Organic Agriculture February 2006 eNewsletter

In This Issue...

• Breaking News
• Montana Organic Farms Featured
• Conservation Security Program (CSP) Evaluated
• Organic Questions Answered
• Calendar of Events

Breaking News

Study Confirms Value of Organic Farming

A study published by Stanford University researchers offers proof that organic farming is less harmful to the environment than using nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers. The study showed that chemical fertilizers resulted in dramatically higher concentrations of nitrogen in the soil.

The results of the study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences after a year-long experiment using apple trees in the Yakima Valley of Central Washington.

Trees fertilized with nitrogen-based chemicals resulted in nitrogen levels 4.4 to 5.6 times higher in the soil compared to trees fertilized with organic manure or alfalfa.

Stanford graduate student Sasha B. Kramer and her colleagues wrote that the intensification of agricultural production over the last 60 years has resulted in greater yields but at a higher cost to the environment.

"The primary source of nitrogen pollution comes from nitrogen-based agricultural fertilizers, whose use is forecasted to double or almost triple by 2050," Kramer and her colleagues wrote.

Nitrogen from fertilizers can enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming, added Harold A. Mooney, Stanford professor of environmental biology and a co-author of the study.

"Nitrogen compounds also enter our watersheds and have effects quite distant from the fields in which they are applied, as for example in contaminating water tables and causing biological dead zones at the mouths of major rivers," Mooney said. "This study shows that the use of organic versus chemical fertilizers can play a role in reducing these adverse effects."

The study also looked at the effects of what is called an integrated system of fertilization using equal amounts of chicken manure and calcium nitrate. The results for the integrated system fell between the results of wholly using either organic or chemical fertilization. "This study is an important contribution to the debate surrounding the sustainability of organic agriculture, one of the most contentious topics in agricultural science worldwide," explained John B. Reganold, professor of soil science at Washington State University and a co-author of the study.

The study is available on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) website.

For more information:
Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
Website: Stanford New Service

Montana Organic Farms Featured

High Country News Features Montana Organics

Montana organic agriculture was featured in a recent edition of High Country News a western regional bi-weekly, "for people who care about the West." Sam Western the author of the article claims that organic production offers a new "vanguard" agriculture that offers new promise to "put people back on the land". Three leaders of organic and sustainable agriculture, Dean Folkvord, Dave Oien, Bob Quinn are featured in the article. An excerpt of the article is offered below; the full article can be read on the High Country News website.

Sexing Up the Beans

In Conrad in north-central Montana, population 2,638, the November winds drive the snow sideways. The flakes pelt aging clusters of grain elevators; the sky is the same leaden color as the buildings.

In the office of one elevator, David Oien shoves aside papers on a cluttered desk, making room to illustrate a point. "There are two ways to grow in agriculture: horizontally," he says, moving his hands sideways. "Or vertically" — and he raises them about two feet off the desk. Oien, 56 years old with a shock of gray hair, has just come back from a farm conference where a speaker from a farm credit association championed the horizontal approach. "This guy said that if you wanted to borrow money from him, that if you wanted to be a viable operation, you'd have to expand your operation by 15 percent a year."

This mentality has prevailed for at least a century. Whenever prices are low and interest rates high — such as during the 1980s — the farmers with the least amount of debt, hoping to get ahead, buy up their neighbors' land. Flat wheat prices and intense foreign competition mean grain producers must rely on quantity to make money. Federal subsidy payments are based on farm acreage, so volume is the name of the game. With fewer children interested in farming, the neighbors are often happy to sell.

As a result, in 1920, Montana had about 58,000 farms, averaging 608 acres apiece. In 2004, Montana's 27,000 farms averaged 2,146 acres apiece. Oien has spent years trying to buck the expansion trend. He and a handful of other organic growers, many of them third- and fourth-generation Montana farmers, have chosen the vertical approach, seeking quality on the acreage they have, not racing after more — and greener — pastures on the other side of the fence.

Oien, who was born and raised in Conrad, is one of the pioneers of organic agriculture. Other farmers talk about his persistence, creativity, irreverence and bone-deep determination to make the world a better place — traits Oien says were nurtured during his years as a student at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s.

