Farming with the Future in Mind

Raising the bar, and the accessibility of sustainable practices.

By Genevieve Slocum

Organic standards could soon be a thing of the past, potentially eclipsed by the American National Standards Institute’s (ANSI) in-progress set of sustainability standards, an ostensibly more flexible and progressive approach to making sustainable farming the status quo. Jeff Moyer, farm manager at The Rodale Institute, recently attended the Leonardo Academy conference where the standards committee, funded by the Scientific Certification Systems group, met to discuss the final stages of the draft document.

Moyer, who sits on the Leonardo Academy’s board and was asked to attend the conference as one of a wide range of stakeholders in the process, did not at first savor the prospect of joining the standards committee. “I envisioned that they were trying to placate the organic community” by formulating the new standards, he said, that this was simply conventional agriculture’s opportunity to co-opt the notion of sustainability. Moyer feared that with input from conventional ag stakeholders, the standards would become so warped that “much of what the conventional world was doing would be considered sustainable.”

When he got to the meeting, Moyer said he quickly scrapped his prior expectations, elaborating that he was amazed at the diversity and explosive clash of dynamic opinions. Moyer recalls that he found that constituents were almost evenly divided between organic and conventional camps, and “splattered in among them were folks who were interested in rural sociology,” fair labor standards and other issues of social and economic sustainability. It seemed that the one thing everyone could agree on was that the document was not up to par. Organic stakeholders thought it competed too much with the organic standards, robbing them of legitimacy, while conventional stakeholders weren’t pleased that it stressed so-called “organic” practices so heavily. The Farm Bureau, among the latter group, emphasized the need for a standard that would be relevant to the 95 percent of American farmers who are not organic, or even for that vast majority who use transgenic crops. "Why create a standard that definitively dismisses such a wide swath of the farming community?" they wondered.

Original language shelved

The original draft standard, written in April 2007, was intended to be voluntary, offering a “life-cycle” scope of assessment, which would guarantee to the consumer that standards had been met at every step of the supply chain, from growing to processing to distribution. As stated in the draft, its purpose is “to establish a comprehensive framework and common set of environmental, social, and quality requirements by which to demonstrate that an agricultural product has been produced and handled in a sustainable manner, from soil preparation and seed planting through production, harvest, post-harvest handling, and distribution for sale.” Goals included encouraging local and regional distribution, increased bioregional consumption patterns, the smart use of resources, and the stimulation of consumer demand to reinforce environmental responsibility in all aspects of production.

The standard was originally drafted as a market-based incentive. That is, much like the current USDA organic standard, the producer gets to advertise point-of-purchase to the consumer, usually via a logo or label, that their product is certified to meet sustainability criteria. Moyer and others at the conference criticized that approach, instead advocating a subsidy system that rewards farmers with points for each step taken toward improved sustainability. They envisioned a dynamic system that each farmer could use to set individual goals and improve incrementally.

“We decided to take that draft standard and set it aside. We are not at this point going to recommend that we just tweak it and call it a document,” said Moyer, stressing the need for a fundamentally more representative, all-encompassing standard and citing the lack of representation of livestock, aquaculture, and forestry, among other agricultural sectors that the Leonardo academy had viewed as too different and diverse for inclusion in a blanket standard.

Farmer choice favored

What Moyer and other committee members envision is “a model like an interstate highway – you can pull on the highway at any point,” which means that farmers can choose where to begin their pursuit of sustainability. It would be a user-friendly system, not-one-size-fits-all, which Moyer compares to an a-la-carte menu. Farmers can pick and choose which “items” – be it cover crops, integrated pest management, better farm waste management systems, or hundreds of others – they’d like to adopt. Sustainability practices would be ranked in a tiered system, with more points (equated to larger subsidies) awarded higher-tiered achievement.

Moyer, who serves on the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) and was recently elected chairman, was at first skeptical about the influence of organic standards in the process. “My view going into the meeting was that organic would be the baseline.” He saw organic standards as offering no room or incentive for continuous improvement, too often a policy albatross and bogged down by the inertia of bureaucracy and entrenched interests. A vision for sustainability could encompass a range of concepts that he believed the organic standards to have bypassed, including aspects of environmental sustainability like biodiversity conservation and those of social sustainability like fair labor practices. Moyer’s main criticism of the organic standards model was that its point-of-sale premise was easily corrupted, and it penalizes farmers for doing something wrong, i.e. not measuring up to every tenet of the certification standard, rather than rewarding them for their every positive effort and achievement.

