"Going Organic"; Chapter 53, The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 54

“Going Organic”

Lottie Thompson took a seat at the last big oak table in the Winona Public Library and began to write a farm plan.

Library desk space these days, at a premium – and with no new Andrew Carnegie in sight – seemed to be more and more scrolled vertically into computer monitors, most boxy, a few flat. This fine old native oak table would soon follow the many-drawered card files into library history and an fundraiser auction. Not much real estate in libraries existed anymore to spread out acres of books or to open a big atlas wide enough to parallel the curve of the earth.

The Ioway woman, sitting in sun pouring through tall east-facing windows on a cold morning, downloaded and printed several workbooks designed to make the farm planning process easier. The precise detail of questions and answers covered page after page after page.

Lottie intended to become an organic farmer. The closing date on the farm on the Root River was just three weeks away. The money from her herb business, carefully banked, would take her part way into this first transitional crop year, but a loan would have to do the rest. Hence, the plowing through a formal “organic farm systems management plan” better known as “the organic plan,” not only for her certifier, but also for her banker, Helen Wilson.

The farm plan. Her farm plan – the foundation of a precise record-keeping system that would prove to anyone who cared to ask or learn that the food they put into their mouth met a specific standard of production from soil to seed to store, and everywhere in between.

Lottie liked to think of the plan as a label on the package of organic beef she would sell. It would stretch out for a very long way, the farm plan, the crop plan, the livestock plan, the manure plan, the conservation and stewardship plan. Each paragraph of that label would capture, indeed prove, the worthiness of every bite of her great tasting organic beef that would vanish from the fork or handful of burger bun of anyone who ate it.

She knew that the USDA had for years declined to label beef as organic in the absence of published rules. No more. The National Organic Standard opened the gates. Yet, the terminology still floated around vaguely in the ever-changing currents of the meat marketplace. Organic beef, natural beef, pasture-finished beef, grain-fed beef, grass-fed beef; no wonder consumers were confused. And Congress! Our elected representatives killing country-of-origin meat labeling at the behest of big corporations? Lottie shook her head in amazement. That would change, especially now.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, "mad cow disease") and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) not withstanding, who doesn’t appreciated good food, carefully grown, and processed? Lottie knew that salmonella infection alone kills more people every day than mad cow does in years. Yet isn’t it the forced cannibalism of ruminants that makes BSE seem so abhorrent? No wonder people become vegetarians, she thought. Why, the American meat industry hasn't had a wake-up call like this since Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle" in 1906. Hmm.

Lottie got up and walked to the laser printer and separated another forty pages from the stack shuttling into the output hopper. She paged carefully through each one, checking page numbers, punching a few at a time with the portable three-hole punch she carried. Into the three-hole binder they went, neatly tabbed into sections. Inspectors and bankers and conservationists would be able to see she had it all down.

One of the best things about going organic to Lottie was that it was a moral way of farming, not the only moral way certainly, but its system of ecological production and organic integrity honored the earth, respected the soil, the air, and the water, the plants, the animals, and the people. Lottie liked that.

Organic seemed a far cry from a system of farming that subsidized large, essentially soil-mining operations that made a few corporations and individuals wealthy selling high cost inputs to generate cheap, low quality food, and flushed sediment, nutrients, and other contaminants into the streams and oceans. Is that moral?

Before she returned to filling out the forms item by item – they are not that hard, people – Lottie smiled to herself and looked out the library window to a cold clear blue sky.

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Next... Chapter 55.

Thanks for these resources:

Organic Farming Documentation, Workbooks, Plan Templates; Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA)
http://attra.ncat.org/publication.html#organic

USDA National Organic Program
http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/indexIE.htm

National Organic Standards Board
http://www.ams.usda.gov/nosb/index.htm

Midwest Organic Services Association, Organic Certifier
http://www.mosaorganic.org/

Earth-Be-Glad Farm, Lewiston, MN, Mike, Jennifer and Johanna Rupprecht
http://www.localfoodnetwork.org/earthbeglad.html

Wholesome Harvest Farms, Certified Organic Meats
http://www.wholesomeharvest.com/

BSE in US to accelerate organic beef growth
http://www.foodnavigator.com/news/news-NG.asp?id=48758

Colo [IA] company aims to market ultra-safe meat
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10746379&BRD=2035&PAG=461&dept_id=238101&rfi=6

Foodborne Illnesses; Centers for Disease Control
http://www.cdc.gov/health/foodill.htm

Organic Independents
Jim Riddle & Joyce Ford
Rt. 3 Box 162C
Winona, MN 55987
507/454-8310 Fax: same
jriddle@hbci.com; jford@hbci.com
Consultancy, policy development, training, and outreach specialists for an organic future.

MOSES, The Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service
Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference, La Crosse, WI, February 26-28, 2004
http://www.mosesorganic.org/index.html

John Gabbert writes and edits The Upper Basin Chronicles.

Your comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to the author via (mailto link) The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 54.

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.