Growers Shed Organic Label, Keep Roots

Bill Coleman’s arugula isn’t pretty. It has holes in the center of each leaf from the nibblings of flea beetles.

And every now and then, a snail will inch down a slender green stem among a bunch on sale in his stall at the local farmers markets.

But, he said, that’s usually not a turnoff for most of the prestigious chefs and home cooks who buy from him.

“That’s how they know it’s organic,” and untouched by pesticides, the white-haired 61-year-old farmer said with a chuckle.

Starting Oct. 21, though, he can’t tell his customers that. After four decades of farming organically, he is now strictly forbidden to say the O-word.

Just as organically produced food moves into the mainstream with federal oversight and a USDA seal of approval, Coleman and many other pioneers of the organic farming movement in California are dropping out, unable or unwilling to fill out the paperwork and pay the necessary fees to get certified as “organic” under new U.S. Department of Agriculture rules that take effect next week.

Of the 2,100 organic farmers in California, about 700 have yet to receive their organic certification, said UC Davis cooperative extension specialist Karen Klonsky. That’s a prerequisite if farmers want to use the word on signs or packaging.

Many of these growers still will farm organically, but they will do it on their terms, using labels and signs that say “pesticide free” or “chemical free.”

Executives insist there’s no exodus from the $7.8-billion organic food industry. This is just normal turnover on the farming side of this niche industry, they say, and organic acreage is continuing to grow.

But some farm advisors and consultants say it’s a sign that remaining organic under the new bureaucracy has become difficult for many small farmers, who lack manpower or capital to document their practices and pay required assessments.

It has become a big farmers’ game. The top 2% of all California organic growers account for half the industry’s revenue and dominate sales to supermarkets and natural food meccas such as Whole Foods stores.

It is these large organic farm operations that are benefiting as organic frozen dinners, cookies and bagged salads become bigger sellers at mainstream supermarkets, some of which are now stocking their own private-label organic goods.

All this is making smaller growers feel left out of the organic food revolution that they helped ignite, relegated to selling their products at farmers markets or to the small number of home-delivery services.

The word “organic” “sort of got co-opted,” said Steve Sprinkel, a farmer who runs an organic restaurant and store near Ojai.

“The movement has been adopted by big-ticket commerce,” he said. “There’s very little community to it. The people who started the organic farming movement have been left out in the cold.”

Although many longtime organic farmers aren’t raking in the tens of millions their large competitors are, industry analysts say it’s still possible for smaller organic farmers to make a good living.

Coleman, who hits seven Southern California farmers markets a week, makes $100,000 to $150,000 a year, depending on weather and pests.

The reason the Carpinteria farmer has given up organic certification is the paperwork he and his son Romeo, who helps him run Coleman Family Farms, would have to fill out each week for each of the 190 herbs, fruits, flowers and vegetables wedged onto his 15 acres of hillside, and the fees they would have to fork over to government-accredited certifiers and the state.

He says most of his customers consider him organic, even if the federal government doesn’t. And the signs hanging over his Oaxacan legumes, Moroccan mint and Russian Red kale say his produce is “chemical free.”

“About 15 times a week we’ll get someone asking us if we’re certified,” Coleman said. “Only a couple of times will they shrug and walk away.”

Sprinkel says he has resorted to using the phrase “clean and local” and no one seems to mind.

However, others say they are afraid they will lose some of their customer base as people look for certification to prove a farmer is following organic practices, which forbid synthetic pesticides, chemical fertilizers and sewage sludge, as well as genetically modified seed.

Maryann Carpenter, who grows heirloom tomatoes, squash and greens in Santa Paula for three farmers markets, says she had intended to drop the word “organic” because of the costs and paperwork associated with certification.

She already has changed the sign for her farmers market booth to “Coastal” from “Coastal Organics” and made up signs saying “chemical free” and everything else under the sun to describe her product.