Oien began farming with his father in 1976. It was a small operation, only 240 acres, and his father used the most efficient tools at his disposal, including herbicides and pesticides — coming home so soaked in chemicals that his wife would make him take off all his clothes lest he kill the houseplants.

Oien's father wasn't much of a risk-taker; the threat of ruthless consolidation tends to discourage that trait in conventional farmers. Oien doesn't blame him: "He was a child of his generation as I am a child of mine," he says. His father didn't object to Oien's early experiments with organics, however — just made a few friendly jabs: "He'd tell me the only place I could sell it was to my mother," Oien recalls. In 1987, Oien got together with four other farmers and started Timeless Seeds. "We grew black medic (a hardy legume used to fix nitrogen into the soil) not for food, but for seed." This first venture was not particularly successful, but it piqued his interest in nitrogen-fixing plants as a form of fertilizer. When the market for organic foods started to grow in the mid-1990s, Oien and his partners planted wheat, barley and flax.

They put their crops through a variety of trial rotations. First, they planted "green manure," various nitrogen-fixing legumes that are not harvested but plowed back into the soil. The legumes would be followed by wheat or barley, then by a pulse, such as lentils or chickpeas, then perhaps by flaxseed or oilseed crops such as sunflowers. Rotation not only restored the soil; it curbed the growth of weeds and insects.

Then, says Oien, "We went around to food shows, selling grains in 50-pound sacks."

They faced long odds: Most organic farmers don't get the federal subsidies that conventional farmers do, but they face the same high transportation costs when it's time to get their products to market.

And grains and pulses lack a certain Madison Avenue cachet. Most grains go into animal feed, and therefore get less attention from consumers. When one farmer says, "I grow organic avocados in seaside Santa Barbara," and the other one says, "I grow organic wheat in Scobey, Mont.," guess who takes home the trophy for sexiest product?

Nonetheless, through experiments ("we figured things out in a disorganized way"), failures, diligence, and what Oien describes as just plain luck, Timeless Seeds grew. The company won — although it later lost — a contract to supply French lentils to Trader Joe's grocery stores. This fall, Oien (who is still president of the company) and his partners shipped 66,000 packages of organic lentils and peas to 160 Whole Foods grocery stores throughout the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.

While Oien is the only full-time employee, Timeless spreads the work around. It partners with a Great Falls-based health-care provider, hiring developmentally disabled adults to pack seeds and grains.

Today, Conrad has three mills that cater to organically raised crops.

And the sex appeal? Timeless Seeds' products, particularly its black beluga lentils, have won praise from cooks worldwide. The shiny black lentils resemble caviar when cooked. A food critic for The Artful Diner, an online food and wine publication, reviewed a restaurant in Pennsylvania recently, waxing eloquent about "the beautifully pan-seared black cod set on a seabed of braised black beluga lentils and finished with a first-rate chive-vermouth beurre blanc."

CSP Evaluated

American Farm Land Trust and Tufts University have recently published an extensive study of the new Conservation Security Program titled, "Conservation Security Program: Rewards and Challenges for New England Farmers". The study gives detailed accounting of three real case studies based on the 2005 sign-up for the program as well as five case studies of "hypothetical" contracts on varying types of New England farms. While the study examines a region of the country unlike Montana and the inter-mountain west, some of the conclusions and recommendations have relevance to Montana organic and non-organic agriculture, these are:

Some organic producers did not receive CSP payments on organic land due to negative Soil Conditioning Index scores. The explanation is that often because organic farmers cannot use herbicides for weed control the substitute increased tillage. However, the study reported that often soil quality is high on organic fields because of the use of green manures and cover crops in rotations.

Certified organic farmers have to keep many records as part of their certification requirements and this gave them an advantage with the CSP because two years of written records were required to eligible for the program.

The national list of enhancement and new practice payments included payments for organic production. However the only one New England state, Vermont, chose to offer payments for organic production. Vermont offered a new practice payment of $25 per acre for applicants seeking to transition to organic production.

