It’s Time for An Organic Revolution

Every time you support organic agriculture with your hard-earned dollars you are inspiring a change toward a more just and sustainable food system, one that supports healthier people and a healthier planet. Thank you for being a part of the revolution!

Every community needs more small-scale diversified farms, in every corner of the country. Our soil is in trouble and so is our health. Much in the way a body on steroids is in trouble from the fake energy, industrial agriculture relies exclusively on petroleum and chemical cocktails to provide fertilizer for plants to make them look big, healthy, and marketable.

Year after year more chemicals are added to industrial farms to try to replace complex natural systems that are lost with these destructive farming systems. But just like steroid-driven athletes whose bodies look good but are systemically weak, so it goes with our soil. Many of those agricultural chemicals leach into our water wreaking havoc on fragile ecosystems as well as creating ocean dead zones. Some chemicals persist in soil, making it impossible for critical healing beneficial microbes to exist. Add in the millions of tons of insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides used to control pests and you have a complete mess above and below the ground. Cleaning up this mess must be considered when calculating the true cost of food.

Good food is measured by freshness, quality, and nutritive value but also by the social and environmental footprint behind the food. While the cost of good food is a lot for families to bear, compared with the cost of cancer and a wealth of immunodeficient diseases I’d say its a bargain in the long run. We can’t afford to not buy organic! When you vote with your dollars for cheap food you invest in an out-of-control health care system and a wealth of social and environmental problems for future generations to clean up.

We know all of this and we try to support the farmers who are solution oriented but it is not always easy, even here in the bluest green state; we need to do more. But how? It’s a good question and there are some great minds pondering that.

Cedar Circle’s co-manager Will Allen says the question about the real price of food should be rephrased: Is it worth sending cheap, poisonous food to the starving masses? Read more from Will in this still relevant article from 2008: The Real Cost of Cheap Food.

Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association takes a look at What’s Holding Back the Organic Revolution. He says, “There is growing alarm among conscious consumers and activists that our 21st Century food and farming system, and the government-corporate cabal that props it up, is spiraling out-of-control. Chemical-intensive, energy-intensive, climate-destabilizing factory-farmed and genetically engineered food and farming are destroying not only our health and our environment, but also the soil fertility, biodiversity, and climate stability that make civilization possible.” Read the full article.