On the cost of organics

22 May 2006

Got questions about the environment? Ask Umbra.

Dear Umbra,

How come it's so expensive to go organic? I could swing it by myself by eating a bare minimum of food, but I'm charged with feeding consume-mass-quantity types who favor the traditional American diet, and they eat meat. I would be in debt buying just half the monthly food consumption. One would have to be rich to go organic.

MonikkaMarie Jackson
Queen Village, N.Y.

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ADVERTISING POLICY

Dearest MonikkaMarie,

The usual answer to your question from organic proponents is: organic isn't expensive, conventional is unrealistically cheap. Not that helpful, but it's true.

It doesn't make cents.

Photo: iStockphoto.

In the United States, a very small percentage of income goes toward purchasing food: less than 10 percent in 2004, compared with 23 percent in 1929 (and 24 percent in modern Mexico). You probably know that the federal and state governments heavily participate in and financially support U.S. agricultural production. I've been told this is a legacy of the Depression, sort of an "as God is our witness, we'll never go hungry again" attitude. Prices for our food are low and consistent because of strong government involvement in the form of subsidies, grants, paying not to produce, buying surplus, supporting technological development, and tax incentives. Look back at my scintillating discussion of oil subsidies, which describes the various ways government can ease the path of any industry. We pay twice for our food: once to the IRS and once at the supermarket. In short, the cheapness of food is a delusion.

Organic agriculture, by and large, has not received and does not receive the same amount of governmental support as conventional. Organic accounts for about 2 percent of total food sales in the United States. Many organic farms are too small to participate in government programs aimed at huge operations, and their diverse crops don't qualify for support aimed at monolithic growers of corn and such.

Inherent aspects of organic farming are simply costly: chemical fertilizers are great on a huge farm, because you can just add them to the irrigation system. With organic, the "inputs" -- the prices of labor, fertilizer, pest management, seed, baby animals -- are in most cases more expensive than for conventional products. Imagine the difference in cost to the farmer: adding gallons of liquid to the irrigation pipes versus buying and applying tons of compost using human labor.

I will finally say that organic food purveyors -- not farmers, but middlemen and groceries -- are happy to take advantage of the laws of capitalism. Charge as much as you can get.

In The Same Vein

Cost in Translation
Seriously, now -- why aren't organics getting affordable?

So there you go. Organic food is more expensive because it costs more to produce, has less support from the government, supply is less than demand, and in general we pay the true cost of food when we buy organic. When we buy conventional, we pay the fake cost of food.

If you can't afford an all-organic diet, buy only priority items organic -- again, visiting my past musings might be helpful. Also, check out the Environmental Working Group's report card (and handy wallet guide [PDF]) listing produce items that are often heavily contaminated with pesticides and produce items that aren't. The oft-contaminated ones -- such as apples, celery, and potatoes -- should be your top priority if you're going to buy just a few organic items.

You know, going veggie is a very useful, highly effective environmental step. And it can be cheaper than going organic. Though the meat-eating mass-quantity types might not approve.

Beanily,
Umbra

Yours is to wonder why, hers is to answer (or try). Please send Umbra any nagging question pertaining to the environment -- but first check out her FAQs!

The claims made in this column may not reflect the views of this magazine. Neither the magazine nor the author guarantees that any advice contained in this column is wise or safe. Please use this column at your own risk.

Umbra Fisk is Grist Research Associate II, Hardcover and Periodicals Unit, floors 2B-4B.

Comments: (6 comments)

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Farm policy

According to Michael Pollan's latest book, the birth of "corn as king" and a cheap food policy occurred in the mid-70s under the Nixon administration. I don't have the book handy and can't find any of his articles on the internet, but my memory is that there was a huge grain deal with the Soviet Union that caused food prices to rise significantly, and protests were starting to pop up around the U.S. So Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture (Earl Butz) changed the structure of the farm subsidies to encourage more production.

The "Farm Bill" is coming up for renewal in 2007, so this will be an opportunity to change some of these subsidies programs so that they encourage organic agriculture (or at least reduce subsidies of the corn industry). The "free traders" and much of the world is outraged by the subsidy programs in the U.S., so it might be possible to make some changes (but with a GOP Congress, the food-processing lobbyists will write the bill, so let's be realistic). Grist Mill had a good discussion of what a Farm Bill should look like a little while ago.

by meander at 12:32 PM on 22 May 2006

The Price can be Less

I have found that if you want to eat organic more cheaply you must be willing to prepare food from scratch. The less processed the food, the less expensive it becomes. Also, see if you cannot take advantage of discount pricing that is available through local natural/organic food stores or co-ops. If you buy in quantity and are willing to put more work into food prep, organic eating can be nearly as inexpensive as conventional diets. For example, purchasing fairly traded, organic, shade grown coffee in my local supermarket costs $8.50 a pound. Purchasing the same coffee in five pound bags through a local natural food store's co-op program costs $5.50 a pound. Fifteen dollars for a five pound bag of coffee beans is an enormous savings!

