9

Going Organic

How damaging are chemical pesticides? Each square meter of healthy topsoil is home to as many as a million organisms, which maintain the fertility, drainage, and aeration of the land. A heavy reliance on chemical pesticides kills these naturally occurring soil organisms and interrupts the natural nitrogen cycle. By destroying the soil's ability to regenerate itself, these chemicals actually enable more pests to take over the soil-and an increase in pests produces the need for even larger doses of pesticides.^1,2 This vicious cycle, while profitable for the agri-chemical industry in the short-term, destroys the long-term sustainability of agriculture. Worse, new evidence shows that the most heavily used agricultural chemicals are also hazardous. Farmers suffer from a high incidence of deadly diseases, including leukemia and cancers of the liver, prostrate, stomach, skin, brain, and lip.³ One herbicide, atrazine, which has been banned in many countries (including Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands) but is still widely used in the United States, damages the liver, heart, and kidneys. In addition, atrazine, like many synthetic farm chemicals, mimics estrogen and has been linked to reproductive disorders, including decreased sperm counts and sterility in males⁴ and increased breast cancer in females.⁵ These chemicals have even been linked to decreased intelligence in both males and females.^4,6

Given the choice, Patrick Piel would prefer that all the foods his family eats be grown without potentially hazardous chemicals. And so would a lot of other people, when you consider that the organic market is the fastest growing sector of the U.S. food market. Piel's preference comes from experience. He has been a farmer for 34 years-the first 24 years were spent growing food with commercial fertilizers; the past 10 years growing without them.

It's harvest time and Piel is riding 20 feet up in the cab of his huge, red combine. It is cold outside, maybe 15 degrees F with windchill, but the cab is toasty. I am sitting on a tool box, squeezed in next to Piel, as he works the final fields of his 250-acres of land one hour west of the Mississippi. People say that Iowa is flat, but we are riding over farmland that keeps undulating like high lazy ocean swells.

This is my first time on farming's front lines-at least since field trips in grade school-watching the first steps of my meal coming to market. At first glance it appears that the combine is scooping up nothing more valuable than a huge mouthful of tall weeds, but a more careful look reveals hundreds and thousands of soybean pods hidden amidst the stalks. I am with Piel because he is a friend and because he is one of dozens of organic farmers across the U.S. who advise the Natural Law Party on agriculture policies.

"Other than the weather, the most serious problem for an organic farmer is weeds," Piel is shouting to me over the noise of the combine. "Foxtail can wipe you out. But as you can see, I have a clean field here." He looks at me for confirmation. I look ahead and nod, not knowing what I am nodding at. "I plowed this field early in the spring. I worked the soil down with a disk and let it sit until all the weeds sprouted. Then I ran my disk back over it again and chopped up all the weeds . Then I planted my soybeans with a 'soybean drill.' I have a beautiful crop this year. No problem with weeds."

I ask Piel how what he does differs from the ritual of the farmers growing soybeans with chemicals all around him. He talks about a farmer a half-mile up Highway 1.

"He prepares his field in the fall, and then, in early spring, he plants'Round-up Ready Soybeans'-beans that have been genetically engineered to be resistant to the Round-Up herbicide [the same herbicide that John Fagan had talked to me about]. After the beans have grown about eight to ten inches tall, he sprays the crops with the herbicide. The weeds die and plants live. A few days later, the dead weeds-they're called dead carcasses-have withered away and all that's left is a plain bean field."

Piel breaks away from his story for a moment to think. Two days ago he had walked through that farmer's fields to look at his crops.

"It's scary in a way, when you walk into one of those fields. You can actually feel the difference. I went into the field right after they were sprayed, and I could see the tremendous amount of poison on the plants. The genetically engineered beans also look kind of plastic, not like real beans. Something had been altered in that bean. They were shiny in a weird way," he says.

