Last year, Gourmet magazine editor and veteran food-writer Ruth Reichel asked the question—local or organic? "Eating organically is a wonderful thing," she wrote, "but once you start calculating the real cost of food, you begin to think about the expense of flying it halfway around the world. What price do we pay in fuel, in government subsidies, in loss of flavor? Perhaps most importantly, what does it cost our community when we support people in other places at the expense of our neighbors?" These are questions widely asked today in the sustainable food movement, whose slogan has become: "local is the new organic."

In many ways this is what organic was always supposed to mean. Organic was farming for the small scale, seeking to supply local markets with food that was grown with regard for the land. Organic meant food that one could check up on. And the small number of people who were committed to organics did check up on it—they built relationships with farmers, and together the farmers and customers built co-ops. The goal was to create an agriculture that would work at nature's pace and be financially viable. In most of these regards organic farming was successful. Farmers were turning profits and customers were getting fresh produce that they didn't have to worry about.

But a good thing is hard to keep, especially when profits are to be had. Organic moved from being the domain of small farmers to a value-added label in the product portfolios of Fortune 500 companies.

Julie Guthman's Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California is a study of this transition, showing how the organic movement's early hopes were betrayed not only by the co-opting of the movement by conventional farmers but also by flaws in the organic movement's agrarian vision.

The first step in transition came with the growing demand for organics. In the 1960s and '70s, "organic" was a label one could only find in health food stores or co-ops. But in 1971 Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkley—an eatery that served only fresh and seasonal ingredients which were grown without synthetic chemicals. Chez Panisse was the first restaurant to put organic on its menu. As the restaurant grew in fame and Alice Waters and her disciples energetically promoted organic food, "organic" began to be synonymous not only with health and quality but also with chic, and the newly rising Bohemian Bourgeois class was there to patronize the places that would serve it.

Around the same time that organic was becoming the food of yuppies there were two major scares involving food contaminated with agricultural chemicals. People didn't want to eat poison-coated vegetables, but that is exactly how they began to view what they could buy in the grocery store, so many began to demand a change.

This new demand attracted attention from conventional farmers, who saw their prices going down. But while they wanted the profits of organics, they were not always willing to go along with the philosophy. As Guthman writes, "Although some new entrants were beginning to question agribusiness as usual, growers' decisions to convert did not turn on a newly found critique of agricultural industrialization for the most part."

The impact of international trade on American farmers was a second force that pushed industrial farmers toward organics. Under nafta, imports of high-margin vegetables and fruits from Mexico began to erode the profits of California farms. Farmers had to find a way to add value to their products to survive, and organics became the answer for many.

A third factor came into play with the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act in 1996. In its first action under the law, the epa banned the use of two chemicals widely used in the fruit and vegetable industry. Afraid that other chemicals would follow, many farmers turned to organics for alternative methods of pest management.

In a relatively short time organic farming had taken a dramatic shift, from back-to-the-land hippies of Northern California to the thousand-acre farmers of the Salina valley. Both were technically organic according to the certifying agencies, but the fundamental vision behind organic farming had changed. "Organic" was no longer an ethic—it was a set of regulated practices and a niche market.

This shift left many of the original organic farmers reeling. They could not compete with thousand-acre farms. A small-scale organic vegetable grower told me about the day that he sent a crate of bell peppers to his distributor. "These are the best bell peppers we have ever seen," the distributor told him, "but California is producing organic bell peppers for less than half the price we paid you last year." My friend took the check and started selling his vegetables directly at the local farmers market. "It's the only way for small farms to survive," my friend said.

But why should we help small farms survive? Julie Guthman thinks that's a question that too often goes unasked. "There are some significant problems with the small-scale family farm ideal," she writes. After all, such farms are refuges of "Christian fundamentalism," "patriarchal exploitation of women's and children's labor," and a dogged commitment to the ideal of "private property."

And what does Guthman offer instead? More government subsidies for organics, a movement away from the ideal of private property, stronger regulation—proposals largely disconnected from the realities on the ground. Guthman provides a useful telling of the story of organic farming's current crisis, but she offers no vision for a real solution. For this we must turn, not to the ivory tower, but to the dirt and work of real farmers.

In Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm Nicola Smith and her photographer husband Geoff Hansen have rendered a beautiful look at the life of the very sort of locally focused small farm that Guthman dismisses. In 2003, Smith and Hansen spent a year with Jennifer Megyesi and Kyle Jones on Fat Rooster Farm in Vermont. Like many farms of its size it is diverse, with a mix of livestock, vegetables, and herbs—just the sort of variety that attracts customers at the local farmers market.

When visiting this kind of farm, Smith admits, it is difficult to keep from "lapsing into the kind of phony, amber-waves-of-grain lyricism that could only be written by someone who doesn't have to do it for a living." But, she goes on, "there is an attachment to the land, an attachment to the animals on the land . . . the satisfaction of providing the food that people eat and the gratification of self-sustenance, despite all the attendant financial anxiety and familial strain farming can produce."

It is this understanding of both the rewards and difficulties involved in farming that makes Harvest the best book I have seen on the real work of a small farm. It shows the marital stress that comes from thin margins and the joy of selling something that one raised from its beginning, neither glossing over the trials nor missing the deep satisfactions of this way of life.

It is through this close look that we can answer Guthman and all of those who ask why the family farm should survive. We see in this work a kind of development of character that is essential to our moral life as a people. After reading Harvest we can see why Hector St. John de Crevecoeur could write in 1782, with pardonable hyperbole, that the small farm has "established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens."

The work of a small farm creates a certain kind of person—a person who must learn to put the interests of animals and plants above his own hunger and tiredness. Small farms are places where rare skills are preserved in this age of instant obsolescence. "Sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush towards destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages," as Gene Logsdon has written—"places to preserve human skills and crafts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose returns to the public mind."

It was this belief in the character of small farms that led to organic agriculture in the first place. But as Kroger and Jewel and even Wal-Mart are beginning to give organics a primary place on their shelves, we must be aware that they do so because the small farms that started the movement have been co-opted. If we want to hold on to small farms, if we want to preserve them as refuges of decent work and character, then we must find a new paradigm beyond organic. We must care more about whether our food was grown on a small local farm than if it was grown "organically." And with this new priority we can hope, with Ruth Reichel, that the "era of eating locally is very much upon us."

Ragan Sutterfield is a farmer and writer in Arkansas.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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