Linley Dixon, Co-Director of The Real Organic Project, studied soil science in college and worked at the USDA on plant-fungal interactions while maintaining a life-long aspiration to one day become a farmer. The alure of raising her child on a farm motivated her and her husband to quit their jobs, move to the country and start a small organic farm. In the process of overcoming all the challenges that come with such a bold move–raising capital, accessing land, earning a profit in Colorado’s short growing season, etc.–she took on a job to help make ends meet as a scientist evaluating the materials that organic farmers use. That’s when her work became political and she joined the fight to keep organic real. Linley was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.  

ARTY MANGAN: You overcame the obstacles of becoming a first-generation farmer, and you’re now living according to your values.On your organic farm in Durango, Colorado you grow 40 different crops, selling your produce locally, but at one point, you became more political when it came to the integrity of organic standards. How did the Real Organic Project come about?

LINLEY DIXON: I had the wonderful opportunity to go to National Organics Standards Board (NOSB) meetings where issues on what defined “organic” according to the USDA were being raised. My job as a scientist for The Cornucopia Institute was to evaluate the inputs that were allowed in the organic standards and then to testify to the NOSB about whether or not they should continue to be allowed. There’s a list of about 200 approved inputs and there’s constant pressure by the manufactures to allow more inputs into organic. Around 2015 or 2016 the issue of hydroponics being certified as organic came up. It culminated in 2017 when there was a vote on the issue.

Some certifiers and the National Organic Program (NOP) had been secretly allowing it. Soil-based organic farmers started to wonder where the really cheap, bad-tasting supposedly organic tomatoes were coming from. It turned out that hydroponics (i.e., growing plants in a soil-less environment and feeding them with soluble fertilizers) was being allowed to use the “organic” label, but if you look at the language of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, soil and how you maintain soil fertility are mentioned throughout. Soil is part of the DNA of being an organic farmer; it’s almost all we think about, so it was sort of shocking. It was thought that this was a mistake, that it had come in under the radar, but hydroponic produce began taking over the shelf space for tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and berries.

The issue lit a fire under organic growers and we became political again. I think organic farmers went to sleep politically for a while after the Organic Foods Production Act was passed and the standards were put in place. They thought, “phew, we did it, we can go back to our farms now.” Little did they know that we had to keep watching what the USDA and the NOP were doing.

That is the role of the Real Organic Project now. I’ve heard people ask: “If we resolve this hydroponic issue and some of the other issues, would the Real Organic Project go away?” And the answer is no because there’s going to continue to be pressure to get an organic premium from entities that are not actually meeting the standards, so I think you always need a watchful eye over what the USDA is doing.

When we lost that vote to prohibit hydroponics from using the organic label in 2017, there was a feeling of loss and concern over what are we going to do now. The Real Organic Project was formed shortly after that as an add-on standard. If the USDA wasn’t going to maintain high standards, then we had to do it ourselves once again. So, I joined Real Organic and started working with Dave Chapman, who is my Co-Director. I had the opportunity in the first year to visit 60 farms that were part of the pilot project to create a national movement for greater organic integrity.

ARTY: With the vote that allowed hydroponics, did you see that as a point of no return in terms of working within the system of the NOSB to make changes?

LINLEY: There has never been a vote to allow hydroponics at the NOSB. They’ve just kind of done it, and the vote in 2017 to prohibit it didn’t pass. In 2010, the NOSB passed a vote to prevent hydroponics in organic and this is still the standing recommendation at the NOSB. However, allowing hydroponics in organic was a top-down decision that started even higher up than the NOSB because the industry was so big. It was driven by big brands such as Wholesome Harvest, NatureSweet, Driscoll’s, etc. Some of those brands deny that they’re growing hydroponically. There is a considerable lack of transparency behind those practices.

ARTY: I started my organic career in the ‘70s; I had a small, local, organic apple juice business in the Watsonville, CA area, home to Driscoll’s. In those days, the Pajaro Valley was full of 100-year-old, highly productive apple groves. Now if you drive through that area, it’s all hoop houses with what you are talking about—small containers with drip lines that are fertilized with soluble fertilizers. No contact with the soil, no attempts to improve soil. Most people don’t know that some organic food is being grown like that.

