• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 518 0

what works and explaining why it does. As it happens, in the years since Howard wrote, science has provided support for a great many of his unscientific claims: Plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are less nourishing than ones grown in composted soils;1 such plants are more vulnerable to diseases and insect pests;2 polycultures are more productive and less prone to disease than monocultures;3 and that in fact the health of the soil, plant, animal, human, and even nation are, as Howard claimed, connected along lines we can now begin to draw with empirical confidence. We may not be prepared to act on this knowledge, but we know that civilizations that abuse their soil eventually collapse.4

If farms modeled on natural systems work as well as Howard suggests, then why don’t we see more of them? The sad fact is that the organic ideal as set forth by Howard and others has been honored mainly in the breach. Especially as organic agriculture has grown more successful, finding its way into the supermarket and the embrace of agribusiness, organic farming has increasingly come to resemble the industrial system it originally set out to replace. The logic of that system has so far proven more ineluctable than the logic of natural systems.

THE JOURNEY OF Cascadian Farm from the New Cascadian Survival and Reclamation Project to a General Mills subsidiary stands as a parable of this process. On an overcast morning a few winters ago, Kahn drove me out to see the original farm, following the twists of the Skagit River east in a new forest-green Lexus with vanity plates that say ORGANIC. Kahn is a strikingly boyish-looking man in his midfifties, and after you factor in a shave and twenty pounds, it’s not hard to pick his face out from the beards-beads-and-tractors photos on display in his office. Walking me through the history of his company as we drove out to the farm, Gene Kahn spoke candidly and without defensiveness about the compromises made along his path from organic farmer to agribusinessman, and about “how everything eventually morphs into the way the world is.”

By the late seventies, Kahn had become a pretty good organic farmer and an even better businessman. He had discovered the economic virtues of adding value to his produce by processing it (freezing blueberries and strawberries, making jam), and once Cascadian Farm started processing food, Kahn discovered he could make more money buying produce from other farmers than by growing it himself—the same discovery conventional agribusiness companies had made a long time before.

“The whole notion of a ‘cooperative community’ we started with gradually began to mimic the system,” Kahn told me. “We were shipping food around the country, using diesel fuel—we were industrial organic farmers. I was bit by bit becoming more of this world, and there was a lot of pressure on the business to become more privatized.”

That pressure became irresistible in 1990, when in the aftermath of the “Alar scare” Kahn nearly lost everything—and control of Cascadian Farm wound up in corporate hands. In the history of the organic movement the Alar episode is a watershed, marking the birth pangs of the modern organic industry. Throughout its history, the sharpest growth of organic has closely followed spikes in public concern over the industrial food supply. Some critics condemn organic for profiting time and again from “food scares,” and while there is certainly some truth to this charge, whether it represents a more serious indictment of organic or industrial food is open to question. Organic farmers reply that episodes focusing public attention on pesticides, food poisoning, genetically modified crops, and mad cow disease serve as “teachable moments” about the industrial food system and its alternatives. Alar was one of the first.

After a somewhat overheated 60 Minutes exposé on apple growers’ use of Alar, a growth-regulating chemical widely used in conventional orchards that the Environmental Protection Agency had declared a carcinogen, Middle America suddenly discovered organic. “Panic