Keeping the Soil In Organic

it's about corporate farming versus real organic the idea that hydroponic can qualify as organic is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of so I think that there's a something that's important for all citizens here in in saying no no I know if you can't take this [Music] the organic community and the National Organic Program are have been traveling along the same road for the last 17 years and the question is whether we're going to be able to continue to travel on the same Road when the organic food production Act was passed a lot of people in their gana community were concerned that this might make a weakening of what organic means of the Organic Standards and other people welcomed it as an opportunity to have support from the government and to actually have United unified standards that were going to be strictly enforced and the problem is that we don't have unified standards and they're not being strictly enforced all the areas of organic farming are under assault and in all the cases the thing that's missing is a connection to the soil that's true of the of the CAFO livestock the containment feeding operations for animals and it's true of course for hydroponic vegetables and berries which are really based on the conventional philosophy of feed the plant not the soil and they've gone so far as to get rid of the soil the organic belief is feed the soil not the plan so I think things are not going well they're not going well for organic certified organic to remain a strong and meaningful label in the marketplace organic sales are growing but real organic is in serious danger of being overwhelmed in the National Organic Program [Music] the people who started the whole organic movement and we're talking up to 100 years ago we're talking back to the 19-teens were people who are concerned that what about what they were seeing in the quality of the food that was coming from the invasion of old-time agriculture by chemicals they didn't really know where they were going but they knew they were going somewhere where agriculture needed to move because of what was going on at the time in America we came upon such immensely fertile soils that we could afford to be robbers for a while and just till away and we didn't need to return much because there was just such a depth of topsoil and much of the country but they were seeing that in soils that have been farmed for a long time that didn't work and so Albert Howard looked at those he wrote a book called an agricultural testament and he wrote another book called soil and health and the message in these books was the same it was in order to produce healthy crops that provides health for the animals and the people you need to feed the life in the soil so it's an interesting thing and this idea is that all organic farmers are livestock farmers and the livestock is the life in the soil both microbial and insect and mammal that there's a lot of things living in a healthy soil a lot and that this is very important to keep that life high and that there's farming practices that will do that and that's that's the foundation of organic farming is how do we farm in a way that keeps the soil alive and then the soil will take care of us if we can take care of the soil [Music] Albert Howard put out soil and health and agricultural Testament around 1940 and so there's a long time period in 75 years 77 years that the organic movement has been active you know it's been called the organic movement and in that time the meaning of what organic means has not changed and nor nor should it it's based on on realities that you know it's based on processes that have been true for hundreds of millions of years but in the last seven years there's been a real redefinition in the National Organic Program of what organic means and and they're doing that because of economic pressures now they already voted in 2010 and they clearly said hydroponics should not be allowed in organic farming the organic farming is based on a fertile soil system and that recommendation was ignored and in the meantime since it was since 2010 there has been a lot of hydroponic produce is not just ignored it was reversed the National Organic Program said we are allowing hydroponic and we've seen hundreds of millions of dollars of produce being sold in stores that's hydroponic nobody knows about it you can't tell if you want to go while I don't want to buy a hydroponic you can't tell people who make a lot of money in organic get together and they start to use that influence not to change how they farm they start to use that influence to change what can be called organic that's exactly what's happened Driscoll's is an enormous company it's the biggest berry company in the world conventional berries it's also by far the biggest company in the world for organic berries over a thousand acres of those organic berries are hydroponic and they're in these hoop houses and they go on forever and they're all growing in buckets filled with coconut husks and all the feed is coming in in a dripper that is not organic when I started talking to some of the soil scientists and asked them well you know why shouldn't that be called organic some of them we're almost speechless well it's not organic a you can't you can't reinvent a soil system in a bucket you know with coconut quar and some liquid feed it's not the same thing [Music] so those of us have been farming organically for many years the idea that hydroponic can qualify as organic is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of what we have been working for is to ensure that people can be well fed from a simple system that depends upon the biology of the natural world as it works right out here in in the fresh air right out here in the soil and there is no way that an artificial system can ever duplicate what's going on in the soil because it's been going on for millions of years the organisms that run at the plant roots that determine it these are things that have been together forever and the idea that you can put a solution made up by chemists in a laboratory through some sort of system with plastic trowel and pumps and electric gadgets is just it is so anti what organic farming has always meant organic farming has been dealing with the beauty of the soil the crops growing on it and the quality that comes when you combine high organic matter in the soil with the adequate mineral levels in the soil and sunshine I mean some hydroponic systems are using artificial lights give me a break and the beauty of what has been developed for all these many years is being totally undermined by the US Department of Agriculture allowing hydroponic to be certified to me anything from a hydroponic system without soil is what I call a virtual veg this is like virtual reality and just out of curiosity I looked up the word virtual in the dictionary and this is great this is the merriam-webster definition of virtual very close to being something without actually being it now that's my definition of any vegetable you grow in a hydroponic system compared to a real one and these are serious issues if you ask scientists about doing trials of biological concepts they will talk about whether you did it in vitro or in vivo in vitro coming