Major concerns about the direction of “organic” must be on the minds of organic farmers day by day. Success as an organic farmer is not guaranteed in the best of times, but what kind of decisions by USDA and the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will make success more or less likely? Recent decisions regarding hydroponic production and livestock welfare standards clearly threaten the chances for family farmers to pursue one of the few remaining opportunities for success as family farmers. Without rules preventing fake organic or vertical integration—or whatever destructive market forces result from “free markets”—the vision and fulfillment of that vision are at risk. How can we create a movement to motivate our society and government to respect farmers, not only for producing healthy food, but also caring for the land and caring for the consumer?

We are posting this essay by George written in May 2014 as it is just as relevant - perhaps even more so - today. World Food Day was recognized on October 16 with demonstrations and actions around the world while here in Iowa the World Food Prize with all its glorification of ‘feeding the world’ continued the corporate agribusiness narrative, explicitly and implicitly. Meanwhile, the number of food insecure people has risen to an estimated 821 million. Climate change, rural poverty, land grabbing, and peasants being pushed off the land are just some of the causes of this increase in hunger that are directly and indirectly related to the chemical and technology dependent agriculture system promoted by agribusiness.

The brief article, “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World” offered by Professor Jonathan Foley in the May 2014 National Geographic magazine, clearly states the stark features of a global society on the brink of overshooting the capacity of the ecosphere. I highly commend Professor Foley and his colleagues for being honest about the depth of the crisis because in the general media, and especially the farm media, one wouldn’t know that anyone should be alarmed at all. Here in Iowa where the landscape is plastered with millions of acres of genetically modified corn and soybeans along with their poisonous herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilizers polluting our lakes and rivers, our institutions deny that Silent Spring has arrived, let alone that anything needs to change.

Our food and agriculture system is in crisis. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) finds that global hunger has increased to 820 million people – 1 in 9 – while malnutrition has skyrocketed to 2 billion people – about 1 in 4. Meanwhile, farmers globally face chronically low farm-gate prices, rising input costs and extreme weather linked to climate change. 

Here in Iowa, family farms are experiencing the worst crisis since the 1980s, with farms under extreme levels of debt not seen in decades. Iowans are also suffering from poor water quality due to run-off, including from fields over-fertilized with manure from industrial hog operations (hogs outnumber people 8 to 1 in Iowa).