The complicated truth about organic food
Five Questions with The Breakthrough Institute's Dr. Emma Kovak.
When I first saw the tweets about Emma Kovak’s op-ed on organic agriculture in The Hill this past December, I got worried. Kovak is a food and agriculture analyst at The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental organization that embraces technological solutions. I was worried the piece might be a typical anti-organic screed.
For the record, I have certainly written, tweeted and memed a few anti-organic screeds of my own, even just a few years ago. And while there’s nothing technically wrong with, say, arguing that organic farmers also use pesticides or that the non-GMO label is frequently used on foods that don’t have a genetically modified counterpart on the market, there’s usually so much more to the story.
That nuance—the rest of the story—is a lot more complicated than a rant. There is no single best way to produce our food because what’s best changes depending on the measure. We can look at emissions. We can talk about soil degradation. We can compare the cost to consumers with the health impacts for workers who pick, pack and process our food.
In the end, we usually have to give up something in order to get something else. It’s just not possible, at least in this country, to have cheap, widely available food that is also carbon-neutral and picked by workers who get good health insurance and earn a living wage.
Kovak’s piece gets at this complicated rest of the story. Categories like organic and conventional are perhaps less important than what a farmer does within their chosen production system, though let’s be clear: these choices also come with a whole bunch of trade-offs. Agriculture is complicated like that.
I wanted to talk to Kovak about her piece, so I asked if she’d be game for answering five of my questions for this newsletter. Happily, she said yes. Here you go:
So, I came across a couple of critical tweets about your op-ed before I read it and, based on these tweets, I'd prepared myself for some sort of anti-organic screed. But that's not what I found at all! It seems to me your argument isn't that organic is worthless, just that consumer motivations don’t line up with what organic farming can actually do well, primarily improving soil health. What would you like to see happen with the organic regulation? Improve it? Keep it as is? Ditch it entirely?
Right, one of the only ways that certified organic farms in the US perform better than non-organic farms is in soil health, primarily by the amount of organic matter in the soil. But of the practices that organic farms use to improve soil health, they’re not required in the certification (they are suggested though) and they’re practiced by less than half of organic farmers: 46% plant cover crops, 36% practice reduced tillage, and 35% use organic mulch or compost. So I’d love to see the organic certification do more to encourage or require those practices that have been shown to be the most beneficial.
The only things organic certification actually requires is that farmers not use most synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides (instead they use manure and naturally-derived chemicals), and not use genetically engineered crops (GMOs). A lot of people like that organic certification prohibits farmers from using synthetic pesticides because they think that makes organic food healthier or less likely to have toxic residues on it. But all produce, organic or not, has only miniscule levels of pesticide residues that are safe for humans to consume. If people understood that, I think they’d make different choices.
Overall, there will always be multiple certifications out there, and what I want most is for them to be more transparent and accurately understood by consumers, who can then make more informed choices. I don’t care so much if the organic certification exists in its current form as long as consumers understand what it actually means, and that consumers have other choices of certifications that truly prioritize environmentally-beneficial farming practices or outcomes. Right now organic has an undeserved monopoly on being “the most environmentally-friendly farming”.
Why don’t more conventional farmers plant cover crops? We know they’re beneficial but it seems like wider adoption of cover cropping in conventional agriculture has sort of stalled out.
Cover crops are beneficial for decreasing nutrient runoff and improving soil health, but they’re also a lot of extra work for farmers and seeds can be expensive. Incentive programs have been successful in getting more farmers to grow cover crops, but they’re still pretty limited. Fortunately, it looks like incentive programs for farmers to grow cover crops will be expanding in coming years — Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota will be following Iowa and Illinois, and there may even be a federal program on the horizon. Illinois’ program had applications for 4x the amount of acres available through the program, indicating that farmers are interested in growing cover crops but may need incentive programs at least to get started.
You mention “outcome based certifications.” Can you explain what these are and why they might be advantageous?
Most certifications — including organic — have requirements for the types of practices farmers employ, like fertilizing with manure and compost rather than synthetic fertilizers. This is based on the idea that some practices are more beneficial than others. The problem is that the outcome of using a particular practice can vary based on the environment — manure might work better than synthetic fertilizer for one soil type, but not for others.
Outcome-based certifications acknowledge this variability by having requirements based on certain outcomes rather than specific practices. One outcome-based certification measures soil health, biodiversity, and ecosystem function. If we take the example of the amount of organic matter in the soil, farmers can add organic matter to the soil by fertilizing with manure, but other practices like cover cropping can too. The advantages of outcome-based certifications over those based on practices is that they give farmers flexibility and encourage innovation. With a certification that measures the amount of organic matter in the soil, farmers could pick and choose the practices that work best on their farms, as long as they’re adding organic matter to the soil somehow.
It seems to me the sticking point on any certification is making sure producers stick with these practices for the long haul, avoiding the problem of farmers who practice no-till but then end up eventually having to till the soil. “Deforestation-free” products that were grown on land that was actually deforested, just decades earlier. How can certifications avoid these inadvertent loopholes?
I think there are two issues here. The example of tilling is a good one for the issue of consistency. Tilling the soil after many years of not tilling the soil absolutely does release a lot of the carbon that was sequestered during the no-till years. But under some circumstances it becomes helpful for the farmer to till every once in a while, for example to control weeds. So whether it’s a certification that requires no-till that a farmer drops out of after a few years, or an incentive program for no-till that ends and some farmers go back to tilling, I think we have to acknowledge what the program means to do and whether it can realistically accomplish that. It isn’t realistic for some farmers to be no-till for many many years, so we shouldn’t design a program for no-till if that’s our goal. But no-till has other benefits that aren’t erased by occasional tilling, like reducing soil erosion and maybe improving water retention, so if our goals include those other benefits then a no-till program realistically matches our goals.
The issue of loopholes is often a problem for any kind of certification or regulation or law. Basically I think we need to be clear about what our goal is, what the certification should do in order to reach that goal, and what’s realistic to measure or track and enforce. But often regulations are created with loopholes or get weakened later via political pressure or corruption, and I don’t have a good answer for how to deal with that.
What’s a promising food system solution that's frequently overlooked?
I’m always excited about genetic engineering and about precision agriculture. CRISPR gene editing has certainly gotten a lot of press in the last few years as a powerful new tool that makes breeding of plants and animals faster and more precise. But the way in which I think it’s overlooked is that people often still think of it with a narrow set of applications. This perception is shaped by the first generation of GMOs, namely only Roundup-Ready crops and Bt crops, because they’ve been around the longest and gotten the most press. We’re seeing a wider array of applications now, like high-oleic soybean oil and non-browning apples and mushrooms and fast-growing salmon, and there are so many more on the way like drought resistance. The organic certification is very against genetically engineered (GE) crops, and I think that’s a shame because GE crops can serve many different purposes, they don’t have to be tied to the use of synthetic herbicides.
Precision agriculture, which is a really wide category, includes GPS-guided tractors, and sensors and maps that show patterns of important factors like soil moisture and crop yield. Together, these technologies allow farmers to only give plants exactly what they need in water and fertilizer, and to apply pesticides and herbicides to only the specific areas of a field with issues. This helps conserve water, reduce fertilizer runoff, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, optimize yields, and cut the costs of expensive inputs for farmers.
What you should be reading
We need to be talking more about carbon farming policies.
What you should be listening to
Listen to my first podcast for the New Books Network, an interview with journalist and author Tom Philpott:
