have many choices about what they could do because they couldn't make money any other way except to squeeze the life out of the workers. They were pretty well-squosed too. And so they shifted and started to instead protest against the buyers, against Walmart, against Whole Foods. Their first one was against Taco Bell.
00:26:56
Speaker
And they took them four years of protesting Taco Bell, and then they got a contract. And once they got a contract with Taco Bell to only buy from farms that were certified by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, then they got Walmart. They got Whole Foods. They got 12 of them now. And it's a big deal. It changed the world. It changed the world. So for me, it's the best 21st century example of a successful boycott that worked. It was very strategic in how they did it.
00:27:26
Speaker
So in my mind, the Real Organic Project is building a big movement, and it's educating people. But it's also creating a label that people can then use to support the farms that they now understand why they should support. So that's the goal.
Regenerative vs Organic Farming
00:27:42
Speaker
So let's look at the regenerative movement. As an example of some extremely well-meaning people
00:27:50
Speaker
who have really good ideas, some of them very sophisticated, knowledgeable ideas about how to do farming better. And it was dormant for many, many years. And then some Midwestern farmers picked it up again. Basically, they used organic techniques, how to use less inputs. That was their whole thing. Let's buy less fertilizer. Let's grow our fertilizer. And let's bring animals back on the farms. And they're doing great stuff.
00:28:19
Speaker
It was not organic. So one of the things that defines that Midwest regenerative, a few of them are, but most of them are chemical no-till. So they use herbicides.
00:28:30
Speaker
and they try to use them judiciously, but they definitely use herbicides. So for me, that's not my solution. It's not my answer to the food I want to eat in the world I want to live in. I don't want people buying stuff from Syngenta and Bear, Monsanto. However, it was still an improvement, but you have to realize that when it started
00:28:52
Speaker
It was neither trying to educate eaters, nor was it trying to create a label or a brand. It was trying to educate farmers, farmers educating farmers about, hey, if you do this, you might get slightly lower yields, but you'll make more money. It was not about climate. That came later. It was just, this is a better way to farm.
00:29:14
Speaker
And eventually they started to talk a lot about climate and carbon sequestration. Now they're talking about labeling quite a lot. So now it's very much aimed at the consumer and the government and not so much at the farmers. I mean, they're hoping that a rising tide will lift all boats, but the truth is every player in big food has embraced the term regenerative there.
00:29:41
Speaker
Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, ADM, Bungie, Pepsi, McDonald's, General Mills. You almost can't think of one that hasn't embraced it and said, yeah, I'm with them. We're going to be regenerative in three years or five years or six years. And what does that mean? Well, we don't really know.
00:30:02
Speaker
and they all have different things that they mean. But what none of those groups means, none of those groups is imagining a world that doesn't use a lot of herbicides.
00:30:12
Speaker
Because they need to make money. That's their business model. That's their business. And frankly, for Bayer and Syngenta, they also plan to sell a lot of fertilizer, and they plan to sell a lot of biocides. So we have a problem now. We just invited Godzilla to come in for lunch. And Godzilla said, yes, I will. And sat down at the table crushing the chair and said, what are we eating? And you're looking around going, I hope it's not me.
00:30:40
Speaker
You know, there's still wonderful people trying to save the world, honestly, of the best impulses in the regenerative movement. Some of them actually in their heart of hearts believe in organic, but there's going to be a bit of a nasty vibe here.
00:30:55
Speaker
I'll tell a story. We had a listening session about the Real Organic Project at EcoFarm last year. And a very nice woman was there, about 25 people. It was like the workshop at Marvel Seed, but we were in a small room, so it felt fantastic. And this woman got up, and she was from Kiss the Ground. And she said, I just want to appeal for all of us to work together. Surely we have the same goals, and we can cooperate and support each other.
00:31:22
Speaker
Fine. And then it went around and then another woman got up and she said, I just want to say, I'd watch Kiss the Ground, I just want your film Common Ground. I'm an organic farmer and I felt personally violated by it.
00:31:37
Speaker
It was like the whole room goes, you know, so we're having a very serious conversation here. And the farmer said, not once in these films is the word organic mentioned, even though we're a huge worldwide movement with millions of farmers and many millions of eaters. And in the US right now, they just said they, they sold $70 billion of organic stuff last year. So.
00:32:04
Speaker
It's happening. It's a real thing. Why are they acting like we aren't? And in fact, they're fairly critical. So what do we do about that? I don't know. I used to say I really wish them well. And now I'm not sure who they are. What I'm waiting for is a real regenerative movement. And guess what? The real regenerative movement would be the real organic movement. We do completely align. I think that one of the reasons that
00:32:33
Speaker
Some of those regenerative pioneers chose to be regenerative rather than organic was because organic is a very unpopular term in the heartland, in the Midwest.
