Certified Organic Can Be Bad for Small and Local

GRAIN recently published an article about the politics of certified organic seeds.

While every country has a slightly different interpretation of the rule, generally speaking, certified organic food must be grown with certified organic seeds when they are available.

This sounds innocent enough, even logical to some people. As innocent as it sounds it’s a really insidious rule that makes things very difficult for some small farmers and decreases global biodiversity.

No Significant Difference

While no one should use treated seeds in their garden, and organic foods certainly should not be grown from treated seeds, the use of organic seeds doesn’t make any sense.

The root of the definition of certified organic is the plants should be grown on land that has not come in contact with chemical fertilizers and pesticides for two years. By the time you purchase and grow any seed in your garden, two years will have almost certainly passed since the parent plant could have been sprayed anyway.

If you are purchasing an OP or heirloom variety of plant, there is a reduced chance pesticides or other chemicals would have been used in it’s production. This is because a large portion of the chemicals used in agriculture are used to make produce appear cosmetically perfect or to protect it from spoilage. These chemicals aren’t needed when seed is produced. This doesn’t apply to F1 hybrid varieties, for which toxic chemicals are frequently used, and presumably these chemicals are allowed under organic certification because organic F1 seeds are widely available.

The chance of transporting chemicals of any significance into your garden or dinner table with an untreated purchased seed is infinitessimally small. First the original plant has to be sprayed, then the chemical must find it’s way to the very small seed, then the seed decomposes in your garden leaving a new plant in it’s place. It’s virtually impossible any chemical residue could be left behind that is any higher than what’s already present in your garden anyway. If you add supermarket vegetable scraps to your compost, you have a much greater chance of adding chemicals to your garden than using non organic seeds.

There is no possibility organic seeds can produce better plants. When you grow a seed, you are simply using it’s DNA. If a seed germinates and grows into a plant, that plant will be the same regardless if it came from an organic seed or not. There are simply no realistic possibilities for any differences to exist.

If you save your own seeds and trade with your fellow gardeners, the idea of organic seeds becomes a non-issue anyway. This is one more reason why we should all be doing this.

No Big Favors to the Environment Either

Of course one of the reasons many people buy organic foods is to help protect the environment. As anyone who has ever saved their own seeds will tell you, the amount of seeds that comes from a single plant is enormous. You can easily plant one seed and get thousands as a result.

Seed production is not as chemically intensive as producing market produce anyway, and the amount of land needed is a tiny fraction of that used in agriculture.

How Could Organic Be Bad?

The problem comes about in the interpretation of the rule ‘organic seeds must be used, when available’.

In North America many smaller seed companies specializing in OP and heritage varieties, knowing they could soon be shut out of the chain of organic agriculture if they didn’t, have been arranging their own organic certifications. This means in this part of the world organic seeds are widely available for most of the common OP and heirloom varieties. Probably for this reason, the certifying agencies have not been very strict about requiring the use of organic seeds.

In Europe and many other places in the world, it’s a very different story.

In Europe there are a very complicated set of rules governing the production of seeds for agriculture. In particular purchased seeds must come from a licensed source and generally can only be modern commercial varieties. Under limited circumstances, farmers are allowed to save their own seeds, but never to sell or trade them. For farmer grown seeds to be considered organic they must have been grown for two consecutive years first. It’s virtually impossible under realistic circumstances for farmers to maintain their own collections of seeds for their own varieties. If farmers can’t maintain their own seed collections, most heritage and OP varieties cannot be purchased as certified organic.

What’s happening in Europe right now, and the Netherlands was singled out by the GRAIN report above as being one of the worst offenders, is certain classes of crops are being closed when it comes to considering if organic seed is unavailable.

For example, the organic certifying agencies might simply say there are enough certified organic cauliflower seeds on the market, so no organic farmer can claim they can’t find certified organic cauliflower seeds. No arguments are accepted over the varieties available or the price seed companies are asking. Farmers who want to grow organic cauliflower must either have saved their own seeds for the past two years or purchase organic seeds from one of the companies selling them. There would be no other possibilities.

Who are these companies selling the organic seeds?

Referring to the Netherlands in particular, since this was addressed in the GRAIN report, one company called Vitalis controls 82% of the market for organic cauliflower seeds.

