Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [62]
She fine-tunes it a little more each year, but already her operation is an obvious success. The last time she had soil tests, the technicians who came to evaluate her compost-built organic dirt had never seen such high nutrient values. The greatest limitation here is temperature; she could keep tomatoes growing all winter, but the cost of fuel would pass her profit margin. In early spring, when she’s starting the plants, she economizes by heating the soil under the seedlings (woodstove-heated water runs through underground pipes) while letting air temperatures drop fairly low. Pushing the season early is more important than late, she says. People will pay more for a June tomato than one in October, when tomatoes are old hat, dropping off the vines in gardens everywhere. By starting in the spring, she can bring bushels of Trust out of her greenhouse to thrilled customers long before anything red is coming out of local gardens.
I observed that in the first week of June, she could charge anything she wanted for these. She laughed. “I could. But I don’t. I belong to this community, people know me. I wouldn’t want to take advantage.”
She is more than just part of the community—she was a cofounder of the hugely successful Ashfield farmers’ market. She sells to individuals and restaurants, and enjoys a local diet by relying on other producers for the things she doesn’t grow. “We don’t have chickens, for example, because so many other people do. We trade vegetables for eggs and meat.” Their favorite local restaurant buys Amy’s produce all summer, the last two months for credit, so that in winter she and Paul can eat there whenever they want. He deems the arrangement “a great substitute for canning.”
Like many small farms, this perfectly organic operation is not certified organic. Amy estimates certification would cost her $700 a year, and she wouldn’t gain that much value from it. Virtually everyone who buys her food knows Amy personally; many have visited the farm. They know she is committed to chemical-free farming because she values her health, her products, the safety of interns and customers, and the profoundly viable soil of her fields and greenhouses.
Farmers like Amy generally agree that organic standards are a good thing on principle. When consumers purchase food at a distance from where it’s grown, certification lets them know it was grown in conditions that are clearly codified and enforced. Farmers who sell directly to their customers, on the other hand, generally don’t need watchdogs—their livelihood tends to be a mission as well as a business. Amy’s customers trust her methods. No federal bureaucracy can replace that relationship.
Furthermore, the paper trail of organic standards offers only limited guarantees to the consumer. Specifically, it certifies that vegetables were grown without genetic engineering or broadly toxic chemical herbicides or pesticides; animals were not given growth-promoting hormones or antibiotics. “Certified organic” does not necessarily mean sustainably grown, worker-friendly, fuel-efficient, cruelty-free, or any other virtue a consumer might wish for.
The rising consumer interest in organic food has inspired most of the country’s giant food conglomerates to cash in, at some level. These big players have successfully moved the likes of bagged salads and hormone-free milk from boutique to mainstream markets and even big box stores. But low price has its costs. In order to meet federal organic standards as cheaply as possible and maximize profits, some industrial-scale organic producers (though not all) cut every corner that’s allowed, and are lobbying the government to loosen organic rules further. Some synthetic additives are now permitted, thanks to pressure from industrial organics. So is animal confinement. A chicken may be sold as “free range” if the house in which it’s confined