Promoting Organic Labeling in the Midwest
00:32:46
Speaker
And it's bad enough being regenerative if they're organic. Nobody would talk to them at the coffee shop, seriously. That's what it was like in the beginning with organic and academia. I talked to one scientist. He said when I went back to University of Maryland where he had worked, he said my former colleagues would literally cross the hall and hug the wall as we walked by each other. They didn't want to be contaminated.
00:33:10
Speaker
And it was a very radical thing for an academic to do. It's still pretty radical for a farmer to do this in the Midwest.
00:33:19
Speaker
I just wanted to say there are a growing number of other regenerative standards, none of which require you to abandon biocides. Gabe Brown is one of the most famous regenerative farmers. He's the star of Common Ground and Kiss the Ground. And he started with friends, something called Regenerified. And I've just seen their fundraising deck. I was dismayed by it. It's a for-profit business.
00:33:43
Speaker
And down at the bottom, they list all these companies that are going regenerative. It's like, isn't this great? We're winning this revolution. And there were a number that caught my eye, but one that really stuck out was Driscoll's. And Driscoll's has vowed to be 100% regenerative on all their buried production by the end of 2025. And I thought, well, I wonder what regenerative means.
00:34:05
Speaker
if these dudes are going to be regenerative, because I don't know what to say. They're moving more and more into hydroponics. They definitely use chemicals. They use chemical fertilizers. Even if they're in the ground, it's mostly a drip feed. The fact that regenerated wood in any way associate themselves with that is not a good sign for me. So there's going to be a lot of regenerative labels, a lot of them.
00:34:27
Speaker
All our friends who are regenerative now who like that and claim it in 10 years, they're going to run from it. It's going to be a real weasel word. I can't help it. It's not my fault. It's not about anything I did. It's just what's going to happen. It's going to be like sustainable. Yeah.
00:34:45
Speaker
Are some of these labels, is it built in that there is maybe an entry point to regenerative, let's say regenerative level one, but that you are required to move to a regenerative level two in a set amount of time. Is that built into any of these certifications? Yeah, some of them are very fond of levels.
00:35:04
Speaker
And it's wonderful, but it's just going to create total confusion in the marketplace because people are going to go, yeah, I'm certified with them. And what level are you? I don't know. I mean, you know, it's just, look, I'm okay with it. People can do what they want. And if that's what people believe in, they should do it. But I do believe when they use that to attack organic, which is the one that says, no, you can't use that stuff.
00:35:31
Speaker
And Real Organic says, yeah, you must actually work on building the health of your soil. I think that's a mistake for us as a culture. And I would imagine if enforcement is challenging enough with USDA Organic, one standard, the enforcement on multiple levels within one branding, much less having so many different labels is going to be so many times more difficult.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yeah, I just think it's doomed. There's a lot of great people involved in it. And who knows where they'll go. The great people won't stop being great. But I think they're going to discover that they don't want to be seen in the picture with Syngenta and Cargill.
00:36:19
Speaker
and Pepsi. They don't want to be in that picture. And Pepsi very much wants to be in the picture with those small farmers who are claiming to be regenerative. And proudly claiming that title, I think Pepsi goes, great. In fact, we'll give you a grant, right?
00:36:35
Speaker
We're going to pay a lot of money, which is just part of our advertising budget, to support regenerative agriculture. And some of that money will go to those farmers. And it's hard to pass up money to help you do a good thing. I'm not saying they should pass it up. I'm just saying, wait a minute, what's going on here? Let's pay attention to this. We get it that Cargill is probably not going to save us, and Bear is not going to save us. So what do we do?
00:37:02
Speaker
because they certainly control the USDA, and they control a good deal of our Congress, and they make the laws be what they want them to be because they have that much power. Well, we could elect better politicians. And I think the answer is we need to build a movement.
Building Movements Against Food Industry Monopolies
00:37:20
Speaker
It's happened before in this country, as I said, 100 years ago, there was a strong movement to break up the monopolies.
00:37:28
Speaker
They were pretty successful, and they were successful for a long time. I don't mean that they eradicated big companies, but they stopped them from having such overwhelming power. They were actually at least forced to compete with each other, and it was a more fractured marketplace. What we have right now is the appearance of an incredibly diverse marketplace that is incredibly not diverse.