Piel shuts down the combine and clambers down the metal ladder to my left. He has to knock some mud off the huge rotating blade that cuts the soybean plants. His produce will be used for human consumption so it has to be delivered clean-no dirt. His neighbor's soybeans will be sold for animal feed or will be pressed into oils. They can be sold dirty.

We're rolling again, at about 10 miles an hour, and now Piel is talking profits. Piel makes a lot more money growing organically than a conventional farmer does because his input is less and because the demand for what he grows-organic soybeans-is greater than for beans for animal feed. Piel spends about $50 an acre on seeds and "green manure"-alfalfa, clover, or rye, whereas a conventional farmer spends about $135 to $150 an acre on seeds and commercial herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. Piel sells his soybeans for $20 a bushel, whereas a conventional farmer gets $7 a bushel.

"Bottom line: It costs me less than half as much to put plants in the ground and I can make three times as much profit," he says.

Better yet, demand for organic is exceeding growers' capacities.

"We are not keeping up by any means whatsoever. If I wanted to grow 5,000 acres of this soybean I could sell everything I grow, and still have many, many buyers calling me. The organic market in the U.S. will buy. The Japanese will buy, the Chinese are importing," he says.

Piel's soybeans are certified by the Organic Crop Improvement Association. Piel then delivers the beans to the nearby Reiff Grain Elevator, an operation which has serviced farmers throughout much of the Midwest for over 25 years. Here is a sign of the changing times:

"For the first time, Reiff has gotten himself certified organic so he can clean and bag our soybeans," Piel says, smiling. "There's a good profit in it for him. He makes over $2000 a day cleaning the beans and loading them in containers that go to Japan [each bag is 30 kilos]. He'll do that many times in November, December, and probably January, too. He could do many times that amount if the beans were there."

Piel has a kind, easy, weather-worn face, and the rugged, leathery hands of a life spent working the soil. In fact, he has been farming, almost without interruption, since he was a 10-year-old boy helping his father work several hundred acres in Moscow Mills, Missouri (population 339), on a farm set off Highway 61, north of St. Louis.

Piel loves farming, but he is ready to make the shift from the fields to the classroom. He wants to take his 30-plus years of experience and train farmers to "grow pure-no commercial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides-nothing that the Organic Crop Improvement Association wouldn't approve.

"The future of farming is organic. Every year there are hundreds of people coming into organic from all over the country."

Piel's 250 acres is about average for organic. He talks to some farmers who do as little as 75, but there is a new trend towards large, up to 5,000 acres. Farming is hard work, and organic farming can be the toughest. So why does he do it?

"Somebody's got to, somebody's got to make the change."

Piel is surrounded by conventional farmers, men and women who just a few years ago looked at him with suspicion and who now approach him with genuine interest, often helping out during harvest time if he runs late, as he is this year.

"I get along with all the farmers around here. I do a lot of business with them. I have a great relationship with them. I don't preach organic, but they see what I am doing and if they are interested then they will change," he says.

I swivel clumsily on my tool box and squint out back through a narrow window to see the glow of freshly-threshed beans piling high in the combine's grain bin behind me. It takes about 20 seconds from the time the blade in the front severs the stalk for the beans to make their way through various screening processes and pour out into the bin. Piel says he can fill up a bin of 135-140 bushels in about 35 minutes. "They come out clean and pure," he says with pride, "just how the buyers want them."

I call Piel the next day to see how late he worked last night. He has been under tremendous pressure to finish the harvest in the next few days and has been out in the cold late to get the job done. He says he climbed out of the cab at 2:00 a.m.

"I love farming, I do. I also love to teach, to set an example for other farmers. I have a lot of experience. I have been through it all-every possible experience you can imagine, I've been through it. The future is organic."

Moving Public Policy Towards Organic

Francis Thicke knows agriculture. He received his Ph.D. in soil fertility from the University of Illinois and has spent four years working in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Extension Service as the National Program Leader for Soil Science. He has also been farming his whole life. Literally.

