Meet Birke Baehr: 13-Year-Old Organic Activist

“I wanted to speak about our food sys­tem because once I learned the truth, I felt so deceived by the big con­glom­er­ates that I used to buy these prod­ucts from,” Birke told Organic Connections. “I remem­ber think­ing, ‘This is crazy! What is this, this and this doing in our food?’ I really felt like I’d been betrayed by these peo­ple I trusted—you know, the car­toon char­ac­ters on TV when I was a young kid. I remem­ber telling my mom, ‘I just wish I could do some­thing about it and tell peo­ple.’ When I finally got the chance to speak pub­licly and talk about our food sys­tem, I jumped at it; it was such a great opportunity.”

As you might imag­ine, Birke is no ordi­nary kid. Contrary to what some have assumed, his view­points on our food sys­tem did not come from his par­ents. In fact, his par­ents had almost no knowl­edge of our food sys­tem or organic food before Birke him­self got into it. “My par­ents, they knew a lit­tle bit about organic food, but pretty much what they knew was that it was about two bucks more expen­sive than every­thing else,” Birke laughed. “So they really weren’t too thrilled when I started learn­ing
about it.”

The Rabbit Hole

Yes, Birke’s jour­ney was very much his own.”It started back when I was nine years old, and I was look­ing over my mom’s shoul­der while she was log­ging on to her e-mail,” Birke recalled. “I noticed an arti­cle about a uni­ver­sity find­ing mer­cury in high-fructose corn syrup. I remem­bered kids in my third-grade sci­ence class going, ‘Oh, don’t break the ther­mome­ter in your mouth; it has mer­cury and it’s going to kill you!’ That was basi­cally my epiphany right there. I was like, ‘What the heck? What is some­thing that can kill us doing in our food?’

“I start­ing going down the rab­bit hole research­ing more and more about every sin­gle process our food was grown by, grown in, and what was used on it. I learned about corn, the way that it was grown—genetically mod­i­fied, pes­ti­cides and her­bi­cides. It just opened up a whole other world for me that I never dreamed was possible.”

But learn Birke did—and ended up mak­ing con­verts of his par­ents. “I started show­ing my par­ents these facts on by-products that are put into the food. When I was around ten, I went to them and said, ‘After learn­ing all this stuff about our food sys­tem, the way that our food is pro­duced, it just seems that it’s so unhealthy for us. The only way we can get into eat­ing healthy food that actu­ally keeps our bod­ies from get­ting sick is to go organic.” Their first thing was, ‘Oh, that’s too expen­sive.’ So my next response—and it’s one of everybody’s favorite quotes from my TEDx talk—was, ‘Well, we can either pay the farmer or we can pay the hos­pi­tal.’ That’s pretty much what got them to change, and we started eat­ing organic after that.”

Birke’s Advice

Birke offers advice to oth­ers who would like to con­vert to organic, based on his own and his family’s expe­ri­ences. “If you want to change the way that you eat, if you want to go organic, pick an area of your food,” Birke advised. “Pick dairy, meat or veg­eta­bles. When we started going organic, just from the cost we couldn’t sim­ply change straight over to organic. So we slowly tran­si­tioned, get­ting all the bad food out of our pantry. As we went along I remem­ber say­ing, ‘Mom, we’re 27 per­cent organic now!’ Then, ‘We’re 83 per­cent organic!’ And then, ‘Oh man, we’re 99.999 per­cent organic!’ It was great to be able to see how it progressed.”

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As a result of all he dis­cov­ered about our food sys­tem, Birke made a deci­sion con­cern­ing his even­tual career. “I really started get­ting into the whole local and organic food move­ment around my area,” he related. “I would go to local farms and watch peo­ple work­ing in the heat, pick­ing bugs off cab­bage leaves, and things like that. I admired them so much for the hard work they com­mit­ted them­selves to do. It was so great to see peo­ple that actu­ally put them­selves toward such a noble cause and movement.

“One day we were dri­ving home from one of these farm vis­its, and I just looked at my mom and said, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be an NFL foot­ball player any­more; I want to be an organic farmer instead. That way I can have a big­ger impact on the world.’ And she sim­ply looked at me with this face, like, ‘Did you really just say that?’ And it’s kind of funny, because I look back at it now and I’m so happy I made that deci­sion, and I feel so proud that I said those words.”

Sometime after Birke became involved in find­ing out about our food sys­tem, he met up with his idol, famed farmer and author Joel Salatin. “He’s a farmer that I really admire and look up to, just for the way he respects the land and treats the ani­mals that he farms,” said Birke. “You drive down the coun­try roads to his farm and you’ll see these big indus­tri­al­ized fac­tory farms and you’ll notice the dif­fer­ence, and it’s so unreal. You go to his pas­tures and you see the cows frol­ick­ing through the fields, eat­ing the great grass that they’re actu­ally meant to eat, instead of being closed up in metal barns with­out much sun­light or fresh air, eat­ing corn that ends up putting E. coli in their gut flora. You look at the dif­fer­ence between Joel and these indus­trial farms and see that he’s doing it the right way.”

His recent rise in fame allowed Birke to spend some extra time with Salatin. “The last time I went to Joel’s farm was to be filmed in a doc­u­men­tary I’m going to be fea­tured in soon,” he said. “I finally got to meet with Joel, and got to work with him that entire day for the film. It was a great opportunity.”

Birke’s future is now firmly grounded in get­ting our food sys­tem turned around. “As of now, I see my role as spread­ing the mes­sage of organic and local food, and how I want to change our food sys­tem,” Birke con­cluded. “What I really hope for is that as I get older, there will be more peo­ple going out talk­ing against the con­ven­tional and indus­tri­al­ized ways. Once I pass col­lege age I’d really like to have my own organic farm, and at the same time still speak pub­licly about organic food.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Birke Baehr and his many activ­i­ties, please visit www.birkeonthefarm.com.