LINLEY: With those operations, they often first spray the ground with an herbicide and laser level the land. Then they put the plastic down–a lot of it. On top of the plastic, they place small pots for the plants, all of it under plastic hoop houses. The berries last about three to four years. None of the plastic is recyclable. The whole thing goes into the trash. The plants are pushed to maximum production and wear out quickly, whereas a blueberry plant in the ground will last 20 years. They basically start these farms over every three to four years, so the whole thing is just so wasteful, so hard on the land.

When it rains on some of the operations with hundreds of acres of plastic tunnels, all of that water gets funneled to the edges causing extreme erosion on the fields, so much so that some of the landowners in California have decided not to rent to those kinds of operations.

 There is an economic impact as well. Much of the hydroponic “organic” food is imported by large agribusinesses. The labor is so much cheaper in South America. It started in Mexico, and now they’re doing it in Peru. They’ll go to where land and labor are cheapest. Sometimes they bring their own Honduran workforce. The more you learn about this, the more outrageous it is.

With massive production they are able to control the marketplace through brokers who get retailers to sign agreements that they have to source from them year-round, so organic blueberry producers in Florida or Michigan, for example, can no longer sell into retail markets during their season. Those domestic growers are losing markets that they have had for decades.

When you look into this hydroponic issue, it just touches on so many key issues that we care about as environmentalists and food justice advocates, including plastics and environmental contamination, even pesticide use, because the NOP says that as long as these containers are on six-inch stands, you can spray the ground with herbicide and the blueberry roots won’t come in contact with it. That is not what I consider organic.

ARTY: I would like to complete the picture, at least this is what I’ve seen: raspberry plants are growing in small one-gallon pots with a minimal amount of soil to hold up the roots.

LINLEY: They don’t put the plants in compost and replenish it so that nutrients keep being added. The substrate is sometimes peat moss, and now they also use coco coir; there’s no nutrient value to these substances.

If you go down that rabbit hole, the coco coir comes from tropical islands, so it’s salty and needs to be put through a rinsing process that requires a lot of chemicals and extreme amounts of water use. No one is looking at the environmental cost of the inert media that they’re putting in these pots, which also has a horrible environmental story.

ARTY: These hydroponic pots are pretty much the antithesis of what we should be doing, given all we’re learning about the benefits of soil health, including its climate benefits and the nutritional value of the food grown in healthy soil. Beyond the hydroponic issue, what are some of the other distinctions that Real Organic has in terms of your standards compared to the NOP standards?

LINLEY: There are issues with livestock as well. The pasture rule, which requires all ruminants to be on pasture during their growing season, is not being enforced. For example, there are drought exemptions, so it’s very profitable to set up a giant, 15,000-cow dairy in the desert, apply for a drought exemption, confine the animals between milking, and bring in mixed rations to feed them. And for chicken and egg production, they can convert huge conventional barns over to organic if they just start supplying organic feed.

And there was and still is a problem with giant shiploads of supposedly organic grain coming to US ports that are found to be fraudulent, so fraudulent “organic” grain is feeding the fraudulent “organic” CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). None of it should be labeled organic, but it is. Finding a truly pastured, organic egg or chicken on a retail shelf is basically non-existent. That has driven sales of non-GMO pastured chickens in the marketplace instead of organic, and grass-fed beef, which is not defined by law. It has led to the rise of these other labels that aren’t necessarily being enforced as organic started to lose credibility.

Farmers are in a pickle because many of them depend on the organic label for their farm to operate profitably. Many of them started the organic movement and helped get the organic labeling legislation into place in the 1990s. Now that the word organic has meaning in the marketplace, what do they do? Do they talk about the problems? If they do, it could hurt their farm.