Thicke, 47, grew up working on his father's dairy farm near the tiny town of LaCrescent, Minnesota, across the river from LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Even when he went away to college, or worked with the USDA, when he came home for a visit, "I'd pick up like I never missed a beat." For 15 of those farming years he has been doing organic agriculture. So Thicke knows agriculture from all directions: from the government and university sides, as a conventional and an organic farmer, and he has seen, firsthand, the impact of the agrichemical companies. In Thicke's view, it is time for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to take a strong position in support of organic agriculture.

Thicke is standing in the back of his pick-up truck, stabbing big clumps of straw with a pitchfork and flinging the clumps ten yards away beneath a big, wide overhang, about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. He has jammed my microcassette recorder into the chest pocket of his red plaid shirt, and as he talks I can see he is trying to remember to speak into his shirt pocket. I am standing beside the truck, shouting up questions. Thicke is trying to be helpful, but he has a lot going on. He checks his watch regularly, and he is constantly looking around to make sure his cows are where they should be. It's 3:00 p.m., it's getting near feeding time, and he has a schedule to keep.

Thicke and his wife, Susan, run this 50-cow, 176-acre organic dairy that sends milk products to HyVee, Easters, and other local grocery store outlets in the southeast area of Iowa. Thicke's cows have a better life than cows in a conventional dairy, although, he says, "I don't have to work any harder to do it."

Thicke uses "controlled grazing," which means that he has divided his farm into many paddocks, and he rotates his cows around the paddocks, letting them harvest their own food (forages) when the crops are at their peak of their nutritional value-for as many months a year as the weather allows. In contrast, most conventional dairy farms confine their cows. As a result, farmers must harvest the feed, store it, bring it to the cows, and then haul the manure back out.

"A waste of time and energy," Thicke says. He also feeds his cows only organic grain, avoids antibiotics, and doesn't use BST-bovine somantotropin-the controversial genetically-engineered hormone that increases milk production in cows. As a result, he says, he doesn't have many of the problems conventional dairy farmers do.

"Cows develop foot problems from spending so much time on concrete. Their immune systems are weakened from overuse of antibiotics. And their udders fail from being pushed to the limit of production. To get the most production, cows are fed highly concentrated rations and finely chopped forages, which can cause metabolic disorders. One common example is 'twisted stomach' that comes from not feeding a cow enough of what it was designed to eat-long-stemmed forage."

Thicke blames such poor treatment of the cows on "just too much emphasis on high production at any cost."

He says that the average cow on a dairy farm only lasts about two lactations-about two years-in the milking herd, before she is sold to be slaughtered. Then he points to several of his cows standing behind a fence.

"We have a cow that's going to have a calf soon, and she'll be 15 years old in a few weeks. We also have a couple of 13-year-old cows, and some 10 years old. That would be unheard of in a conventional dairy."

The tone of Thicke's voice suddenly changes. "Careful of the bull behind you, Bob-he's OK, he just plays, but he plays rough, you know." I turn and waist high is the face of a very curious, very formidable black bull, nuzzling at my shirt.

I continue with my questioning, trying to seem as casual around the big bull as I might around a mean-looking dog sniffing suspiciously at my feet.

The conversation shifts to organic farming as public policy. I am aware that the organic food market is booming. It grew 26% in 1997, and has been averaging about 20% a year growth for the past five years. But how is "organic" defined in the dairy industry, I ask.

"It means, basically, that the feed has been grown on land that hasn't had any chemicals on it for three years, at least," he says, "although the biotech industry is trying to push genetically-engineered food as organic. That has to stop."

Thicke contrasts organic agriculture with sustainable agriculture.

"Sustainable doesn't mean the same thing as organic. It is an overused term that just means going in the direction of fewer chemicals, and a little better stewardship of the land, but it's not well defined, and now everyone is using it, even the biotech companies. Whereas, 'organic' is well defined, it's concrete, and it's marketable," he says. "That's why the organic market is growing. Nobody sells anything that's 'sustainable.'"