In each one of these classes of crops being closed for consideration of organic seeds not being available, only a small number of large companies control the seed market, leaving them in a position to charge virtually whatever they want.

15 Replies to “Certified Organic Can Be Bad for Small and Local”

  1. Nice follow up and explanation of some of the nitty gritty; I particularly support your suggestion that swapping-home saved seed (and produce!) makes nonsense of organic regulations.

  2. Very interesting and well thought out post. I always wondered whether organic seeds were by definition a bit pointless, but I hadn’t thought about it in this wider context.

  3. I am beginning to think that it is impossible to be organic without being local. Then again I feel that this whole organic craze has been counterintuitive to eating well. My mother left me a message yesterday saying that she saw USDA certified organic Animal Crackers. What the f*#k is that?

  4. I did catch Steven’s post. Quite a few people actually linked to that post (including myself) and it ignited some very interesting dialogue amongst those who are becoming restless about the validity of the organic tag.

  5. That was a good (and fairly depressing) explanation of the organic seed situation. The European rules I wasn’t aware of, which makes the whole thing more dismal.

    Here in Canada, which is pretty much in sync with the US as far as organic production standard, if not actual enforcement, the organic seed rule has been a sword hanging overhead for the last few years. Every year so far, you can get an organic seed exemption by providing a list of a minimum of five suppliers that you’ve tried to get seed from.

    As it’s been interpreted in my direct experience, this applies to individual varieties. If I can’t find, say, organic Space spinach from five seed houses, I can use untreated Space. Otherwise, for many veggie crops, I’d be forced to use whatever one or two organic varieties were available, and these are almost always home garden varieties not at all selected for market garden use (i.e. poorer performance, limits on days to maturity choice, and so forth, than even some other OP varieties that aren’t available as certified organic seed).

    The other thing is cost. For some crops, like tomatoes and peppers, where the yield and harvest window to plant ratio is high, certified seed is absolutely affordable. But when it comes to things like lettuce seed for mesculun mix, spinach, beans, peas, anything where you use a lot of seed and in succession, organic seed is crazily expensive. Even if the variety choice was there, a small farm couldn’t afford to plant these bulk seed crops at anywhere near the retail price the harvest could bring.

    So, every year, you wait to see whether the “reasonable” five-supplier exemption rule will be continued, because on the books, 100% certified organic seed is a requirement.

    What a nightmare…

  6. Mike,

    Thanks for explaining that. I hadn’t thought of that before, vegetables that you might think of as cheap because they are fast growing like lettuce and spinach are really more expensive for the farmer to grow because of the seeds.

    I really hope for your sake they stay flexible on this rule.

    I was talking with a organic cheese farmer about using some of my unusual garlic varieties in his garlic and herb cheeses.

    He checked into it and found out first of all that garlic was one of these crops closed for consideration of organic planting stock not available but also, even if he purchases ordinary certified organic garlic, that isn’t good enough because it has to be certified organic garlic planting stock. This means it has to come from a company licensed to sell seeds.

    It’s just too expensive for him to grow garlic this way, not to mention he has virtually no choice of varieties or suppliers, so he has started to grow some of my garlic and in two years it will be certified organic and he can use it in his cheeses.

  7. Hey Patrick,

    Largely because of this little discussion, I called the certifier just now to check (I usually put it out mind until the new year’s paperwork arrives), and the exemption appears to be in place: “Yes, this year you can still send in your 5-supplier exemption form for a ruling.” So, mandatory compliance hasn’t kicked in just yet.

    I re-read my comment above, and I don’t want to exaggerate or misrepresent the situation with seed cost. It’s not “just” an economic, arithmetical thing. I took a quick look at a couple of my catalogs for pricing and selection…

    Take a crop like beans. My mainstay small, independent seed house that produces its own seed, and where I get most of my tomato heirlooms, has a selection of about 40 open pollinated beans of all sorts. I practically drool over the descriptions (no nice color photos, just a neat little printed catalog). Around 10 of them are certified organic. They sell only by the packet, same price for certified or not, so a kilo of beans works out to around $250. That’s obviously…crazy. Not workable.

