The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [82]
For better or worse, these are not the kinds of farms a big company like Small Planet Foods, or Whole Foods, does business with today. It’s simply more cost-efficient to buy from one thousand-acre farm than ten hundred-acre farms. That’s not because those big farms are necessarily any more productive, however. In fact, study after study has demonstrated that, measured in terms of the amount of food produced per acre, small farms are actually more productive than big farms; it is the higher transaction costs involved that makes dealing with them impractical for a company like Kahn’s—that and the fact that they don’t grow tremendous quantities of any one thing. As soon as your business involves stocking the frozen food case or produce section at a national chain, whether it be Wal-Mart or Whole Foods, the sheer quantities of organic produce you need makes it imperative to buy from farms operating on the same industrial scale you are. Everything’s connected. The industrial values of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization wind up crowding out ecological values such as diversity, complexity, and symbiosis. Or, to frame the matter in less abstract terms, as one of Kahn’s employees did for me, “The combine just can’t make the turn in a five-acre corn field”—and Small Planet Foods now consumes combine quantities of organic corn.
The big question is whether the logic of an industrial food chain can be reconciled to the logic of the natural systems on which organic agriculture has tried to model itself. Put another way, is industrial organic ultimately a contradiction in terms?
Kahn is convinced it is not, but others both inside and outside his company see an inescapable tension. Sarah Huntington is one of Cascadian Farm’s oldest employees. She worked alongside Kahn on the original farm and at one time or another has held just about every job in the company. “The maw of that processing beast eats ten acres of cornfield in an hour,” she told me. “And you’re locked into planting a particular variety like Jubilee that ripens all at once and holds up in processing. So you see how the system is constantly pushing you back toward monoculture, which is anathema in organic. But that’s the challenge—to change the system more than it changes you.”
One of the most striking ways companies like Small Planet Foods is changing the system is by helping conventional farms convert a portion of their acreage to organic. Several thousand acres of American farmland are now organic as a result of the company’s efforts, which go well beyond offering contracts to providing instruction and even management. Kahn has helped to prove to the skeptical that organic farming—dismissed as “hippie farming” only a few short years ago—can work on a large scale. The environmental benefits of this process cannot be overestimated. And yet the industrialization of organic comes at a price. The most obvious is consolidation down on the farm: Today two giant growers sell most of the fresh organic produce from California.
ONE OF THEM is Earthbound Farm, a company that arguably represents industrial organic farming at its best. If Cascadian Farm is a first-generation organic farm, Earthbound is second generation. It was started in the early eighties by Drew and Myra Goodman, two entirely improbable farmers who came to the land from the city with exactly