Thicke (and I) are carrying buckets of feed to cows across the yard. He has, by his own description, a small farm. Today's commercial dairy operations are mammoth by comparison. Is organic destined to be sort of the "boutique shops" of agriculture, compared to the Wal-Marts of commercial farming?

"No," he says, shaking his head firmly. "Dairy farming could easily be changed over to organic. We already have the soil fertility taken care of through manure, and the weed and pest control are not really that difficult."

So why aren't more farmers using organic?

Ignorance of the facts and ignorance how to do it, he says.

"People say, 'How can you feed the world with organic?' But they just haven't looked closely to see that it is viable, to see that farmers are making it work. When I hear doubts, I always think of solar energy, which many experts said wouldn't work in the northern U.S. Meanwhile there are a lot of people building solar houses that work just fine. It's the same thing with organic farming-some people say it won't work, but there are a lot of people doing it just fine."

Thicke says the reasons organic farming can be viable today, more so than it might have been 20 years ago, are knowledge, technology, and expanding organic markets. Farmers know more about the cycles of pests and crops, and have better equipment for controlling weeds.

"People think of organic farming as going back to their grandfather's way of farming, but it's not. It's using some sound knowledge from them, but also going much beyond that."

Thicke says more research is needed to move organic farming along faster, and that research, in principle, should be coming out of the land grant universities.* (*Every state has one university funded by the government to do research on agriculture. These are the land grant universities.) Instead, the vast majority of the research is going towards chemical use in agriculture.

We are walking towards the barn, and I step gingerly over an electrically-charged wire fence, put there to keep the cows in. Thicke is talking about changes that need to be made in three major areas: research, education, and conservation.

"First, the USDA needs more focused research on organic farming-not 'sustainable,' but organic," he says. "That's mandatory."

One promising sign of a shift in that direction, he says, came in the latest budget proposal for USDA, which included a section on research on organic farming.

"Second, we need to change the way we educate agricultural students. Right now, we isolate them from the farms. Students spend four years in undergraduate school and spend little or no time on a farm. Then they go to graduate school and into research programs and even then it's rare they get on a farm. And when they are finished with school they are supposed to go out and teach farmers? It doesn't work that way. We need to integrate the farming experience into their education and professional experiences-internships for undergraduates and sabbaticals for researchers. We also need exchanges where farmers do some teaching and reinvigorate the land grant system."

Thicke stops his train of thought and tells the story of how, when he left the USDA to go back to farming, no one could believe his decision.

"'Why would anybody ever leave the USDA for a farm?' my colleagues wanted to know," he recalls.

Why did they respond that way? I ask.

"Probably because they didn't have the skills to farm," he says with a laugh. "There is a big gap between paper pushing and farming.

"As far as conservation goes, over the years USDA has spent a lot of money for soil conservation, but what have we gotten for our efforts? Soil erosion may be a little less, but no-till farming, which requires chemical weed control, has increased dramatically, driven largely by USDA programs. This increased use of agrichemicals has put more pressure on our water resources, which has forced USDA to spend many millions of dollars over the last decade on water quality programs.

"So it turns out that USDA's prescription for good farming and soil conservation are, in fact, creating serious problems in a lot of other areas, such as water quality and animal and human health. We have to take a more holistic approach to protect our resources. When organic farming is done right it helps protect everything-water, soil, air, plants, animals, and humans. We ought to give farmers in the U.S. incentives to farm organically, just as is being done in Europe right now."

Thicke puts in long hours on his farm. He works from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., seven days a week, in sun, rain, or freezing, bone-chilling Iowa snow. He is trying to cut back, though, training someone to help out with milking and other chores.

Why are you doing this? I ask.

"A lot of reasons, but mainly, conviction and challenge," he says, sounding a lot like Patrick Piel. "My conviction is that I don't think we should be putting all these chemicals into the soil. My challenge is to find ways to do it-and to work out systems so other farmers can do it, too."