    By comparison, one of my two bigger seed houses, with a nice color catalog, also has around 40 varieties of bean. They buy from seed producers (but they sell only untreated seed). A kilo of beans ranges from around $8-30, the average around $12 or so. Two varieties, both green snap beans, are about 60% more expensive than similar non-organic. So, I can get a kilo for about $16, instead of $10. Way more affordable than $250.

    So, I COULD grow by the strict seed rule? Let’s say my seed cost is 10% of the overall cost of growing the crop through post-harvest to the market. Maybe that’s high or low, I haven’t figured it out, but it’s in the region. That 60% premium is then “only” a 6% increase in my total growing cost, surely I can pass that on to the consumer, 6 cents on the dollar, the “organic premium”, and we’re all happily certified organic?!

    Not really. The absolute and potential problems multiply. On the practical side, what if they’re sold out of organic seed (this can easily happen)? No beans this year? More likely, I’m spending significant season start-up time hunting down other suppliers, checking availability, making sure the certification paperwork is included with the seed orders… In a tiny farm, usually a one- or two-person show, these administrative things can eat up a surprising amount of time and energy, usually at the busiest time of year. Calling, following up, checking with your certifier about the validity of other certifications, the usual bureaucratic junk, in spring?!

    Then, there’s the…mental cost. The impact on your happiness, motivation and sanity. Suddenly, the fun is gone. I’m growing one green snap bean, no fava beans, no yard-long Asian beans, no French filet beans, not even a variety of similar green snap beans to see how they do, just the one or two certified organic beans. I can’t even dream about more varieties, well, maybe in 5 or 10 years they’ll be available… Multiply this through the typical 15-30 crops of a veggie market garden, and you’re mired in sameness and paper trails. You lose as the grower (no fun, no learning, no diversity), customers lose (no variety, no happy farmer talking excitedly about the harvests…no fun).

    This would turn me into an extremely low volume commodity crop grower…which is ridiculous, an oxymoron!

    I’d rather plant from both the OP and untreated catalogs, try F-1’s freely with the OPs again this year as I work on seed saving plans for the future. Watch different varieties do their stuff. Enjoy the entire process, right through to market. Which is what I’ve been doing, so far. I don’t want to be growing one well-documented variety of beet, one carrot, one green bean, and so on.

    That’s…nuts! And this is just a look at the certified seed part of the whole implausible regulatory set-up when it comes to small-scale farming.

    (I don’t know. Am I just living in a bubble, a spolt little boutique farm in a rich country, in an over-populated, starving world…? With every similar discussion, this thought is always lurking… The economic pressures and income requirements are very real on this farm, but still, is this approach realistic…?)

    Hope I didn’t ramble here. It’s hard with our sound bite reflexes to try to describe a situation without going too short or too long… 🙂

  8. Mike,

    I think that’s a really important thing too. If what we want is our food to be grown by someone like you who cares about what they are doing, it’s really important not to have an administrative burden so great it keeps them away from doing what they want to be doing.

    For me, buying food from someone who cares and believes in what they are doing is probably the most important thing. It’s why I end up growing most of my own food. I really wish you were my neighbor!

    Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on this, I’ve really found it all fascinating.

  9. Great post! I’ve been thinking much the same for years. I’m against organic because it’s a government word/label and “good enough for government” certification is no substitute for careful research and deliberation about the quality and ethics of a product.

    On a related note I’ve recently become acquainted with the “Safe Seed Pledge” here in the U.S. where seed companies pledge not to KNOWINGLY buy or sell GMO seeds. As with organic certified sellers this means they can and do buy and sell GMO crops, but they don’t shell out the extra cash to eliminate almost all or all of their sources. Baker Creek is the only seed company that actually tests every batch of corn for GMO. Once I get my first fortune I’ve been thinking about buying up corn seed samples from every “Safe Seed Pledge” company and having them tested and sending them the results via certified mail and publishing the results online. If they uphold their pledge at that point then they would have to stop selling those seeds, which would make me a jerk for eliminating much of the relatively high quality corn sources in the country, but it might motivate them and their customers to change the way things are done instead of pretending it is okay to sell GMO seeds so long as you don’t bother to make sure they aren’t GMO.

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