For organic farmers, it's a much easier row to hoe

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose responsibilities range from overseeing logging in national forests to assisting in the provision of electricity for rural residents to providing meals for schoolchildren, will begin putting its seal of approval on organic food.


		Gilbert W. Arias / P-I
	Shay Shapiro, left, and Ben Deitle pick cilantro at the Full Circle organic farm in Carnation as Nelson looks on. In seven years, the farm has grown from 5 acres to 80 acres.

That has farmers such as Andrew Stout worrying whether he can be earthy enough for the USDA. Among the rows of pumpkin and baby arugula growing along the Snoqualmie River, Stout measures the level of nitrogen in his compost and wonders about where to get especially natural seeds so that his produce can win a government seal.

Stout and the growing number of other organic farmers are bracing themselves for Monday, which will likely prove to be a milestone in modern agriculture.

"It's a lot of extra work involved, but it's all so worth it," Stout said. "I think organic is really going to become important."

In the seven years he's been farming in east King County, Stout's Full Circle Farm has grown from 5 acres to 80 acres of fresh produce, free of pesticides, that he sells directly to consumers and to natural-food markets.

His success is a reflection of a national trend showing that more people are trying to be healthful and more environmentally conscious by buying organic food. And they are paying extra, often 30 percent more, to do it.

Organic products still make up less than 2 percent of retail food sales nationwide. But the USDA reported that in a five-year span, between 1992 and 1997, certified organic cropland doubled to 1.3 million acres. In Washington, between 1997 and 2001, organic acreage more than tripled from 12,000 to 40,000 acres.

According to a variety of industry surveys, consumers are increasingly concerned about agricultural practices, such as the use of pesticides, sewage sludge, antibiotics and growth hormones.

Organic supporters have been aware of the steady growth in the market. But a light bulb went off in 2000 when an industry survey found that more of the country's organic food had been bought at such conventional groceries stores as Safeway and QFC than at the natural-food markets.

That meant that the organic market was capturing casual shoppers, often referred to as the regular folk, said Goldie Caughlan, a consumer member of the USDA's National Organic Standards Board.

It was a big change over a time 14 years ago when Washington had been one of the country's first states to define and certify organic food.

"Before standards in '88, organic was pretty much relegated to hippiedom," Caughlan said. "We didn't have farmers' markets all over the place back then. We really have come a long way in 10 years."

Surveys and shopping trends show that folks are buying the more expensive organic food because of sensitivity to environmental effects of conventional agricultural chemicals, most of which are petroleum-based.


		Gilbert W. Arias / P-I
	A worker holds a bunch of white turnips at the Full Circle farm in Carnation. There are 560 certified organic farms in Washington, most of them small.

"The fact that people are concerned about the quality of water is an important fact," said Gene Kahn, chief executive officer of Small Planet Foods, who started Skagit County's Cascadian Farm in 1972.

Kahn, considered a pioneer of organic farming, said that the new labeling represents an acknowledgement that the industry has come of age and that its claims warrant certification by the federal government.

"It's a great thing that we're celebrating," Kahn said, adding that the pursuit of consumer education and awareness about the environmental and health benefits of organics will make the industry grow.

In 1996, the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to review all chemicals in pesticides using tougher standards for health risks. Under the Food Quality Protection Act, the agency initiated hundreds of new studies on pesticides and their effects on children. The EPA is supposed to complete its reviews of thousands of these chemicals by 2006.

For now, many chemicals being used on a majority of the nation's cropland are considered safe enough, or low risk.

In setting and implementing the national organic program, the USDA has been careful not to step on its own toes.

As the largest, most diversified federal department outside the Pentagon, the USDA spends most of its effort and money promoting conventional farming and techniques allowing faster delivery, higher volumes and stronger markets for agricultural products. Setting these organic standards, explained in a double-sided report about 2 inches thick, took the department 10 years to complete. The USDA relied heavily on tough practices that had already been promoted by a few states, such as Washington and Texas.

Organic practices go beyond growing pesticide-free lettuce. Organic beef, for example, will come from cattle treated humanely, given access to the outdoors, fed organic food, and given neither antibiotics nor growth hormones. The same will be expected of poultry, dairy and egg farmers.

Companies that make organic products, such as Small Planet Foods, a subsidiary of General Mills, must document each step in the process of making cereals, quick-cook dinners and frozen vegetables.

Everything from cosmetics to greenhouse tomatoes to over-the-counter medications claiming to be organic will have to conform to these standards.

Agricultural leaders will not say that organic farming and certified organic food is better than food that is produced using pesticides. The food is just different.

"Yeah, it's a different set of growing standards, but people can put two and two together," Caughlan said.

And they have been.

Consumers, not the government or producers, have been driving the organic market and its astonishing 20 percent annual growth since 1990. Advertisements for organic food are few, and farmers do not receive specific government incentives to be chemical-free.

Farmers and organic-food processors actually pay for the privilege of being certified by the state of Washington, and that sometimes makes them cranky, said Miles McEvoy, the state's organic program manager.

Many farmers feel that the national standards actually punish them for doing what they feel is right and that new restrictions may push some of the smaller ones out of the business completely, said Bob Meyer, who grows organic vegetables and eggs on his 40-acre farm in Tenino.

For example, farmers cannot use manure, a natural fertilizer, on their fields unless it is composted or is applied months in advance of planting.

For Meyer's farm, and many others in Western Washington, this is a tough requirement because not all have a massive composting set-up at their farms. That means they would have to fertilize their fields with manure during the rainy season, which would let the fertilizer seep too deep into the ground.

"This is supposed to be sustainable farming," said Meyer, who also travels to British Columbia to buy the organic feed for his 300-plus hens.

Then there are the certification fees, which in Washington will be increasing about 10 percent next year.

"They figure, 'I'm doing this because I think it's right, and I think it makes the world a better place. Why are they making it hard on me?' " McEvoy said.

McEvoy said that organic methods have helped many smaller farms survive because of the higher prices that growers command for their produce. But the smaller farms will be the ones hard-pressed to comply with rigid paperwork and compost testing standards.

Of 560 certified organic farms in Washington, 494 are considered small by USDA regulations. Those are farms that make less than $240,000 in annual sales.

Still, Stout, who has one of the larger organic farms in the state, said that he supports anything that ultimately increases the amount of organic farmland, even when, as expected, more conventional food companies buy into the trend, putting the squeeze on little guys like him.

"Then we'll need those really tough standards," he said.