Did you buy "organic" food at the supermarket in 2006—say, one of those clam-shell boxes of spinach? If so, there’s a strong chance you got hoodwinked.
Get this, from the Sacramento Bee: For years, a California organic-input company was passing off synthetic fertilizer as organic and selling it widely to the state’s organic farms (including nationally distributed giants like Earthbound Farms). The offending company, California Liquid Fertilizer, owns about a 33 percent market share among the state’s organic farmers, the Bee reports.
Using an open-records request, the newspaper found that state regulators uncovered the mess in June 2004, but didn’t force the product off the market until January 2007.
The question of fertilizer lies at the heart of organic production. Industrial agriculture leaches nutrients from soils, replacing them with synthetic and mined fertilizers. These substances create all manner of ecological trouble.
Ideally, organic agriculture recycles nutrients into the soil through on-farm composting and cover-cropping. As I’ve argued before, creating truly closed-loop, sustainable soil-fertility regimes is the key challenge for organic agriculture going forward.
The kind of intensive monocropping that holds sway on California’s industrial-scale organic farms—the ones that supply our nation’s supermarkets much more than the ones that supply the state’s celebrated farmers markets—generally ignore that challenge. They practice instead what’s known as "input substitution"—merely looking for a relatively benign replacement for industrial inputs like fertilizer and pesticide.
That’s how they found themselves buying fertilizer spiked with ammonium sulfate, a byproduct of the industrial steel-making process.
"Organic agriculture is becoming very dependent on these amendments," one grower told The Bee. "If you don’t use them, and your competitor is using them, you’re going to suffer."
Funny—that’s the same mentality that’s driven conventional farmers to grow more and more dependent on agrichemical and farm-equipment manufacturers over the past half-century.
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Comments
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amazingdrx Posted 2:24 am
30 Dec 2008
Are there any incentives for farm based biogas/organic fertilizer production in California? A nice per kwh subsidy for biogas power production of say 6 cents per kwh might just get this going.
Self (non) regulated industries need re-regulation to prevent this scamming, when will "free" market efficiency bull shit yield to reasonable re-regulation?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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SamanthaCabaluna Posted 12:33 am
08 Jan 2009
First, there are 150 farmers who grow Earthbound Farm organic produce on farms small and large (from 5 acres to 680 acres). Our farmers aren't practicing "input substitution"; it really doesn't work. Our farmers use beneficial insect habitat, crop rotation, cover cropping, trap crops/host crops and other very traditional, necessary, scale-neutral organic practices.
Earthbound Farm, other organic farms, and those who made the conscious decision to choose organic were defrauded by the makers of Biolizer XN; this liquid organic fertilizer, which was endorsed as organic by the highly respected Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI), was found to be fortified with non-organic nitrogen.
As soon as we confirmed this, we notified all of our growers of the findings and required that they review their inputs to determine whether they may have used this particular fertilizer and to stop using it immediately if they were.
We are committed to the protection of organic integrity. Our farmers fertilize with a variety of methods, including cover crops, so this liquid fertilizer was far from the only source of fertility for our crops, but it's true that we're not, for the most part, using just on-farm inputs. So to protect the organic integrity of our crops and our farms from being victimized again, we have instituted a stringent organic verification process for all liquid fertilizers: any of our farmers using any kind of liquid fertilizer must subject it to nitrogen testing and process validation by an independent, third-party lab, to ensure that any product marketed as organic is legitimately organic.
Since its founding on 2½ acres in 1984, Earthbound Farm has maintained an unwavering commitment to organic farming. We are passionate about its potential to produce healthy food and to protect the environment. We think it's important to provide the organic choice to people all across the country, in the supermarkets where they shop every day.
This fertilizer problem underscores the crucial importance of strict adherence to the organic standards, enforcement of those standards, and transparency at all levels. All of us who believe in the benefits of organic food and farming must take responsibility for defending and protecting the integrity of the organic standards.
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