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There’s been quite a bit of debate about what organic really means, of late. The biggest issue: can an ethical farmer grow hydroponically or in pots and realistically sport the USDA organic label? The simple answer is – and must always be – no… for the very simple reason that these operations do not protect one of our most limited and valuable agricultural resources: our soil.

The phrase “dirt cheap” is quickly becoming a contradiction in terms: dirt – at least if it’s good dirt – is becoming rarer and rarer. Only 25 percent of the earth’s surface is made up of soil; of that, only 10 percent can be used to grow food, and much of that is currently in distress.

Soil, at its best, is made up of a complex ecosystem of bugs, bacteria, and fungi, all of which work in symbiosis: healthy soil creates a safe living environment for these organisms which, in turn, make the soil richer and stronger, with nutrients that plants can soak up, therefore becoming healthier themselves.

But in recent years, our soil has become inundated with chemicals like insecticides and herbicides that can create imbalances. Add to that our modern farming love for monocultures that seep nutrients from the soil and give nothing back. Adding nutrients back to the soil with compost is a good solution, but only if this compost comes from healthy sources, which is usually not the case.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all: these issues are not just stemming from big, bad, Big Ag, but also from USDA organic operations.

The History of the USDA Organic Label and Soil

There was a time when the organic label focused on soil. There is even language in the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) of 1990 (section 6513 b-1) – requiring organic farmers to foster soil fertility, “primarily through the management of the organic content of the soil through proper tillage, crop rotation, and manuring.”

But while the National Organic Standards Board, which advises the USDA on organic rules and regulations, has no qualms about outlawing dangerous pesticides like glyphosate or harmful additives like carrageenan, it seems that the Board has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to soil – not just by refusing to enforce these soil-building measures, but by considering the possibility that hydroponics and container growing systems could be considered organic.

“There is a dilution,” explains Ryland Engelhart, founder of the soil-focused non-profit Kiss the Ground, “Based on more and more people’s interests and how to monetize organic, scale it really big, and make it mechanical and not ecological. The organic standard has turned more into just a list of what you can’t use, as opposed to practices and philosophies to use to make a resilient environmental, ecological soil health system.”

“They make the argument that they want to grow organics, and at any cost,” says Linley Dixon, PhD, Food and Farm Policy Analyst at the organic watchdog group the Cornucopia Institute, of some current members of the NOSB. “And in order to do that, they’re saying that the law is mainly about inputs.”

While large-scale organic farms, for the most part, follow rules about these “inputs” – which pesticides they can and cannot use, what they can and cannot feed animals – they also tend to produce monocultures or focus only on raising livestock, thus divorcing the farm from the land: livestock farmers are left with more manure than they know what to do with, and crop farmers need to till far too much and outsource manure from other operations to build rapidly depleting soil.

“We end up with 25 Band-Aids stacked on top of each other,” says Engelhart of this approach. “Not a healthy nature, not a healthy farm, not a healthy soil.”

How to Grow Soil Health and Organics

Some experts claim that the best way to resolve this issue is to create a whole new label. “Regenerative agriculture” is a term that’s being bandied about in some circles, highlighting farms that, for example, may spray with an herbicide a few times a year, but are building soil resources at epic speeds through no-till methods.

“The pure and organic folks are like, no, we can’t allow that in, because that will just allow the whole conventional industry to co-opt the whole thing,” says Engelhart.

It seems an impasse has been reached: while it would be a shame to turn our backs on farmers growing soil health, even if they are occasionally adding unapproved chemicals to their land, so too would it be a shame to focus time, energy, and resources on creating a new label, when the USDA organic label finally has so much integrity and meaning to consumers.

“To just move on to something else is a tragedy, and we’ll basically lose ground – literally and figuratively,” explains Engelhart. “Regenerative agriculture will just turn into the new natural or the new sustainable, which means nothing.”

The answer, then, is to help the USDA organic label and the regenerative mindset find one another.

In Engelhart’s mind, this would require the NOSB to take note of existing provisions for soil health, with mandates requiring no or low tilling, no bare soil, no hydroponics, and no monocultures. Even farms devoted to producing only one crop can and should use multi-species cover-cropping methods to avoid the erosion caused by bare ground and to reinforce the health of the soil.