from the Latin word for glass means you're doing things in test tubes and stuff in vivo means you're doing things in the real world organic farming has always grown food in vivo in the soil with all of the features that the soil brings into that hydroponics is growing it in vitro in some sort of artificial setting some sort of artificial medium and it can never in any way qualify for what organic has always meant to those of us who are farming this way and to the people who have always wanted to eat the highest-quality food grown on high-quality soils [Music] you know we have this amazing situation now where where Senator Pat Roberts from Kansas is a serious influence in what we call organic and he hates organic but you know one of his constituents in Kansas is the biggest CAFO egg producer CAFO confinement animal feeding operation the biggest CAFO egg operation in America that is not organic but it is certified organic as these large producers come in they're not just seeing how little they have to do to be able to call organic they're also saying you know why don't we change that standard to fit how we do do it already and that's what's happened with CAFO production of milk meat and eggs you know some of them yes are breaking the rules as they exist the rules say that you have to have pasture and a lot of these farms have no pasture so if the rules were enforced by then NOP that would be the end of Capo's in organic but they aren't it's about corporate farming versus real organic and in fact the the hydro lobby one of their their leaders spoke to the Senate he got to speak to the Senate because they have a lot of money and they hired a top lobbyist to get them a position and because when he was in front of the Senate he said by the way the the nos B needs to be reformed it needs to have a makeup that better reflects corporate farming interests and it needs to stop wasting its time on outlier issues like animal welfare this is the new organic that is being planned for us and the only way that we're going to stop that is to stand up and speak up and speak up loudly well when it comes to livestock on this farm we feel that livestock should be raised on grass pastures to the greatest extent possible because they're out in the sunshine they're getting a food that is coming actually for free by eating grasses and insects and other things and what happens whenever you have a system where the quality of the produce is supposedly better and in this case is more than supposedly better you're going to have people who want to get into it at just for the price premium without doing all the things that everybody knows makes the food superior and so all of these huge egg operations all of these huge milk operations you can't put thirty or sixty thousand chickens in a barn with a little door that allows them to wander outside if they know we're outside is and tell me that that is organic farming yes you're feeding them organic grains but as the latest information from the Washington Post a recent people Peter hore whisky article indicates so much of the supposedly organic grain is being relabeled on its way here from Eastern Europe where it was actually grown conventionally so if you really want to eat a good egg or drink good milk you want to make sure you find a farmer who runs the animals honestly on range lets them express their chicken as' as Joel Salatin says and the milk wants to come from cows that are out grazing cows were designed to eat grass and turn it into something we can eat they weren't designed to be stuffed with a grain no matter how the grain was grown so let's get back to an agriculture that allows animals to produce the highest quality food by the farmers providing them with the highest quality care [Music] let them come up with a new brand that's fine all right let them let them advertise what they what they are growing and sell it as as what it is but to call it organic when it's CAFO or it's hydro that is a lie yeah in the real world if you went to a consumer and took them to one of these CAFO egg places it's a it's this organic they'll go no this isn't organic right this is not what we that's not why I'm giving you my hard-earned money and paying a premium because it's organic because this isn't what I wanted you know I wanted the pasture I wanted the Sheep out on the pasture on the hill I wanted the chickens who are going out every day and hunting for bugs and eating grass and I think you know like that famous thing I know I know pornography when I see it I think most people actually know organic when they see it what happens is that they're trusting the National Organic Program to do that for them because they can't go around to all the farms and so to me that's what's called bad marketing when you trick somebody and sell them something that they don't want right good marketing is we help somebody to find what they do want and that was the whole idea of the National Organic Program was to try and help people to find the food that they wanted protect the standards so that they were strong and so they were enforced and there wasn't cheating and that the farmers could could offer their stuff to people who wanted to buy it and it's a beautiful idea it was an attempt an honest attempt by Senator Leahy and others to create what's one of the most enlightened laws you know in the history of America but like any law it is subject to influence and and as the organic market has grown so has interest in it from large corporations and there are now very large corporations that are dominating and controlling the the National Organic Program [Music] this fall they're going to be something like 15 rallies across the country and actually one of those is in England one of those is in Costa Rica tour in California one in Vermont and Hampshire Maine Wisconsin Colorado and the final one in Jacksonville Florida I think no matter what happens in Jacksonville no matter what happens with the National Organic Program this is not going to go away even if the National Organic Program says once and for all we welcome hydroponic production into organic a great many people are going to resist that and what we see is that the National Organic Program is being so seriously undermined by its lack of integrity that the only thing separating it from total marketing disasters that people don't know about it yet it's my first desire to reclaim the National Organic Program and make it be great again to make it be honest and have strong standards and enforce those standards but if they are unable to do that then I would like the farmers and the eaters to move on and find some way of identifying real organic food and I don't know exactly how that's going to happen I think it needs to if if the National Organic Program can't do that [Music] you [Music]

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Views: 43,041

Rating: 4.8911567 out of 5

Keywords: Keep the Soil in Organic, NOP National Organic Program, USDA, USDA organic, organic certification, hydroponics, Eliot Coleman, Long Wind Farm, Four Seasons Farm, CAFO, confined animal feedlot, NOFA, NOFA VT, NOFA Vermont, NOP, National Organic Program, NOSB, National Oganic Standards Board

Id: Op3J5GFmfzo

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2017