“Behind the Bean” (pdf) - Cornucopia Institute

Commitment to Organics
If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and
we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth
no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations. 9
—Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, from an op-ed piece in the New York Times, January 2009
A De a d Zo n e in t h e Gu l f o f Me x i c o the size of
New Jersey, 10 thousands of cases of acute pesticide
poisoning among farmers and farmworkers, 11 polluted
water from animal agriculture that kills millions
of fish 12 —these are just a few examples of the
“offenses against the land and labor” that Wendell
Berry, a farmer and agrarian poet and writer, and
Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute in
Kansas, are talking about. But Berry and Jackson
are also talking about something more serious than
these high costs. They are taking a lesson from history:
societies that ignore the health of the land
and soil that grows their food are doomed to fail.
If we want our children and grandchildren to eat
tomorrow, we must care for the land today.
Photo courtesy of Vermont Soy, Louis Rainville.
If we wish to see more farmers
caring for the land in thoughtful
ways, as opposed to relying heavily
on petroleum-based fertilizers and
toxic pesticides, consumers must
support organic farmers by buying
the foods they produce and paying
them a fair price for it.
Increasingly, governments, scientists, and organizations are
coming to the same conclusions. In 2008, an intergovernmental
panel, supported by organizations such as the World
Bank and the United Nations, reported that organic management
of food production is the most sustainable way to
feed the world. 13 Organic farming combines old wisdom with
modern knowledge of pest control, nutrient cycling, crop
synergies, and soil health. Scientists and researchers are continually
discovering additional benefits of growing food under
organic management, while dispelling the myth that organic
farming systems are less productive than intensive conventional
systems.
If farmers do not care for the land, we risk losing the resources
on which our food production depends. Organic agriculture
aims to build the health of the soil, and to raise its productivity
through means that are less dependent on fossil-fuel
energy. Organic agriculture, therefore, is more than a system
of “withouts”—without growth hormones, without synthetic
fertilizers, without toxic pesticides, and so on. It is about
building a healthy and sustainable food production system.
In 1995, the National Organic Standards Board defined the
principal guidelines for organic production as the use of “ma-
10 Behind the bean: The Heroes and Charlatans of the Natural and Organic Soy Foods Industry.