Homegrown Farmers Adopt Their Own Standards

This is a great follow up to my recent post What Does Organic Mean to You?
The article speaks to the flaws in organic certification and what some farmers are doing to create more trustworthy standards.

Homegrown Standards
An attractive alternative to national organic certification
by Ari LeVaux
Published in the January/February 2007 issue of Orion magazine

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Clark Fork Organics is not an organic farm—not according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While Slotnick and his wife, Kim Murchison, haven’t changed their farming practices, they also haven’t paid the thousand dollars in fees, filed the forms, or shown the federally accredited inspector their compost pile.

Instead, after fourteen years of farming certified organic, Clark Fork Organics has dropped the federal seal of approval and joined eleven other western Montana farms to establish the Montana Sustainable Growers Union, marketing produce under their new “Homegrown” label. The label’s ten-point pledge covers everything from crop rotation to a ban on absentee ownership.

"Homegrown is the first group in the nation to collectively drop organic certification and replace it with their own local organic guarantee,” says Elizabeth Henderson of the Germany-based International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. “Given what happens with oil prices, wars, and sabotage, sustainable food ultimately depends on local networks of people working together based on trust. It’s a good idea to get used to.”

“What we took for granted—that organic means small and local—is gone,” says Slotnick. “The label that describes tomatoes flown two thousand miles from a three-thousand-acre monoculture worked by migrant workers who don’t make a living wage—that doesn’t describe the food my family grows.”

Read the entire article here