The phone rang as I was tying up loose ends for my last day in the office before Christmas. New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal wanted my thoughts on the sustainability of organic agriculture… a subject that I think about a lot. I gave her my cell phone number and asked her to call back.

She called again Saturday afternoon, as my kids and I returned home from Christmas shopping. I plunked them in front of a video and put her on speaker phone so that I could peel butternut squash for a solstice potluck that evening. We talked for a half hour or so, and she said she’d let me know when her story would run.

Organic agriculture used to be sustainable agriculture, but now that is not always the case.

I disagree with the statement attributed to me that “organic agriculture used to be sustainable.” Most organic farms remain more sustainable than their conventional counterparts. If we must import produce from Mexico we should support the farmers there that grow it organically.

 

US produce imports from Mexico have almost tripled since 1990, driven by growing demand for inexpensive fruit and vegetables out-of-season. Most of this supply comes from conventional farms. Sourcing more of it from organic farms will not solve the important sustainability issues Rosenthal addresses, but it makes things better, not worse.

 

Despite growth in demand for organic products, less than 1% of farmland in the USA or Mexico is certified organic. Organic farms tend to use energy and water more efficiently than conventional farms. They pollute less. Organic farmers are often healthier, and better able to make a decent living from small, diversified farms, such as those that dominate Mexico’s organic sector. Supporting them promotes sustainability.

Our current way of living is clearly unsustainable, and the food system that supports it can’t be sustained indefinitely either. This concerned Sir Albert Howard, the father of organic agriculture in the west. Seventy years ago Howard was fascinated by the fall of civilizations, which he saw as an inevitable result of unsustainable food systems. He looked to the agriculture of long persistent civilizations – like China and India – for examples of ways to feed ourselves sustainably. The “practices of the Orient” that he held up as examples were built on a foundation of small, diverse, labor-intensive farms integrating animal and crop production. Few inputs were needed because resources were recycled on the farm by composting, to build soils rich in organic matter that retained water and nutrients. “Organic farming” evolved into a shorthand description for the type of agriculture that Howard advocated. The term “sustainable agriculture” showed up years later, and often incorporated similar concepts and ideas.

For many years, organic agriculture – like sustainable agriculture – was defined by principles, rather than specific practices. In his 1981 essay, Solving for Pattern, Wendell Berry called for solutions that solve multiple problems without creating new ones. He used an organic farm as an example, saying that it

is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system; it has the integrity, the independence, and the benign dependence of an organism.

But we must not forget that those human solutions that we may call organic are not natural. We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy. Our ability to make such artifacts depends on virtues that are specifically human: [...] A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.

 

Groundwater depletion in the regions of the U.S.A., Europe, China and India and the Middle East for the year 2000 (mm/year; clockwise from top‐left). From Wada et al., 2010 (Click image to go to source).

Since some of the farms in the Baja Peninsula are organic, the problem is presented as an example of growth in the organic sector promoting unsustainable practices. Ironically, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recently released a report called Sustainable Options for Addressing Land and Water Problems that identifies organic farming as part of the solution to such problems. Organic standards don’t regulate irrigation methods or acceptable water sources, but they do promote practices that improve water use efficiency, build soils that retain water, and reduce pollution of remaining water resources. The Mexican organic vegetable farms highlighted in the article happen to use trickle irrigation, which uses up to 75% less water than sprinkler or flood irrigation systems. They aren’t required to do so by organic standards, but the fact that the farmers can fetch a premium for their organic produce may have allowed them to invest in more sustainable technology. Michael O’Gorman, who used to manage an organic farm in Mexico, describes the irrigation practices used by organic farmers in the Baja peninsula as “some of the most inventive and advanced water saving systems in the world.”

 

O’Gorman offers his own perspective on the particular farms highlighted in the New York Times article:

The group doing all of Del Cabo’s production in the southern end of the peninsula is one of the oldest grower-owned organic cooperatives in the world.  It is owned by the same 151 families (average acreage less than 10) that were given ownership by organic farming pioneers in the early 1980s.  It was started, and remains, as a social enterprise to give Mexican farmers a dignified alternative to waiting on tables and cleaning any of the nearly 500,000 luxiorious hotel rooms that American and European tourists inhabit daily[...] In fact the reason why organics developed in this part of Mexico is because the big conventional growers had no interest in the small fields  that were owned by Mexican families.  Del Cabo growers are religious about organics.

Americans like tomatoes. We eat — and import — more of them every year. In 1981 the average American consumed about a pound of tomatoes each month, of which just 3 ounces were imported. Today the average American eats more than a pound and a half of tomatoes monthly, and a half pound of that is imported, mostly from Mexico. Even our American-grown tomatoes are mostly tended by farm laborers from Mexico and other Latin American countries, who often work in indentured servitude to bring us cheap fruit. The brutal environmental and social costs of America’s conventional tomato industry are detailed in Tomatoland (2011), by award-winning investigative journalist Barry Estabrook:

Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States.

Those who tend our crops suffer the health effects of direct exposure to herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and fumigants, whether they are in Mexico or the USA. In the 1990s a team of anthropologists led by Elizabeth Guilette studied effects of pesticides on children from farming families in the Yaqui valley and foothills of northwestern Mexico. Families in the valley used conventional farming practices with numerous pesticide applications; those in the foothills practiced traditional farming without pesticides. Children from conventional farming families in the valley had much poorer motor skills, less endurance, and worse memory than those who grew up in the foothills without pesticides. Evidence of the effects Guilette and her team observed included representative drawings by her four year-old subjects:

 

Representative drawings of a person by 4-year-old Yaqui children from the valley and foothills of Sonora, Mexico (Guillette, 1998. Click image to go to source). Valley children are exposed to pesticides; those in the foothills are not.

 

As a father of young children, I find these images heartbreaking. I want to be able to choose healthy foods for my kids without hurting other kids in the process. Thankfully, I can grow my own tomatoes, or rely on local farmers to grow tomatoes for me using low-input season extension technology, for about half the year. If I must have fresh tomatoes in January then I can choose organic to support farmers — wherever they are — who step off the pesticide treadmill. This won’t fix all of the problems of our industrial food system, but it can make it a little more sustainable.

 

Originally published at Organic Kentucky

Original article available here