For a while, people were trying behind the scenes to reform organic, but it got to a point at which it was so far outside of the intent and values of organic farming, and attempts at reform had failed so many times that we had no choice but to start to speak up about the problems because our farms were on the line. We’re in a really difficult situation. We can’t walk away from the organic label because it still has marketplace value, and we can’t just hand it over to the industries that essentially stole it from us. And when I say “us,” I just mean the organic movement. We can’t walk away and start over with another word because all the marketplace value is held up in that word because organic family farmers have given it that reputation of integrity over time, so we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.

ARTY: Certain ethical certifiers have been threatened by USDA for following the intent of the original organic standards and not certifying CAFOs and hydroponics.

LINLEY: There is a group of certifiers that got together after that 2017 vote and decided that they were not going to certify hydroponics, even though the NOP says they can. There are ten certifiers who have signed onto an agreement titled “Organic Agriculture is Soil Based Position Statement.” They represent thousands of organic farmers. It gave us at Real Organic the ability to redirect farmers from certifiers who allow hydroponics and CAFOs to ones that do not. We should be supporting the certifiers that are in line with the vision of organic that we share.

ARTY: Have there been repercussions for the certifiers who signed on to the agreement?

LINLEY: Yes, the NOP certifies the certifiers, allowing them to inspect and certify farms according to the USDA organic standards. OneCert was the first certifier to say we won’t certify hydroponics because we think it is illegal, it doesn’t follow the organic law. Other certifiers took the position that they won’t certify those practices because they don’t have the administrative capacity. That was their way of getting around the issue and avoiding repercussions from the NOP.

But OneCert said, “We have the capacity, we just don’t believe it’s legal.” As a result, they received a non-compliance determination from the USDA NOP. It was really brave of OneCert to stand up for the integrity of organic certification. As a result of the non-compliance, OneCert formed a coalition with nine other certifiers who signed on to that “Organic Agriculture is Soil Based” agreement. Forming a coalition of ten strengthened their position and makes it harder for USDA to go after ten certifiers rather than just one, but it’s an ongoing struggle.

It’s the same reason for farmers to join the Real Organic Project. There isn’t marketplace value in the Real Organic label at this point, but we are joining forces around something that we believe in, and we are a lot more powerful together than in silos. I think it would be really stupid of the USDA to go after ten certifiers, because that would make a lot of news. It would embarrass them and it would bring more attention to the issues. It’s same reason the Real Organic Project hasn’t been sued for creating add-on standards, which technically was prohibited by NOP. They don’t want this issue to be frontpage news.

ARTY: Let’s talk about the growth of the organic industry. It is exciting that sales have grown to a $76 billion annually, but when you look behind the curtain you see that although it is 6 percent of overall food sales, it is only 1 percent of U.S. farmland.

LINLEY: The fact that 6 percent of what we consume is organic, but only 1 percent of the farmland is organic means we’re relying on a lot of foreign imports.This is a trend across agriculture in general, and I think it’s really concerning. We need to be raising awareness about the fact that 60% of our fruits and 40% of our vegetables are now imported, regardless of whether they’re organic or not.

ARTY: The impression that I got when I saw those statistics was, as you said, the growth of organic sales is coming largely from imports, not domestically grown produce. And that poses another problem: how do we ensure the organic integrity of those imports? How are they certified, and who can vouch for that certification?

LINLEY: We have an increasing problem with integrity with imports. We know that some imports have been fraudulently labeled organic and are sold below market prices which hurts organic farmers and discourages other farmers from transitioning to organic. As I mentioned, there have been a number of fraudulent grain imports. In 2017 The Washington Post ran an article about imported grain shipments titled “Millions of Pounds of Apparently Fake Organic Grains Convince the Food Industry There May be a Problem” revealing that enforcement and inspections of imported organic food is lacking.

Consumers now have many choices all of which have problems with transparency and no common or legal definition: grass-fed, non-GMO, regenerative or whatever other seal of sustainability put on food, but I believe that the fact that USDA organic is not transparent or being enforced properly and that there is a lack of integrity in the process hurts the organic movement built over many decades by people who were committed to the core values. 

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