Other recommendations included:

• NRCS should increase CSP outreach to farmers who do not have a working history with the NRCS. NRCS should provide "hypothetical" farm or ranch CSP contracts to give them an idea about the potential for rewards available under the program. If a universal application were available for all NRCS programs then the process of application could be streamlined and made easier and would not cause competition between similar NRCS programs.
• If CSP stewardship payments (which are based on acreage and county land rental rates) provided a payment floor rate for all eligible applicants then the program would be more equitable and foster the participation of smaller farms. Payment floors of $500 for eligible farms less than 50 acres were suggested.
• Quantitative measures like the Soil Conditioning Index (SCI) should not be the sole basis for eligibility for the CSP. "Quantitative measures must be balanced with more individualized, qualitative measures for eligibility". The possibilities of using several different measures for soil quality are available and could provide a less biased single indicator.

The full study is available in Adobe Acrobat format:

The Conservation Security Program: Rewards and Challenges for New England Farmers (2.9 MB)

Organic Questions Answered

From the Independent Organic Inspectors Association website

What are some of the common mistakes made by a farmer or rancher in obtaining or maintaining organic certification?

Certifier relations:

• Getting a product or practice approved by a certifier, but not getting the approval in writing, and then misunderstanding the "approval".
• Failure to submit requested documentation to the certifier (such as prior land use forms, genetically modified organism (GMO) letters, adjoining land use forms, water test results, etc.)
• Not understanding and/or not complying with certification requirements (minor non-compliances) from the previous year.
• Failure to complete required paperwork on time, or at all.
• Not registering with the state organic program, if applicable.
• Failure to pay certification and/or inspection fees.

Non-approved inputs:

• Use of non-approved substances (incl. treated seeds), due to negligence and/or not understanding the requirements.
• Use of non-approved substances, due to trusting an input supplier who gave assurances that the material was "approved" for organic farming.
• Failure to inquire about the GMO status of inputs, especially inoculants and Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) products.
• Not having documentation of non-GMO status of inputs, including seeds, inoculants, and Bt products.
• The farmer does not correctly calculate the amount of time from the last date of prohibited inputs used - and the required 36 months have not passed. The farmer then wrongly thinks that the present year's crop will be saleable as certified organic, when it is not certifiable.

Documentation of approved inputs:

• Failure to obtain adequate documentation for purchase of approved inputs.
• Failure to document attempts to source organic seeds.

Record keeping:

• Lack of adequate detail or clarity on field maps and/or use of inaccurate maps.
• Field maps which do not show acres, field numbers, and/or adjoining land uses.
• Not keeping field activity records up to date.
• Failure to keep seed and input labels and receipts in an organized and accessible manner.
• Failing to keep records for contracted services, such as planting, spraying, harvesting, and/or trucking.
• Failure to keep bin records up to date.
• Not recording field numbers on harvest and/or storage records.
• Not using lot numbers or not using a consistent lot numbering system.
• Not providing adequate documentation to buyers when organic products are sold.
• Not keeping records of steps taken to inspect and clean transport units.
• Not maintaining adequate records for operations with both organic and conventional production.

Organic plan:

• Failure to follow the operation's organic plan.
• Filing "renewal" farm plans with entries marked "No Change", when there have been significant changes, such as new leased or purchased fields, discontinued leases, sub-divided fields, new crops, new inputs, changes to field numbers, changes to lot numbering system, etc.

Commingling and contamination:

• Failure to properly clean harvesting equipment and/or storage units, resulting in commingling or contamination of organic crop.
• Failure to segregate crops harvested from buffer zones.
• Lack of cleaning logs for spray equipment that is also used for prohibited inputs.
• Work area contamination for post harvest handling (e.g. washing vegetables, cutting vegetables, packing vegetables, etc.)
• Mislabeling or mishandling of crop by mistake by workers who are not fully informed of organic certification requirements.
• Misapplication of prohibited materials by workers who are not fully informed of organic certification requirements.
• No GMO drift management plan - not knowing where the nearest GMO fields are located.
• Failure to inform highway departments and/or other authorities that land adjacent to organic fields should not be sprayed (or sign no-spray agreements when these are available).
• Failure to post no-spray signs when and where these would add protection.

Calendar of Events

First International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) International Conference on Animals in Organic Production
August 23 to 25, 2006 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Bridging Borders Toward Food Security: Community Food Security and Food Secure Canada Annual Meeting
October 7 to 11, 2006 in Vancouver, British Colombia

Montana Organic Association Annual Meeting
December 1 to 3, 2006 in Missoula, Montana

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Last Modified: 07/09/2007