Of course, for any of these things to happen, there has to be soil, first and foremost. As the debate over hydroponics continues, a clear answer – and a clear first step towards rebuilding soil health – has emerged.

“Soilless systems are not organic systems, because they are removed from the regenerative organic practices that capture carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil,” the Cornucopia Institute wrote to the NOSB on this subject. “Soilless, hydroponic/container growing is not necessarily ‘bad,’ it simply isn’t organic by law.”

In the meantime, consumers would do well to stay conscious of where their food comes from. Choose small, diverse farmers using best practices for crop rotation and no to low tilling… and continue to demand more from the USDA organic label.

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ColumnIt’s easy to focus only on the fruits and vegetables that make their way to our plate. They are after all what we touch, smell and taste. But there’s an essential component to sustainable food that is often forgotten, perhaps because for most of us, it’s something we rarely interact with: soil.

Soil is essential. It’s full of life. There is a complex web of organisms beneath our feet that is responsible for keeping us alive. And we simply destroy it.

Conventional agriculture has certainly played a big roll in the demise of soil health. Think back to the 1930s and America’s Dust Bowl. The environmental disaster that ruined farmland, and left millions homeless (by the time it was over, 2.4 million people had left the Plains), was the result of years of unsustainable agricultural practices, farmers essentially working the soil to death. In its wake the government worked to put policies in place that would prevent such a disaster in the future, and created the Soil Erosion Service, which would later become the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

But while the Dust Bowl is a history lesson, our mismanagement of soil is an ongoing, current problem, and it is one with severe consequences. According to the Organic Consumers Association, “Without protecting and regenerating the soil on our four billion acres of cultivated farmland, 14 billion acres of pasture and rangeland, and 10 billion acres of forest land, it will be impossible to feed the world, keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, or halt the loss of biodiversity.”

Soil as it turns out, is at the root of everything, and it’s the key to a laundry list of our modern day ailments. If we respect the soil, and start to implement agricultural policies that work on regenerating the earth beneath us, instead of extracting what we need and destroying the rest, we can begin to find a sustainable path forward. And that is a path that’s not just about food.  “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy,” said activist and author Vandana Shiva.

Even the United Nations is calling for a radical shift in how we do agriculture. A 2013 report (titled “Wake Up Before Its Too Late”) from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development called for a “paradigm shift… from conventional, monoculture-based and high external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers.”

With better agricultural practices that benefit the earth — which can involve leaving land untilled, and planting cover crops to increase the amount of organic matter in soil — we can reduce or even eliminate the use for pesticides, make crops more productive, and be better able to deal with things like drought. We can literally turn back the clock on the destruction that modern agriculture has done, and farmers benefit financially in the process. “Nature can heal if we give her the chance,” Gabe Brown, a farmer in North Dakota, told the New York Times in an article earlier this year on the topic. The important thing to remember is that healing nature isn’t just good for nature, it’s good for us too.

But sustainable food and agriculture isn’t just a question of whether or not you can get heirloom tomatoes at the local farmers market in August, it’s a question of global food security and addressing an environmental crisis.

Regeneration International is a group of researchers, activists and farmers which has formed to “promote the multifunctional benefits of regenerative forms of agriculture such as agro-ecology, holistic grazing, cover cropping, permaculture, and agroforestry.” This group is working hard to challenge the agricultural status quo.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the topic of climate change. What we do in the face of crisis isn’t always an easy solution. But the point of regenerative agriculture, is that it all starts from the ground up. That if we started rethinking how we did agriculture, then we could deal with some of the serious problems that we are struggling with today. The solution is literally right under our feet.

According to the Rodale Institute, “recent data from farming systems and pasture trials around the globe show that we could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic management practices, which we term ‘regenerative organic agriculture.’ These practices work to maximize carbon fixation while minimizing the loss of that carbon once returned to the soil, reversing the greenhouse effect.”

So what can you do? Start supporting and advocating for organizations that work on the topic of soil health and regenerative agriculture. Respect the soil in your own garden, learn how it works and learn how to make it as healthy as possible. Boycott agribusiness and support farmers going against the status quo.

