Letter to the Editor

Who Owns the Canaries?

Let’s say that you have a product you’d like to sell. What’s one of the best marketing tricks you could pull off? It would be to convince people that you were simply offering your product for sale out of the goodness of your heart to benefit them, not because you wanted to – oh, the horror! – make money.

Such is the achievement of the organic industry. And while fooling the general population about their supposedly pure motivations is one thing, we should be very concerned when our policy-makers are too naive to recognize a marketing gimmick when they see it.

Commissioner Deb Gardner provided an unfortunate example of this at a recent candidate forum. Gardner spoke against agricultural practices that have been scientifically proven to be safe and sustainable, instead advocating for as-yet-unproven organic growing methods. She justified her brazenly pro-organic, anti-science stance by saying, “I like to listen to the canary in the coal mine, not the coal mine’s owner.”

It’s a clever turn of phrase, and meant to indicate that only the “coal mine” (the conventional farmer) has a profit motive. But, in Gardner’s analogy, who owns the canaries?

Make no mistake about it – organic products are an industry, and a big one at that. The Organic Trade Association reported that U.S. sales of organic products in 2015 hit a record of $43.3 billion. Yep, that’s “billion” with a “b.”

If you were marketing a product that costs more than its conventional counterpart, how would you convince consumers to pay more? It’s done in large part by portraying the less expensive, non-organic product or process as dangerous or toxic.

Such tactics are fair game in marketing, but our county commissioners shouldn’t be so gullible. Look at the science, not the spin.