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Hi Sal,
Organic growers, and would be growers, and the organic
movement, have a number of choices in front of them.
One would be to decertify any farm where any amount of any
neochemical of any kind were found, for example. Result: no more organic farms,
we are all carrying at least some amount of neochemicals, it is in the wind and
rain, man...
The other choice would be to allow anything. That would make
all farms organic, and render the word meaningless again.
The middle path, which is also available in varying degrees,
is to exclude neochemical contamination as much as is reasonably feasible, and
try to expand a pragmatic organic sector to allow more and more farmers to stop
using chemicals and 'go organic'. That may not be pure as the driven snow (which
is not as pure as it used to be) but it would be the way to go for the sake of
the planet, microbial diversity, carbon sequestration and all the rest,
eh?
Let's say we have a compost with 3 ppm of chlordane in it.
(That's in the spectrum for what was found in thermophilic New Jersey composts,
btw.) Now we send that compost off to someone like Phil Fredericks, who
recomposts it to get rid of the chlordane. Now Phil's compost can be used on the
yards where the chlordane still is in New Jersey, and help get rid of it.
Perhaps if we made a compost tea out of this compost, aiming for fungal growth,
we might be able to accomplish this kind of bioremediation with compost tea as
well.
That's an example of a contaminated feedstock being properly
composted and yielding a decontaminated, and decontaminating,
compost.
OTOH, as far as I know nobody knows what to do to bioremediate
clopyralid, that herbicide that is able to affect plant growth at levels as low
as 1 ppb. Compost containing clopyralid should not be accepted for organic
growing, and so far it has resisted being remediated.
GMOs offer similar complexity. Some GMO materials break down
readily and do not appear in the finished compost, others do not, and are still
present at the time the compost is supposed to be mature.
The rule forbids contamination, but what sort of enforcement
and testing is required?
If we define organic too narrowly, transition will never
occur. If too broadly, it becomes meaningless.
People who have a marked need for organic foods with as little
a load of xenobiotic materials as possible will generally look for local growers
whose land has never been sprayed. Compare that to someone working a piece of
land carrying a substantial load of recalcitrant chemicals (chlordane, DDT, etc)
that has just finished transition of three years. A chemically sensitive person
may be able to tell the difference between crops from these two kinds of
farms.
Sal, I have read Our Stolen Future and I know the dose is not
always the poison. I know we have to be properly diligent about keeping
chemicals out of our food, our soil, and ourselves.
I also know that we can't hold up the transition process for
every and any molecule that could be present, any more than we can ask for
detailed information on each and every microbe in a ton of compost.
So, what standards are you proposing? What levels of which
chemicals would be low enough, in the finished compost, to be
acceptable?
Don't set them at zero, though, because no one on the planet
can meet that.
I sympathize with you for not being able to use material with
one tenth of one per cent biocide, but that is 1000 ppm, right? Think finished
compost is likely to have 1000 ppm of any biocide in it? If it did, it wouldn't
be OMRI acceptable, I would think.
I agree that it is exasperating sometimes trying to be organic
in a polluted world. And I agree we have to keep watching and demanding to know
what the rules are, what the standards are.
But we can't be organic puritans. Not on this planet, not in
this century, anyway.
Frank Teuton
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