Organic Farming: A Growing Concern

January 14, 1986|By John N. Maclean, Chicago Tribune.

FRONT ROYAL, VA. — Tomatoes that taste like they were just picked from a home garden, firm and red on the inside despite oddly shaped and colored exteriors. Apples that squirt sugar from the first crunch to the core. Potatoes that glow a golden yellow and are good enough to eat without butter.

All that and more is the promise of organic farming, which used to occupy a tiny niche in the great design of American food merchandising. It was a niche that sometimes went begging. Organic produce could be found in only a few health food stores and often sold so irregularly that it rotted on the shelf in misshapen little piles.

Two decades ago, organic farming meant a hippie pushing a wheelbarrow of manure.

Today, organic farming has put on a three-piece suit and is trying to elbow its way into the mainstream.

Organic farming has become more than a small band of believers. Piggybacking on increased concern about health and toxic residue in food, organic growing has attracted farmers, middlemen and customers from among just plain folks.

The natural foods industry does about $3.5 billion of business each year, with organic foods accounting for perhaps as much as $500 million. Nobody knows for sure, in part because nobody can say what organic is.

Natural is in. But is it organic? A lot depends on the answer, as everybody from pet food makers to near-bankrupt farmers try to cash in on the interest in natural foods.

Virtually every supermarket devotes shelf space to ``natural`` products. They can range from face cream connected to the natural world mostly by a thread spun on Madison Avenue to produce fresh from a regional farmer who says he grows by ``organic methods,`` a term in search of a definition.

Organic is easy to define in the extremes.

Evening television shows a glamor girl made up to look as though she weren`t made up arising in her mountain cabin, her hair miraculously brushed, with a bowl of ``natural`` cereal in her hand. She steps outside.

Never mind that it`s cool enough for a down vest at the same time it`s warm enough for bare feet. We`re talking image here; we`re talking back to nature.

For contrast, drive out to A.P. Thomson`s Golden Acres farm in the foothills of Virginia`s Blue Ridge Mountains. Thomson, 75, is a guru of the organic movement who took a worn out family homestead and gradually turned it into a showplace that has spawned imitators across the country. Thomson`s apple orchard is as different from a conventional one as a garden is from a parking lot.

The apples blossom in splendor in the spring, unthinned by man-made chemicals. Thomson`s bees accomplish the pollination. The blossoms become little green apples that survive and flourish without the 40 or so sprayings that conventional fruit growers may apply. They become big red and yellow apples and sometimes fall off, instead of being glued to the branch by a sprayed hormone.

You can barely make out the trees because the foliage is so heavy. But step into the orchard and see beneath the irregular rows of trees a living carpet of lush alfalfa and grasses, only lightly marked by tire wear.

At a large operation down the road, the apple trees stand out like telephone poles from the nearly bare earth, deeply rutted by a constant passing of spraying and harvesting vehicles.

The search for a definition of organic farming has been so difficult that even Organic Gardening and Farming magazine, which had much to do with initiating the organic movement, has abandoned the attempt. In 1971, the magazine began a certification program for organic farmers to maintain standards and assure consumers.

Then, in the late 1970s, the magazine began moving away from this procedure and has dropped it, leaving the setting of standards to regional groups. California, Oregon and Maine have set standards, but the standards, which are in general terms, vary.

The Organic Foods Production Association of North America, formed only a year ago, has entered the fray to set some kind of recognizable national standards for growers, merchants and consumers.

The association is headed by Thomas Harding, who left the trade publication industry after 20 years because he sensed a need for less traumatic farming methods. On a visit home to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, he was standing in the Choptank River, recalling how, as a boy, he could see to the bottom at a 60-foot depth. The water was up to his knees, and he couldn`t see his feet.

``I knew something was wrong,`` Harding said laconically.

Harding is out to unify the organic foods industry, set guidelines and standards and endorse organizations across the country that monitor organic farming. Harding wants to give consumers and retailers something more to trust than a personal relationship with a supplier such as Thomson.