MJ Graham

by mjgraham at 1:54 PM on 22 May 2006

Paying for both

And here's a seldom-mentioned financial penalty people pay when they choose to support organic agriculture with their food dollars: In addition to voluntarily paying higher prices at the checkout counter, they are unable to opt out of helping to pay for the subsidized costs of conventional agriculture through their tax bill. In other words, you not only pay more directly when buying organic, you're still coerced into subsidizing the hidden costs of conventional food even if you eat very little or even none of it. You help pay for food other people eat, like it or not.

Which is not to discourage anyone from buying organic, particularly small-scale, locally-grown organic. Check out Local Harvest to find farmers near you. But we really need to find a way to end the subsidies to conventional agriculture.

"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith

by John Fish Kurmann at 7:18 PM on 22 May 2006

the price

You have to break out of the money syndrome. I help (on a volunteer basis) a small dairy farmer. While I expect no reward, he expresses his gratitude by giving me all the milk I can drink, plus often some less than choice cuts of beef and all the heart and liver I can manage. I watch him give away food all the time, on this trade-for-work basis.
I'm sure vegetable farmers are the same. Also you can probably make your own harvest off of fields which have been harvested, a little work, but rewarding. I used to do this to feed pigs.
Another idea: get chickens. Get a cow if you can. Plant a garden, if it's only potatoes [I read once that humans can live fine on only potatoes and (presumably raw) milk].
Last idea: get poor. The income limit for foodstamps is surprisingly high, and my experience there (granted, it was 30 years ago) is that the foodstamp allotment for a family is sufficient to eat luxuriously as long as you are willing to prepare your own food.

by wendy at 6:16 AM on 23 May 2006

The price is wrong because of mega farms.......

that do not include the true cost of the product produced.

We now in America have hundreds of brownfields in every community; a legacy of manufacturing in which the true cost was not covered. Slag and waste was just 'dumped' into the environment or into the water, whichever was cheaper.

Right now, this very minute, mountaintops in Kentucky and West Virginia are being removed and 'dumped' off the mountain side into shady glens where springs that furnish water for the residents of the mountains originate. Sitting on the mountain tops are processing facilities that reduce the coal slurry that currently sits in huge retaining ponds ( 214 in Kentucky out of the over 6oo) to convenient dry waste; they are not used because it would add a dollar ($1.00) to the cost of a ton of coal.

Interesting reads: Raise Less Corn and More Hell, which opens the eyes of the purchaser of 'cheap food. Farmers were led to sign agreements to raise a product for a guaranteed
price but carry all of the costs. The 'egg farmer' scandals were typical of this scam. The individual farmers raising beef and pork were forced into price agreements also; the farmers went bankrupt. And in their place is the factory farm which sells round steak for $1.98 a pound which the same sale price I paid for it at the beginning of my marriage over 25 years ago. Cheap food is the end result of feeding animals animal parts, and antibotizing them due to the cramped pens they lead their short lives in.

Authors of reports critical of mountain top removal have been crippled through assaults and beatings. Residents who complain are harassed and driven off the road to their deaths. Being against the coal mine owners has been a dangerous occupation since the coal was acquired by slick operators who purchased the underground rights of farmers. It does not seem a surprise that the owners of coal properties are out-of-state corporations who use shell corporations to avoid the penalties and who bargain these down to pennies through their powerful connections in government.

Lastly, mega farms of rice and sugar and heavily subdized by the government (read the lable of your product and see that the product contains sugar) which is sold to developing countries at less cost than their farmers can raise it; this destroys the developing economy and allows global corporates to buy the land and set up mega farms of their own. This sad practice is typical of what happens when the world trade agreements are forced on developing nations.

by katesisco at 7:10 AM on 23 May 2006

The CSA option

Hey MonikkaMarie,

You might want to look into buying a farm share from one of the many CSAs serving New York. My Cobble Hill (Brooklyn) CSA, (Bill Walsey/Green Thumb see: http://www.justfood.org/csa/locations/ for this and more) also delivers to Astoria, Queens. A 27-week "subscription" will provide organic, locally grown veggies for 4 (though I think you can also get a larger "pantry share") for as little as $14/week. Check into it!

Jenny Gage

by jennymx at 11:05 AM on 24 May 2006

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The Price Is Wrong