00:37:52
Speaker
there's 57 peanut butter brands and they're all controlled by one company. That's the kind of reality that we live with. And that's true in everything. So you go to the supermarket and you go, look at all the choices. This is great. This is, you might not say this, but you might say, great, this is capitalism working, right? Cause capitalism can work, but it can't work with monopoly. Capitalism does not work with monopoly. So if you happen to be a conservative, traditional economist who believes in capitalism,
00:38:21
Speaker
You don't believe in monopoly. You think monopoly must be stopped. And I love those guys who say that because they're out there. They're out there. And I agree. One of the dairy farmers I interviewed, I think he's very conservative politically, but he was fantastic. And he believed in everything I believe about agriculture. And he had integrity. So if he was running the world and he wasn't swept away by running the world,
00:38:50
Speaker
then we would have integrity and transparency. And instead he was being destroyed by what was happening in the National Organic Program. And he served five years on the National Organic Standards Board. He did his time in the trenches fighting for it and failing. And he was very depressed about his failure.
00:39:07
Speaker
So it's not going to be easy, however we're going to solve this, and it's not going to happen tomorrow. I think that right now, Lena Khan is the head of the Food and Drug Administration. She is fighting monopolies as well as she can with a small federal agency.
00:39:27
Speaker
I interviewed Zephyr Teachout, who is a friend of Lena's. And also, they've done a lot of work over the years on anti-monopoly. Zephyr's fantastic. And in my last interview with her, she said, people say that what Lena Khan is doing doesn't matter. It's just not important. She said, I'll tell you who it is important to, the Wall Street Journal. And they've written 100 op-eds against her since she's been in that position.
00:39:55
Speaker
So these things do matter and it's a big deal that someone like her is in a position like that. We need more. We need a hundred lena cons. We need a thousand of them. Every state needs a lena con or 10, you know?
Sustaining the Organic Movement
00:40:10
Speaker
So I think this is creating a movement and I believe it is the right answer. It's the only answer that I can find to the ever growing consolidation. It's not like
00:40:23
Speaker
We've got monopoly, we've had monopoly for a long time. I can say in the food system, I'm watching over and over the farms getting bigger and bigger and more consolidated. And those huge farms are now selling
00:40:38
Speaker
to the huge retailers through the huge distributors. And the retailers are getting more and more consolidated. I've had, I don't know, four supermarket chains that I sold to that are now owned by two multinationals.
00:40:55
Speaker
One is a Dutch multinational called Ahold. Ahold USA. It's nice they gave us our own little branch. And one is Kroger's Albertsons, which, thanks to Lena Khan, did not get to merge. So that's an amazing achievement to be able to in any way stop that thing of ending up with three companies running the world. So that's something we can be aware of. We can be organized. We can come together. And frankly, it can cross political parties.
00:41:21
Speaker
So it's going to be hard to get where we want to go. And we shouldn't be wimps about it. We shouldn't go, oh, we didn't get it yet. It's going to be bigger than that. And we have to think generationally, I think. I don't mean that we should be overly patient. I just mean, let's not get discouraged. Well, maybe to finish us off, what would be one parting word of wisdom you would tell the next generation?
00:41:49
Speaker
I'll just tell one little thing for farmers in my life. When I started farming, I was very much in the movement. We didn't have political meetings, but we did have meetings. We'd have potlucks and we'd get together and we'd share a lot of ideas. Then as I went along and I got kids and my farm got bigger, all my attention focus was on surviving the farm and raising my kids.
00:42:14
Speaker
and I didn't go to any conferences and I didn't talk to other farmers. I just worked really hard. I am a focused person and I think it was a mistake.
00:42:24
Speaker
And so I'll say that to somebody younger. I'll say, I think that part of our responsibilities as humans is to be involved in these issues. And I truly understand that most people are just overwhelmingly busy and feel that they have no resources for this. But I think just a little bit, if you just take a little bit and you be involved in these issues and great, listen to our podcast. Our podcast is phenomenal. Somebody interviewed me.
00:42:52
Speaker
who was doing a book in England, and I went, God, you're well-informed. I mean, he really knew a lot about what we were talking about. I said, how did you learn so much? And he said, I just listened to all your interviews. So I said, well, that's great. You know, I'm glad to see that that works so well. So learn, keep learning, but also speak out, be involved. Don't walk away from it, because I think that we almost can't afford to do that as a species anymore. We have to be involved.
00:43:22
Speaker
Well Dave, thank you very much for taking the time, significant amount of time, and having this conversation with us and sharing so much about the history and the evolution and the progress that's been made. And also for your efforts to fight the good fight and make sure that people are able to have access to good food that's grown in the way that it should be and the way that they're expecting it to be and that farmers can make a good and just living.
00:43:46
Speaker
Thank you, Austin. It's not my fight, it's our fight. I'll be gone in a heartbeat and you guys will be running the world and it's for all of us.
00:43:59
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.