But when she found out that one of her main farmers markets, the Saturday Santa Monica market on 2nd Street, was going to set up a separate section for certified growers, she was spooked.

“They’re going to have signs saying you are now entering the organic zone, you are now leaving the organic zone,” Carpenter said. “I’ll be a block away from my original spot ... on the fringe,” she added. “I just don’t know if [my business] can withstand that.”

Under the federal farm bill, small farmers will be eligible to receive up to $500 to cover the cost of getting certified, and they can get funds to help promote their organic produce overseas.

But the government can’t help Carpenter with her time. With just her and her husband farming 12 acres, and her husband holding down another full-time job, the paperwork would be difficult to handle without hiring someone else. And what she earns from her produce, she says, doesn’t justify that.

Organic farming, once seen as the salvation for the small farm, has become increasingly difficult to manage and only marginally more profitable, growers say, as large players with greater economies of scale have muscled in and driven down prices.

“It’s much harder now to start an organic farm than it was in the past,” said R. Ford Denison, an agriculture professor and director of organic farming research at UC Davis. And he said the increased involvement of large farms is “probably having a more negative effect on the profitability of small organic farms than increasing demand is having a positive effect.”

A recent AC Nielsen study of 61,500 households suggests that the market for organic goods might not be growing as fast as many people would like. Only 15% of current organic buyers in the survey said they would buy more organic foods in the next six months. And only 3% of non-buyers said they would buy organics in the next six months.

For many, the road to organic certification has been so bewildering and burdensome that they have decided to abandon the organic movement, or at least slap another name on it.

Contra Costa County growers Rick and Kristie Knoll farm using organic practices, but after dropping their organic certification, they sell their fruits and vegetables under their own label, called Tairwa -- a play on the French word terroir that refers to the influence of a particular area’s soil on a plant.

“Now we just tell people that we are ecological and sustainable and we promote the health of the soil,” Kristie Knoll said. “We wanted to [pay to] promote ourselves rather than the organic method.”

However, she acknowledged that the decision to drop out of organic farming after more than two decades has been difficult.

“It was like I had abandoned my child,” Knoll said. “I was made to feel like Judas.”

But, she added, “we don’t want to fight anymore. We just want to farm.”

California has 180,000 acres farmed organically, representing about 14% of the 1.3 million acres grown organically across the nation but producing two-thirds of the organic fruit and vegetables in the country.

Much of this acreage is held by large grower-shippers, and it is these farms that dominate the flow of organic produce into supermarkets -- the fastest growing and potentially most lucrative market for organic food.

Some started as small producers back before the organic movement really began to pick up steam.

Myra Goodman, for instance, one of the owners of San Juan Bautista-based Earthbound Farm, which ships organic bagged salads and vegetables, has seen sales go from thousands of dollars in the mid-1980s to about $175 million last year. Her goods have found their way into 67% of all supermarkets, as well as discounters such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The evolution of large grower-shippers such as Earthbound, and the centralization of retail produce buying, has made it hard for smaller organic growers to secure contracts with individual stores, industry analysts say.

To compete in this economic landscape, farmers will have to think more creatively about what they do, such as growing new produce varieties and tapping ethnic markets, said Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation in Santa Cruz.

Goodman said that although her company is larger than most other organic growing operations, that doesn’t mean she’s tearing apart the movement.

“People ask me, ‘Don’t you feel bad about putting small organic farmers out of business?’ I say, ‘We’re not competing with small farmers, we’re competing with conventional farmers,’ ” she said. “We’re putting 14,000 acres into organic farms that are not polluting the earth, and farm workers are not being forced to handle those chemicals.”

Besides, Goodman added, small organic growers can provide something major produce shippers supplying supermarket chains can’t: a level of freshness one can only get by picking something when it’s ready to eat and selling it within a day or two.

That’s why Coleman prefers farmers markets, where he can peddle his holey greens and cut out the middleman.

“I raise a good product,” he said, “and people know it.”