David and Goliath
Are hydroponic plants organic?
You have heard the “David and Goliath” story from the Book of Samuel. The Philistine giant champion Goliath twice a day challenged the Israelites to send their own champion to confront Goliath in single combat. King Saul was afraid but David accepted the challenge, foregoing Saul’s arms and amour, and taking only his staff, sling, and five stones from a brook to face Goliath’s armor and javelin. After some verbal sparring, David hurls a stone from his sling and hits Goliath in the center of his forehead. Goliath falls on his face, and David beheads him which causes the Philistines to flee. The small guy wins.
David and Goliath, a color lithograph by Osmar Schindler (c. 1888)
Producers of “organic food” are not in the Valley of Elah, but a rerun of “David and Goliath” may be playing itself out in the market for organic food.
The “organic” produce section of the grocery store was historically small, not much shelf space. Today, it has grown substantially as more people turn to a healthier lifestyle. Check out the organic produce section of your grocery store the next time you visit.
Before even looking, you know that “organic” is going to cost more than “non-organic,” and we assume the food is going to be better for us, healthier, primarily, free from chemical residues. Today, however, it seems there are questions and debates about the exact meaning of the word “organic,” in particular with respect to foods grown hydroponically.
A little history is in order. What you see today as the “USDA Organic” certification is the result of a grass-roots effort by small farmers in the 1980s to differentiate themselves from corporate industrial agriculture by growing and selling food grown without synthetic, mostly toxic, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. The small family-scale farmers were an endangered species and wanted a mechanism to help them survive. The result was the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) of 1990 that created the National Organic Program (NOP) and established the National Organic Standards Board of stakeholders (NOSB) to advise the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Act established standards for foods to be recognized as “organic” and entitled to display the USDA Organic label on its packaging. [See “What does the USDA “Organic” label mean?” posted here on June 24, 2021, for a more detailed discussion.] With the implementation of the NOP in 2002, the sale of “organic” foods increased tremendously. The proof was in the market; people were willing to pay more for better quality foods.
“The U.S. organic food market size was estimated to be worth over $52 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a rate of over 10% during the forecast period 2023-2028. … In 2020, the organic fruits and vegetables market in the U.S. was valued at around 22 billion U.S. dollars which represents about 42% of all organic food sales. … These figures are estimates as the exact market size because it is not always easy to identify whether a food product sold is actually organic.” FoodIndustry.com, “How big is the organic food market in the United States?” https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/how-big-is-the-organic-food-market-in-the-us/
People willing to pay more!!! As you should expect, industrial food companies jumped into this market; they started their own proprietary “organic” brands, they bought up independent organic brands, and looked for ways to manipulate the NOP to their advantage.
In his farewell message upon stepping down from his five-year term as a member of the NOSB in 2017, Francis Thicke, a 30+ year organic dairy farmer in Iowa who also has a PhD in soil science, warned about the takeover of the NOP by industrial food companies. Worth the read …
“The second thing I learned, over time, is that industry has an outsized and growing influence on USDA — and on the NOSB (including through NOSB appointments) — compared to the influence of organic farmers, who started this organic farming movement. Perhaps that is not surprising, given the growing value of organic sales. As organic is becoming a $50 billion business, the industry not only wants a bigger piece of the pie, they seem to want the whole pie.
We now have “organic” chicken CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operation) with 200,000 birds crammed into a building with no real access to the outdoors, and a chicken industry working behind the scenes to make sure that the animal welfare standards — weak as they were — never see the light of day, just like their chickens. The image consumers have of organic chickens ranging outside has been relegated to pictures on egg cartoons.
We have “organic” dairy CAFOs with 15,000 cows in a feedlot in a desert, with compelling evidence by an investigative reporter that the CAFO is not meeting the grazing rule — by a long shot. But when USDA does its obligatory “investigation,” instead of a surprise visit to the facility, USDA gives them a heads up by making an appointment, so the CAFO can move cows from feedlots to pasture on the day of inspection. This gives a green light to that dairy CAFO owner to move forward with its plans to establish a 30,000-cow facility in the Midwest.
We have large grain shipments coming into the US that are being sold as organic but that lack organic documentation. Some shipments have been proven to be fraudulent. The USDA has been slow to take action to stop this, and organic crop farmers in the US are suffering financially as a result. I spoke with the reporter who broke the story on fraudulent “organic” grain imports. I asked him how he was able to document the fraud of grain shipments when USDA said it was very difficult to do so. He replied “it was easy.”
We have a rapidly growing percentage of the organic fruits and vegetables on grocery store shelves being produced hydroponically, without soil, and mostly in huge industrial-scale facilities. And we have a hydroponics industry that has deceptively renamed “hydroponic” production — even with 100% liquid feeding — as “container” production. With their clever deception they have been able to bamboozle even the majority of NOSB members into complicity with their goal of taking over the organic fruit and vegetable market with their hydroponic products.”