There is a sustainable path forward, we just have to choose to walk it.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Natural Resources Conservation Services

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America runs on coal. It creates half of our electricity. And the unclean technology producing this source may be killing our children, grandchildren and the future unborn, not to mention our natural environment.

Is the fed sensing the urgency to limit the damage from this source we depend upon?

Not according to three environmental groups looking for clean coal technology. They are planning to sue the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for being blatantly lax in limiting toxic discharges from power plants that threaten the health of local communities exposed daily to the pollutants.

According to Planet Shifter, the federal government is 26 years behind setting restrictions on the discharges which contaminate ground and surface waters and threaten aquatic life. Apparently, the EPA should have limited coal ash discharges to meet its own requirements for annual environmental reviews.

Back in December when a coal ash spill occurred at the Tennessee Kingston Fossil Plant, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson promised to issue regulations by the end of the year for nearly 600 coal plants with on-site coal ash storage ponds or landfills.

But the three groups planning to sue: the Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project argue “the EPA need to stop kicking the can down the road and set a date for the regulation.”

There is evidence that these coal plants discharge millions of pounds of toxic pollutants every year. According to the report, in  Kingston, alone, more than 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled from a coal-ash holding pond last December when a earthen wall ruptured. The ash contains elevated levels of arsenic, selenium and lead, among other toxic substances.

In a 60 Minutes investigation on harmful waste by-products from coal, it was revealed that the tremendous amount we burn for electricity every year generates 130 million tons of waste. They even interviewed coal barons who have become rich off coal, who admitted being responsible for those smoke stacks that pump out 100-million tons of carbon dioxide every year.

Most of the waste emitted from power stations  is coal ash which is dangerous to humans and other living things. Environmental scientists tell us that the concentrations of mercury, arsenic, lead and other toxic metals are considerably higher in coal ash than in ordinary soil.

When properly disposed of  in dry, lined impoundments, coal ash is considered to be safe. But observers say it is often dumped into wet ponds (nearly 500 of them in the U.S.)  and in those cases the ash could pose health risks to the nearby communities.

Images: Tennessee Valley Authority, Earth Observatory, NASA

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At first, it seems extremely eco-friendly, the biannual Compost Giveaway Events every fall and spring in San Francisco hosted by the city’s Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC).

Residents are offered free compost to produce soil for community and school gardens and local backyards. It’s the green and organic thing to do.

The problem is the mulch isn’t made of food scraps and manure but a combination of toxic sewage sludge from waste water treatment, green waste, yard waste and wood chips.

What’s in sewage sludge? Stuff that’s foul and harmful to people and other living things.

The True Food Network, which is leading a petition drive against the latest giveaway argues sewage sludge is shown by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to contain heavy metals, pathogens, pharmaceuticals, PCB’s, flame retardants and endocrine disruptors. In addition, organic pollutants are present in sludge samples, such as polybrominated diphenal ethers (PMDEs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, DDT degradation products, chlordadanes, synthetic musk products, triclosan and tributytin.

“Residents may be led to believe that the city’s sludge compost is organic,” says the network. “The USDA’s National Organic Program’s (NOP) regulations, however, strictly forbid the use of sewage sludge as a fertilizer or soil amendment, no matter if it is composted or otherwise treated. This compost is by no means organic.”

The Center for Food Safety and the Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems filed a petition with Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s Mayor and Ed Harrington, General Manager of SFPUC, asking them to immediately and permanently suspend the sewage sludge compost giveaways for the fall. Residents are asked to join the letter writing campaign to protect the health of its gardeners.

Image: SfLatchkey

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Whether you’re looking to improve your home’s curb appeal, or to master a tomato and basil salad, testing your garden soil before planting is a wise, and low-cost investment.

The Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides useful, practical and research-based information to interested parties from agricultural producers to home gardeners on subjects such as lawn care, home canning, financial management, frost dates, soil testing and weeds.

Contact your local office and test your soil’s pH, nutrient level, and soil type. Some adjustments now could make the difference in your growing season.

Image: Sir Mervs

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