Modern Organic Blog

The federal government set standards for the production, processing and certification of organic food in the Organic Food Production Act of 1990 (OFPA). The National Organic Standards Board was then established to develop guidelines and procedures to regulate all organic crops. The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) during December 2000 unveiled detailed regulations to implement OFPA. These took effect on April 21, 2001, with an 18-month implementation period ending October 2002. At that time, any food labeled organic must meet these national organic standards. USDA’s National Organic Program oversees the program.

What is organic food? The term is becoming more popular. In the United States for a product to claim that it is 100% organic is has to produced following legally regulated guidelines and be subject to strict testing. Typically to because of the detail involve to get the ultra healthy organic food it costs more than the fertilizer and pesticide rich alternatives.

The term organic means that the food was produced without the use of conventional pesticides, synthetic fertilizers or sewage, and that no artificial additives to included in the process. When the term organic relates to animals like beef, the animals are free of antibiotics and growth hormones given typically to make the animals bigger.

In the beginning the only place to get organic food was from your local farmers market. Not any more. Now, family run farms are being over taken by commercial operations that produce still 100% organic food faster and meet the new demand for the products. The United States has grown by 17-20% in organic food sales in the last few years. You can now get organic products from online retailers to Wal-Mart.

In the United States, companies have to pass tough testing and regulations to call their products organic. The term certified organic means that the USDA has certified that the product in question is actually 100% organic. A farmer commercial or family run must apply for their certification. Not all organic food is certified. Food products can be organic and just not have gone through the approval process to be certified.

With the every increasing demand for organic products, more and more products are finding their way into becoming organic. Now, coffee, ice cream, and ketchup can all be found with organic labels and ingredients. There is now an overwhelming change from the overly processed foods that line our grocery stores to more all natural products.

The term all natural is not govern, so the only way to know a product is organic is to get it from a trusted source or grown it yourself. The ladder probably isn't going to happen for most of us. All natural products are not necessarily bad. They are just not going through the certification process to be considered 100% organic.

Looks for the organic label from your trusted places you buy your products. You will have to make the decision on the products that might be 70% or 35% organic. For some products that is as good as it gets for the time being. With the demand high more and more products will start becoming organic. They have to.

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Natures Organic Market has low prices on organic baby clothes, organic protein bars, and more.

Organic produce just tastes better to Chris James. Simple as that.

“I can certainly taste the difference,” he says.

It’s just one man’s opinion, of course. But it’s one shared by a rising number of consumers during an explosion of interest in organically grown food.
Chris James started Fresh Earth Farms in 2003. James and wife Susan bought the farm in 2002, moving to Denmark Township from California where Chris was a software engineer and salesman. (Bulletin photo by Jon Avise)
Chris James started Fresh Earth Farms in 2003. James and wife Susan bought the farm in 2002, moving to Denmark Township from California where Chris was a software engineer and salesman. (Bulletin photo by Jon Avise)
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A recent study by the University of Minnesota, Minnesota Agriculture Department and the state’s university system that analyzed the finances of 45 larger organic farms in the state revealed their average profits doubled in 2007.

On a smaller scale, James has seen the surge in interest firsthand — between 2005 and 2007 the number of customers nearly doubled at his small, family-owned, organic Fresh Earth Farms in Denmark Township.

And, he says, the demand is there to double it again over the next two or three seasons if James and his one full-time and three part-time employees can manage to keep up with the new-found appetite for locally grown fruits and vegetables free of synthetic chemicals.

“Based on the demand I see this year we certainly could increase” the amount of produce Fresh Earth grows each season. “The question from my side is, ‘Do I have the labor to meet the demand?’”

Fresh Earth Farms operates under a food production model called community supported agriculture (CSA) where customers purchase a share of what the farm produces each season. In James’ case, one share is worth 1/300th of what his eight-acre farm grows from the rich Denmark Township soil spring through autumn.

Shareholders receive a box of produce each week — anything from fresh heirloom tomatoes to potatoes pulled from the ground that day, “even artichokes,” the farm’s Web site says — either picking it up from one of the various drop sites around the metro area or from the picturesque farm just off County Road 20.

James had to cap the number of shares available last year at 300 after demand exploded, and interest in his small business, operated on their 20-acres of land west of Afton State Park, hasn’t let up.

He thinks it’s part of a realization by consumers of the importance in knowing where the food on their table came from and what’s gone into it. At Fresh Earth Farms it’s not chemicals doing the work, it’s “complex, active, living soils.”

“Without food you don’t live,” said James, a former software engineer in California’s Silicon Valley and native of White Bear Lake. “It’s important to know where the things you’re putting in your body to survive are coming from. If you don’t know where it’s coming from, how do you know how good it is for you?”

Locally grown and organic produce has become all the rage, evidenced by the expanding organic selection at grocers like Wal-Mart, Target, Rainbow and Cub as well as a spate of new restaurants around the Twin Cities with menus featuring Minnesota and western Wisconsin-produced fare.

James is only too happy to help. He’s an unintentional farmer, a former software engineer and salesman who with his wife Susan moved back to Minnesota from the west coast in 2002. They purchased their 20-acre farm a few miles east of Cottage Grove not to work the land, but to have room for Susan’s horse in the back yard.

“We had no intention of farming,” he said last week, walking along the dirt road that winds past small weed-strewn fields of lettuce, squash, potatoes and strawberries between old whitewashed barns and the family’s farmhouse perched atop a small hill.

When James began selling his organic produce in 2003 — he’d had a small organic garden back in California — he did so at farmer’s markets, a set-up he didn’t enjoy for its unpredictability.

So in 2004 tiny Fresh Earth Farms made the switch to the CSA model, getting roughly 90 customers to buy shares the first year. That jumped to 160 one year later and 300 in 2007 and 2008.

He says selling direct to consumers is probably the only way his small-scale farm can survive so close to the Twin Cities — the higher cost of land and more labor intensive production process means he needs to maximize profit, something selling wholesale to a co-op or grocer wouldn’t allow.

Plus, James says, watching families handpick their weekly allotment of fruits, vegetables and herbs from the boxes of fresh produce on the farm offers him valuable feedback.

“I liked that idea,” he said of CSA. “I wanted to have that relationship with the customers.”

Growing organically gives him a different relationship with the land, too, than would conventional farming methods. It can be a backbreaking effort trying to keep up with weeds and pests, using only naturally occurring, synthetic chemical-free pesticides.

“If we’re not out there every week, hoes in hand, we’re running into problems with weeds,” he says. “You can also see why people use chemicals, because it’s so much easier to spray something rather than go through with a hoe and pick out weeds.”

That increased level of attention and labor is what makes organically grown food more expensive, James says.

Not everyone values it, he knows. But more and more, these days, people do.

Organic food is healthier and a responsible way to grow, he says. But really, for him at least, in Minnesota’s unforgiving climate the appeal is even simpler than that.

“There are about 20 weeks out of 52 weeks a year when you can eat locally grown food — maybe half-a-year or so buying from the farmer,” he said. “So I say take advantage of it when you can.”

Jon Avise can be reached at javise@swcbulletin.com.

For more information on Fresh Earth Farms go to its Web site: www.freshearthfarms.com.