Almost certified organic again!

(CSA Newsletter: Week 22)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

If all goes according to plan this week, when you receive next Tuesday’s CSA vegetables they will be different. They will look the same, taste the same, have been grown the same, but they will be different.

Your vegetables will be certified organic.

What’s this? Did you not fully realize that our farm is not yet certified organic? It’s confusing since the word ‘organics’ is in our name and we are certified by Oregon Tilth. However, since we only purchased our land in 2006, for the last 2+ seasons, our farm has been certified transitional as we go through a mandated waiting period.

The waiting period is three years since the last application of a prohibited substance. In our case, the last substance was a pesticide applied by the former farmer on July 8, 2006, meaning that our land is not ‘eligible’ for organic status again until July 9, 2009 (this Thursday!).

In the meantime, we’ve continued to maintain our certification with Oregon Tilth — a process we began on rented land in 2006. That year, our ground was eligible (nothing prohibited had been applied in over five years), so we achieved certified organic status the first year. Since we had already established a relationship with Oregon Tilth, we continued being certified as we moved onto our new transitional land. Even though our product couldn’t technically be labeled ‘organic’ during this time, we were still required to grow 100% in accordance with organic practices. Every year, we have sent Oregon Tilth our paper work updating our ‘organic plan,’ and every year an inspector has come to make sure we’re following that plan.

It’s been an interesting process of waiting. During this period, we’ve had many conversations with customers about what ‘transitional’ status means and what organic certification actually entails.

Not surprisingly, we found that there’s a lot of misinformation and lack of understanding out there about the process. With the change in our status, we’ve got certification on the brain, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to provide a brief explanation of what certification is and how it came to be …

Organic certification began as a grass-roots movement across the United States as a way for farms to ‘verify’ to their customers that their practices were in accordance with organic principles: i.e. no synthetic inputs (fertilizers, pesticides) and an emphasis on soil and farm health. Initially, certifiers were regionally based, and each had slightly different interpretations of those principles. Being certified was and is voluntary, but up until 2002 anyone could use the word ‘organic’ regardless of their certification status or their actual methods.

As the movement grew bigger, eventually growers started worrying about the integrity of the word ‘organic.’ To that end, another movement began to standardize and legalize organic standards through the USDA. Many producers did not support this idea (and still do not), but I think that overall most growers recognized the negative consequences of corporate food companies latching onto ‘organic’ trends and marketing without actually following through on the practices. Thus, people wanted to regulate the word to insure a more concrete meaning.

After much work and discussion, in 2002, the National Organic Program (NOP) was enacted by the USDA to make that happen. The NOP standardized certification requirements across the country and made it not legal to use the word ‘organic’ without achieving certification first (with an exemption for farms grossing $5,000 and less).

Of course, no government intervention is without controversy. Some farmers and activists continue to criticize the NOP standards as being too ‘weak,’ etc. Having read the NOP final rule closely, we here at Oakhill Organics believe that the resulting standards are miraculously in tune with what we understand to be organic principles: crop rotations, use of natural inputs, soil health, etc.

When we started our farm, however, we balked at the process. We debated marketing our farm without the aid of organic certification (scared about the price and time). But the farmer we trained with pointed out that we’re doing the hard work of farming; we might as well be able to use the word ‘organic.’ Point taken.

So, we sought certification through Oregon Tilth, one of the first certifying bodies in the country and a USDA accredited certifier. By law, their standards and process are the same as any other certifier in the country; however, we like working with a locally based organization.

Certification, at its simplest, is a process for documenting and verifying that a farm’s practices are in compliance with organic principles. The process begins with a farm’s written ‘organic plan,’ which is a simple but detailed document outlining how the farm plans to address common farming challenges: fertility, weeds, pests, seed sources, etc. The certifying body and inspector review that document, make sure it sounds good, and then inspect to make sure that’s what is really happening on the farm.

In order to ‘prove’ our practices, we must keep detailed records: receipts from fertilizer purchases, field maps with crop rotations, sowing dates, harvest yields, sales figures, etc. Admittedly, some of the paperwork was daunting at first. But we quickly found that it’s easy to keep up once we have a routine and system. Plus, all the records we keep for certification have proven to be invaluable to us as farmers. We’re grateful that we had the incentive to keep records even in our first hectic year when we might have otherwise let things slide. We can now easily compare information from year-to-year for our own benefit as well as for certification purposes.

But, of course, no bureaucratic process is perfect. There have been bumps along the way, mostly due to communication problems and our own learning curve. Also, Oregon Tilth has to charge money to cover the cost of the process, so certification does cost us money. Fortunately, the USDA has a cost reimbursement program that has paid us back a significant portion of our fees two out of the four years we’ve been certified.

Ultimately, in spite of the infrequent annoyances, the paperwork and the cost, we feel that being certified organic is worth it. We appreciate the regulation of the word, because it means that you and I can walk into any grocery store and trust that the organic milk or organic bananas on the shelf were actually grown using organic practices. We want the continued regulation of these big agriculture and food businesses, so we feel comfortable submitting to the same process ourselves.

Plus, by being certified, we feel that we have a stronger voice in the ongoing debates about organic agriculture. Even though we are small, we are a certified organic farm, recognized by the USDA. Our presence can’t be swept under the rug, because we are fully present and accounted for.

Being certified organic again will also allow us to tap into other potential markets if we choose to. We can sell our products to produce departments at natural food stores and have them placed in the organic section (not so if we were not officially certified). We can also enter the seed growing business, something we’re tinkering with this year, and sell our seed as certified organic.

Finally, we feel like certification keeps us accountable and professional. Certainly, we could (and do) communicate directly to you our eaters about our practices. But the people who come to inspect our farm are experts who would catch us if there were inconsistencies in our farm plan or fields. We appreciate knowing that our farm is transparent enough in its practices to be held up each year to a very close examination. Plus, the certification process has forced us to become very familiar with what organic really means. Without the forced study of the NOP final rule, it would be easy to make little but significant mistakes without realizing it (such as using raw manure in soil mix or using pressure treated boards at the base of a field greenhouse where they touch the soil — both of these have real health risks and are explicitly prohibited in organic production).

Oh yeah, and we’ll be able to use the ‘O’ word again with complete legality and force. We’ve been doing the hard work, so why not get credit for it?

Certification is complicated, so let us know if you have any lingering questions about certification, our transitional status, or our new organic status. Enjoy this week’s last of the transitional vegetables! And, next week, celebrate with us!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla