Challenging Conventional Farming: One Farmer’s Take On The Stanford Organic Food Study

As a farmer and a father, I strongly dis­agree, and I think the Stanford study sends a ter­ri­ble mes­sage to U.S. con­sumers. Here’s why:

The word con­ven­tional may sound rel­a­tively harm­less when used to describe the food we eat, but the real­ity is our nation’s “con­ven­tional” fac­tory farms use far more pes­ti­cides, her­bi­cides and fungi­cides than most con­sumers real­ize when shop­ping for pro­duce or prepar­ing a fam­ily meal.

Granted, con­ven­tion­ally grown foods have to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s min­i­mum safety thresh­old when it comes to the amount of trace­able pes­ti­cides. But the Stanford report fails to appro­pri­ately con­sider the com­pound­ing effects that mul­ti­ple chem­i­cals ingested through dif­fer­ent foods may have on our long-term well­be­ing, or the effects they have on vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions like preg­nant women and small children.

As a par­ent of two young boys, I for one don’t think the min­i­mum require­ments are any­where near suf­fi­cient. Consider the chem­i­cal chlor­pyri­fos, an insect-killing organophos­phate that has been approved for use in “con­ven­tional” American agri­cul­ture for more than four decades.

In 2009, more than one mil­lion pounds of this pes­ti­cide were used in California alone. Yet accord­ing to researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, min­i­mal chlor­pyri­fos expo­sure, even at very low lev­els con­sis­tent with stan­dard agri­cul­ture use, has been proven to cause adverse impacts on brain devel­op­ment in ways that inter­fere with aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment, read­ing and learn­ing com­pre­hen­sion, and even sex­ual devel­op­ment. Not to men­tion the adverse impact that mil­lions of pounds of this chem­i­cal, and hun­dreds of oth­ers like it, can have on the soil and water­shed that sup­ports del­i­cate ecosys­tems for hun­dreds of miles or more. San Francisco Bay? Puget Sound? Gulf of Mexico? These chem­i­cals even­tu­ally end up there, many times with dev­as­tat­ing effects.

Agricultural chem­i­cals are designed to kill things. They are toxic sub­stances that come with skull-and-crossbones on the con­tain­ers. Farm work­ers com­monly wear futuristic-looking “haz­mat” suits as pro­tec­tion when they spray the fields. In some cases, farm­ers, work­ers and even pets are not allowed to enter the fields for hours after treatment.

Farmers and food pro­duc­ers in this coun­try have an oppor­tu­nity, and an oblig­a­tion, to pro­vide con­sumers incen­tives for mak­ing the health­i­est choices pos­si­ble. The debate should not just be about whether a straw­berry pro­duced at a fac­tory farm is more or less nutri­tious than its organ­i­cally grown equiv­a­lent. We should instead be ask­ing: “How can we grow and pro­vide fam­i­lies with the fresh­est, clean­est, and most fla­vor­ful, straw­ber­ries possible?”

It’s some­thing we take very seri­ously at Full Circle, the 400-acre organic farm I founded in Carnation, Wash. My wife and brother were there at the begin­ning with me, help­ing to sow the fields from day one. It just didn’t make sense to me to expose them, our cus­tomers, our land or our com­mu­nity water­shed to toxic chem­i­cals in the name of yield and cost. We’re about purity. Flavor. Freshness. Stewardship.

Full cir­cle. Farm to table. Cradle to grave. These are not con­cepts that have much res­o­nance in our nation’s indus­trial food sys­tem. But in the words of food advo­cate and organic pio­neer David Lively, “Conventional agri­cul­ture is based on a lot of non-sustainable limited-resource prac­tices and prin­ci­ples, and the chick­ens are com­ing home to roost.”

It doesn’t take a bunch of aca­d­e­mics to tell us that indus­trial farm­ing isn’t work­ing on many lev­els. We need to stop debat­ing and mea­sur­ing how “un-harmful” chem­i­cal pes­ti­cides are in our food. We need to instead focus on how we can best grow and dis­trib­ute fresh, pure foods that are as invit­ing, deli­cious and healthy as pos­si­ble, encour­ag­ing peo­ple to eat more of them and make bet­ter over­all food choices. We should be giv­ing folks incen­tives to eat those apples, greens and strawberries—not more rea­sons to fret over and avoid them.

Andrew Stout

Andrew Stout is the founder, head farmer and CEO at Full Circle, an organic pro­duce deliv­ery com­pany and farm based in Carnation, WA, and serv­ing cus­tomers in Alaska, California, Idaho and Washington.