Even for most conventional farmers who have an interest in becoming more sustainable or just in pocketing the sustainable premium, making the switch to certified organic production is a daunting and expensive step, and can seem like a big leap. The potential value of the ANSI sustainability standards, on the other hand, is to give farmers the opportunity for incremental, manageable change and to reward them for every improvement they make.

Re-route current dollars

Moyer envisions a third-party inspection/enforcement service “using existing farm-service organizations that are already monitoring what’s going on,” such as the Farm Bureau or the Farm Service Association. Money that’s already being spent on crop supports and conservation would simply be shifted. Similarly, the subsidies awarded to large conventional producers could be reallocated (albeit despite substantial opposition) to farmers demonstrating their commitment to sustainability.

What about the USDA? Where do they come in? Although they sent representatives to observe the standards committee meeting, none were actively involved. “The USDA, I can tell you, is not in favor of having a sustainability standard,” said Moyer. There would be no opportunity for a USDA logo, for one thing. They would essentially come in after policy had been formulated and allocate the funding for the subsidy-point program, he said, giving the standard-setting process some immunity from the effects of lobbyists.

The major threat to the process is that the healthy level of debate could escalate to gridlock. “This is going to take way longer than anyone thinks,” believes Moyer. “Here’s a group of people that half of them don’t even want it to happen.”

A few things are clear to Moyer: Flexibility is key, and market-based incentives are inadequate. He and many of his colleagues on the committee share a vision of a standard “based on performance metrics rather than a series of practices, so that how you get there becomes less important than that you get there.” For example, if farmers want to reduce their reliance on pesticides, they can accomplish that goal in a variety of ways – they can incorporate more varied crop rotation, they can use organically certified biological pest control, such as Bacillus thuringiensis, they can grow clovers or other blooming crops that draw beneficial insects that prey on harmful pests, etc. It is entirely up to them, as long as the end result is accomplished. This helps account for the different obstacles that come with geographical variance. A technique that works in Pennsylvania may have completely different results in Washington State, and farmers should have the flexibility to work within the constraints of their locale.

A market-based, point-of-purchase label would actually stifle flexibility, since the incremental, tiered nature of the standards makes labeling extremely complicated, and is likely to be unintelligible for the average consumer. The only way this would be seriously practical is if a representative were physically present to interpret to the consumer what the standards are and what they mean for every ingredient on a food label. Consumers simply do not want to take the time to decipher such a label, even if all the information could be squeezed into the label in the first place, said Moyer. Such labeling would also punish farmers and processors unable to earn it, its absence effectively proclaiming unsustainability to the consumer.

Anyone against sustainability?

The standard as envisioned by Moyer and others has the potential to be a win-win approach for both farmers and consumers. As with any policy change, a huge amount of energy will be invested in preserving the status quo, but it will be a shift that’s hard to argue with. Who will come out against sustainability, especially with a dynamic, adjustable target for improvement? “The reason farmers would fight this plan is if they felt that their income and way of life were being threatened,” remarked Moyer, who sees the potential for universal rewards.

The Committee will continue to revise the stipulations for each tier of the standard, and will later outline the specific fiscal details of the subsidy program after the guidelines are finalized. Moyer hopes to see a resulting document that will become a “stimulus package” on the individual farm level, that “gives people choices and options [as to] how they comply with the goal,” and that uses third-party enforcement and reward, rather than bendable direct-to-consumer advertising.

When the marketplace cannot practically reward farmers for small positive steps, members of the ANSI standards committee meeting feel that it is time to draft fiscal policy that can. Consumers, the majority of whom are uneducated about the intricacies of sustainability or who care about little except price to begin with, may not be the appropriate channel for reward. Subsidies are a significant source of underlying control in the way food is produced, and potentially have the power to reinvent the priorities of our food system.

Click here for the complete draft of the Standards.

Genevieve Slocum is editorial assistant in the communications department at the Rodale Institute. She was recently accepted into Columbia University’s Masters of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy program, and plans to change the world one plate at a time.