An interview with...

Brian Leahy
President, California Certified Organic Farmers

 

What kinds of inroads has the organic ag sector made into traditional agriculture?

It's very substantial. The first year I grew organic, the local newspaper said it was a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the American food chain. And it was a joke for the rest of ag. And now, many of the largest agricultural producers in the world, in California, have organic production. They see it as just one more approach.

Does that make you or your organization nervous, having factory organic farms cropping up?

No, the goal has always been to return agriculture back to a biological base, ot an organic base, away from a toxic chemistry approach. So I mean, that's why we started. What makes us nervous is that organics has also been an area for smaller farms to make some money, and you know, that was partly just because it was new; it was a market niche. And now we see the very efficient farmers coming in, using the advantages of large scale, and getting prices down, which is what happens… All of agriculture has been a history of new innovations that the early adapters tend to make some money, and then everybody else jumps on board and that advantage disappears.

When did you see the organic industry start to surge?

Really, it was after an alar scare, which like…early 90s, something like that. But it's been a constant growth. The first year I grew organic it was a $78 million industry in t eh United States. Today we're about $13 billion. It's been a 20% growth per year for a couple decades.

What do you think has caused traditional farmers to get interested in organics? Is it because the money is better, the idea of working without chemicals is starting to appeal more…?

A combination. Some of it is the market. There is the opportunity to maybe make a little bit better return. A lot of the early organic farmers like the people I learned to grow from tried the chemical approach and just realized it was lousy way to farm. It was not a good approach. You created in the long term more problems than it really resolved. And then there's people that have always…they tried the chemicals, they see some of the problems, and they want to back off a little bit. And a real good way to learn how to reduce is to try it without any. So we have many farmers that actually have some…a small amount of organic, a lot of conventional. They learn a lot from the organic and they apply that on their conventional.

Given that the industry is growing so quickly now, what are the challenges facing organic farmers?

One of the biggest challenges is the market. You know, the farmers could easily grow a lot more organic, but the market is inefficient, it's not predictable, it's not reliable yet. So you know, that's one big one - just the consumers aren't there yet. The other is research; we've lost 50 years of biological research. We don't really understand weed ecology, soil health, because we've applied all of our research into this toxic chemistry and now this biotechnology. Instead of just doing real good basic science and figuring out what's going on in the soil, how do we do good crop rotations, how do we work with insects? So that's one of the biggest limiting factors. And then of course, government programs for the commodity crops that discourage producers to go and take an organic approach.

Could you lay out some of the concerns about GMOs?

Probably the biggest concern about the genetically modified crops is that they really haven't been subjected to good scientific scrutiny. We don't really know what's happening when you eat the material, but more importantly we don't know what's going on in the environment. We don't know what's going on, you know, in the soil. We do know some things. We've already seen that they're creating new types of weeds, new types of soil problems, and so the biggest one is: it fails a cost risk analysis. When you look at the potential benefits, they're very few, and they're really the concentration of power into a few companies more than anything else, that just want to make sure that you pay a royalty any time you eat. But when you look at the benefits to the consumer, or to the farmers, it's not that great. So it fails every risk analysis you look at. So that's probably the biggest concern.

What about the dangers of cross-pollinating to unmodified seeds?

Well, there's two real concerns. One is a marketplace concern. You know, the people that want to buy organic, they've been very vocal. They don't want to take this risk of genetically modified crops. And so they don't want it, and this technology - the GE technology - it doesn't respect property rights. It blows around through all sorts of ways. Through pollen, and the seed just tends - it's little and it gets all over the place. So it doesn't respect property rights, and that could affect our market places. That's not just organic either; that's conventional, European, people that just don't want to eat this tuff. The other of course is we could lose our… When seed pollination… If we get this new species of plant into our native plant, then we could lose our ability to go back to the native plants to make improvements. And that's really vital to agriculture, because we're really pushing the game all the time, the envelope. We could very easily come… WE could get a plant disease - and we have had in the past a plant disease that could threaten the entire crop, and we're… Researchers have been able to go back to the original plant, other species, wild species, use those and find a valuable thing in there, a valuable trait, and breed it into the crops that we're growing. So if we lose that ability - if somehow these new genetically modified plants go out and contaminate our original…seed source, that could be a huge danger to humanity.