Whether food production entails acres of mono-crops, livestock shuttled through assembly lines or orderly tracks of plastic pipelines in factory-scale hydroponics spaces, streamlined production techniques tempt food producers to improve on nature, without necessarily assessing the long-term health or environmental costs. Even an apparently benign innovation, like hydroponics, may convey unexpected downsides.
Despite each new agricultural novelty, 17 years after the US Department of Agriculture established the Organic Standards, earth-based farming remains the oldest and most proven method for cultivating organic food. A coalition of farmers, sustainability advocates and foodies wants to keep it that way.
“If we want to protect the integrity of the organic seal, we will have to fight for it,” says Lisa Stokke, founder of Next7, which has launched a campaign to raise public awareness about the upcoming decision. Stokke hopes a vote at the October 31 meeting of the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) — which regulates the rules governing organic standards — will rectify what she calls “the wrongful designation of hydroponically grown foods as organic.”
The ruling is particularly critical because soon several pre-Trump members will cycle off the NOSB, to be replaced by Trump-era appointees.
2016 data show that organic foods have burgeoned into a $47 billion industry, year after year increasing more than any other food sector. Over the last two decades, major corporations have briskly acquired organic brands. Ownership gives food conglomerates entrée to the National Organic Standards Board. That means companies like Danone and Clif Bar have a powerful say in organics’ future.
According to Dave Chapman, a Vermont farmer and co-founder of an advocacy group called Keep the Soil in Organic, to get the coveted and economically valuable organic label onto its products, the burgeoning hydroponics industry engineered an end run at the NOSB back in 2014. Despite…