Eating for a Healthy Planet - First in a 2-part series

Editor's note: This is the first in a 2-part series. Next week: Regenerative Agriculture.

Organic - Does it Matter?

Food shopping is not for the faint of heart these days. The meat counter alone seems to require a master's degree. Should we buy organic? Free range? Grass-fed? Pasture-raised? And what about produce? Local seems important. So does organic, but is all organic the same? Oy! By the time we hit the eggs aisle, we've got catastrophic decision fatigue.

Maybe it's not as daunting as all that, but if one of your grocery goals is to shop and eat for a healthier planet, the reality behind the labels is worth examining, especially as it applies to our little corner of the world. In short, there's a growing concern among farmers that the terms alone can't satisfy our quest for sustainable eating, and that we need to embrace a more in-depth, demanding philosophy of food production.

Let's start with "Certified Organic," a label growers can earn from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Michael Moss owns Kilt Farm, an organic farm near the Diagonal Highway on Oxford Road. He considers organic food to be the very foundation of sustainable eating. "If everybody stopped purchasing conventional produce and started buying organic produce, that would be a gigantic shift," Moss said.

When fossil-fuel based fertilizers and chemical pesticides came on the scene, they dramatically boosted agricultural yields, but they also held "serious health implications to man and his environment," according to the National Institutes of Health. Chemical pesticides have been linked to a myriad of diseases and are known to wreak havoc with the soil biology that crops need to thrive.

"Conventional agriculture tends to be very hard on soil," Moss explained. "We are losing topsoil faster than we can replace it in conventional systems. That is not a sustainable trajectory."

Maybe soil biology isn't something most of us ruminate on, but that may need to change, given that we all like to, say, eat.

A 2019 article in the British daily "The Guardian" spells out what's at stake. Thanks to conventional farming methods, the world has lost half its topsoil over the past 150 years, and topsoil is where we grow 95% of our food. By one estimate, we may run out of topsoil by 2080.

"It's important for people to know that there's a threat," Moss said. "If we keep doing the things we always do, we're going to run into problems."

Organic food production eschews some of those very damaging farming practices. "As far as food consumption, this town wants organic," said Alison Steele of Niwot Market. "Especially with meat and produce."

But both Moss and Steele will tell you that the term "organic" is tricky. "There's a big difference between buying the organic lettuce we sell from a local farm and a box of something organic from General Mills," Steele said.

Certified Organic food can be shipped thousands of miles before arriving at your table, passing through many hands. That takes fuel, and time. Produce, especially, can lose vitamins and other nutrients during shipping. And if the aim is to protect and rebuild soil, Certified Organic has mixed results.

"Large scale organic will follow the letter of the law," Moss explained, "but they're still pretty much an extractive process."

To earn a 'Certified Organic' badge from the USDA, farms need to adhere to a long list of standards. For instance, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, irradiation or genetic engineering are all prohibited. That's much better than the use of chemicals, but still leaves room for significant environmental damage. Some organic pesticides are allowed, and just because they're naturally occurring doesn't mean they're non-toxic. Plastic weed barriers can kill critical microbes in the soil. And quite simply, unless large farms take special care to replace the nutrients their crops absorb, the ground becomes depleted.

"The ground after a few years is just tired, and they move on and do the same thing to a new piece of ground," Moss said. "I don't have the ability to move production from Niwot to Salinas. My ground has to be healthy enough to continue to grow food."

What he's saying, in short, is that Certified Organic doesn't go far enough to ensure that our food supply is sustainable.

Marcus McCauley agrees. He's Farm Director for McCauley Family Farm in Longmont. McCauley's focus is meat-pork, lamb, and chicken-all of it raised on nature's local pastures.

"Certified Organic and free range are not required to have any pasture at all," McCauley said. "For chicken, Certified Organic is 30,000 birds in a barn with access to a porch they're afraid to use."

You can hear a similar refrain from Erin Dreistadt, who co-owns Aspen Moon Farms with her husband Jason Griffith. Aspen Moon holds 99 acres-two-thirds of them in Niwot. A farm stand and the other third of their acreage are in Longmont. The farm sells produce, flowers, starter plants and occasionally beef, all of it Certified Organic.

"Here's a big thing," Dreistadt said. "All of our produce is soil-grown in the earth. That is not a requirement of being Certified Organic. There's lot of plastic culture, indoor growing, vertical growing." She added that for small farms, keeping the Certified Organic label is tedious and expensive. For Aspen Moon, certification costs about $2,000 per year.

"We have to pay to say we're organic," she said. "It should be the other way around. You should have to pay to use chemicals that hurt people and the earth."

The cost causes some local farmers to skip the certification process altogether, even though they adhere to the USDA's standards for organic. For all of these reasons, Steele feels that, especially with produce, eating local may be more important than choosing the organic certification, especially when you or your grocer know where that food comes from. "If you're getting super local produce and it's not 'certified' organic, even if it's just 'natural,' it's pretty clean," she said.

So while Certified Organic is good, it may not be good enough. The same caveats apply to terms like free-range, grass-fed, and pasture-raised. All of these can refer to animals that are humanely and sustainably raised, but consumers can't tell that from just the label. We need more information.

Moss, McCauley and Dreistadt share a strong conviction that our soil, and our food, rely on a much more holistic approach than any of these terms can cover. They embrace farming processes that fall under the umbrella of "regenerative agriculture."

As McCauley said, "The difference between what we're doing and Certified Organic is vast."