Thicke's conviction spills out in other ways, too. He heads up a mentoring program that trains local farmers in southeast Iowa who want to shift to organic agriculture; he is a member of the USDA's State Technical Committee, which advises USDA administrators how to implement USDA programs; and he is a member of Iowa's "Organic Certification Advisory Committee," which is developing guidelines to regulate certified organic production in Iowa.

We have to stop talking now because he is pouring buckets of grain into a grinder that is so deafeningly loud I can't hear myself think. Afterwards he tells what he puts in the feed: corn as a base-"the energy for the cows"-then hay, which provides fiber and some protein, and then soybean meal, which provides more protein-all of it organic.

We have just tromped through mud and are now feeding more cows, pouring the grain into troughs. It doesn't look like much food, considering how big the cows are, and they seem to be inhaling it like they could never stop. Are cows always this hungry? I ask. Will they always eat, no matter when you put it out?

"Yes, they'd eat this grain until they got sick and died," Thicke says, chuckling to himself, as he carefully pulls away the bucket of grains.

Thicke says the move towards organic agriculture in public policy is sure to be discounted by many people, but it's a move that is environmentally mandated, market-driven, and is already taking place across the country.

"For a long time, researchers, in particular, thought organic was just too far out-they would simply discredit it as unnecessary," Thicke says. "But times are changing and there is definitely more interest now-especially with the booming organic market. Even the Governor of Iowa is behind organic certification for the state. He's pushing it for economic reasons, but nevertheless he's pushing it."

Thicke shows me the barn where he and Susan milk the cows, the holding tank where the milk is cooled, a smaller tank where it is pasteurized (a legal requirement in Iowa) but not homogenized, and the machinery where the milk is bottled. His market has grown nearly 20% a year over the past five years, and he works hard to keep up with the demand.

Thicke leads me upstairs to the apartment that he built for Susan and himself-"temporary quarters," he says-until he can start work on a new house this spring. Susan is working on the books. She looks up and smiles. Francis tells her I am following him around for a book I am writing on the Natural Law Party. I look around at the apartment. Temporary nothing, I think. This place is beautiful, a dream farmhouse. Huge wooden rafters cut across a high-beamed A-frame ceiling, thick carpets, antique furniture, a blazing wood-burning stove, needlepoint-covered pillows thrown on overstuffed sofas and chairs, and books and magazines piled up everywhere. There is also a small television in the corner, but it looks like it doesn't get much use.

Thicke loads me down with some of the magazines and articles on agriculture that I have requested. As he rifles through drawers, I scan what I have. On top of the stack is a proposal from the "Illinois Stewardship Alliance" calling for new government policies that promote safe, humane, and environmentally sound treatment of livestock. The problem with current policies, the Alliance claims, is they allow "highly concentrated animal confinement systems-or factory farms-which can overload the environment with risky manure containment lagoons, cause surface and groundwater pollution through runoff and leaching of manure; generate offensive odors and overload air emissions; and saturate the soils with excess nutrients."

Such factory farms also "push smaller farmers out of the market, disrupt rural communities, and use inhumane practices on animals."

Factory farms are a big problem here in Iowa, and the government is struggling for ways to deal with it. The proposal I have in my hand offers a 16-point action plan for enacting public policies to correct the problems, including far more stringent regulations, proper planning for manure management, more regularly held inspections, and a ban on large-scale facilities in environmentally sensitive areas. I fold the proposal and put it in my coat pocket. I will pass this along to the Natural Law Party's platform committee for further review.

I also have a copy of the newsletter from the "National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture," an organization headquartered in Pine Bush, New York. The newsletter reviews the Campaign's achievements and setbacks in pushing for funding for sustainable (I imagine Thicke saying, "organic, organic") agriculture programs under the Clinton administration. "Peaks and valleys," the report concludes. I stuff that report into my pocket. In fact, everything Thicke gives me looks good.

I thank him and his wife for their time and hospitality. I have been moved by the work they are doing. It's people like them, I say, who make me realize even more strongly than before that the Natural Law Party can be a mainstream political voice for America. Clearly, no other party has so many people speaking up quite so loud.