Chapman, D., “A Farewell Warning to the National Organic Program,” On Pasture (Nov 6, 2017). https://onpasture.com/2017/11/06/a-farewell-warning-to-the-national-organic-program/ Pedersen, S., “The Mud Below: A Farewell to Francis Thicke,” High Ground Organics (Nov 7, 2017) https://www.highgroundorganics.com/the-journal/the-mud-below-a-farewell-to-francis-thicke/
The question of hydroponics was and remains particularly contentious. It is commonly believed that the earliest hydroponic system was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, created by King Nebuchadnezzar II as a gift to his wife around 600 BC. Nutrient-rich water was drawn from the Euphrates River and routed through channels and ducts to feed plant roots.
Other early examples of hydroponics were transparent containers filled with water and nutrients around 30 AD to grow cucumbers to feed Roman Emperor Tiberius’ year-round cravings, and the Aztec floating gardens 1100-1400 CE. The Aztecs built rafts of reeds that allowed crop roots to grow through the soil on top of the rafts and reach into the water below.
A fundamental concept of the NOP at the time of its creation and the clear language in the OFPA is the requirement for maintenance and improvement of soil fertility. “Organic food is about an entire ecosystem: taking care of the soil, recharging nutrients with crop rotation, [and] providing for natural pollinators and pest control. It is a way for farming, which can often be ecologically destructive, to work with the planet, wrote Dan Noscowitz at Modern Farmer. Noscowitz, D., “National Organic Standards Board Decrees the Hydroponic Can be Organic,” Modern Farmer (Nov 2, 2017). https://modernfarmer.com/2017/11/national-organic-standards-board-decrees-hydroponic-can-organic/
Among the major players behind the push for organic certification of hydroponics was Driscoll’s berries, a global aggregator conglomerate that controls 64 percent of the U.S. organic berry market, and the Organic Trade Association that is dominated by organic processors, not farmers. Driscoll’s breeds all of its berries and has over a hundred varieties under patent. One of the issues driving hydroponics is making the fruits accessible to robotic harvesting. Vegetable Growers News, “Driscoll’s innovates with machinery, fruit, marketing,” (Apr 19, 2018). https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/article/driscolls-innovates-with-machinery-fruit-marketing/ Many organic activists see hydroponics as, “a cheap and easy way to charge a premium without actually doing any of the stuff the organic program is really about.”
Hydroponic farming in Canada and the European Union is not considered “organic” because it does not meet the minimum soil requirements. Nonetheless, on November 1, 2017, after more than seven years of lobbying by Driscoll’s and others, the NOSB reversed its prior position and voted for organic certification of hydroponic farms if the cultivation of the plants was carried out under organic standards; the vote was 8 to 7. On March 3, 2020, the Center for Food Safety (CFS), along with a coalition of organic farmers, sued the USDA to challenge its authorization for hydroponically produced crops to be certified “organic.” On March 19, 2021, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that USDA's decision to exempt hydroponic operations from the soil fertility requirement mandatory for all soil-based crop producers was permissible because the Organic Foods Production Act did not specifically prohibit hydroponic operations. On September 22, 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a memorandum decision upheld the district court ruling that allows hydroponic produce growers to continue to sell their produce as organic. The US is the only country in the world to grant organic certification to hydroponically grown plants.
Here Goliath won!!! Dan Nosowitz at Modern Farmer said, “A battle for the soul of the organic movement has been settled. The winners are corporations, as usual.”
Admittedly, there are definite advantages to hydroponic farming, and it can be argued that as long as the nutrients provided to hydroponic plants are all organic in origin, consumers can be confident of the quality of the vegetables or produce. Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case. The NOP states that to be considered certified, land must be free of chemical inputs for at least three years prior to certification and farmers must exclude the use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or genetic engineering. 7 CFR §205.202(b) The USDA admitted in 2019 that glyphosate, the principal and carcinogenic ingredient in Monsanto’ Roundup weed killer, is being sprayed on fields to be used for organic hydroponic berry production. The most commonly used glyphosate has a half-life of about 47 days in soil, however, the USDA says glyphosate can remain in the soil from 3 to 249 days. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Region, “Glyphosate Herbicide Information Profile,” (Feb 1997). https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev2_025810.pdf We do not know whether hydroponic crops grown over soil treated with glyphosate take it up. Furthermore, just looking at the label, do we know the quality of the water and the nutrients being supplied to the hydroponic plants?
At the end of the day, consumer choice decisions are necessarily based on information, some of which is reliable, some of which is marketing, some of which is hidden and not disclosed. It takes more than just reading labels. We all have to dig deeper to really understand the quality of the foods presented to us for purchase.
