Pennsylvania seeks ecological, environmental benefits through organic conversion

State funds help farmers cover three years of transition, first year marketing, to meet certification requirements of USDA National Organic Program

By Greg Bowman
Posted January 19, 2010

Members of the Dietrich family of Oley Valley Organics flank Pennsylvania Rep. David Kessler in front of the brick back oven structure. At left are Casey and Nate, and at right are Barb and Mike. Their vegetable and berry crops have been mostly sold through direct marketing close to home in the first three years of the operation. Barb is participating in the state’s new Path to Organic program to pull together a transition team to help her develop a more sophisticated marketing plan as the organic farm’s perennial crops and value-added enterprises increase.

The Path to Organic program of 2009 provides financial payments and on-going, farmer-customized technical support to make the three-year transition to certified organic production. Farmers agree to work with a transition team they help to shape, to sample and report on soil fertility and organic matter tests, and to evaluate the success of their organic production practices as tools to improve soil health, protecting water quality and sequestering atmospheric carbon.

Projected public benefits from the $500,000 appropriation are cleaner water, healthier food, lower greenhouse-gas emissions, greater viability for preserved farms and an eventual decrease in the state’s tab for mitigation of agriculturally linked excess nitrogen within the Chesapeake Bay.

Incentivizing organic

The originator of the program was David Kessler, who started exploring a state program to encourage organic conversion soon after he started his first term in 2007. Despite some well-known organic organizations and a solid core of organic farmers, Kessler admits he encountered some skeptical looks among other legislators when he explained his conviction that public money should fund a new way to farm.

Explaining the approach as one that cooperates with natural systems in ways that have worked for generations, improved by modern scientific research, won him support across the commonwealth’s traditional urban-rural divide (Philadelphia v. the rest of the state).

Why would a freshman representative tackle such an uphill battle? “Our family always had a large organic garden and read Rodale publications. When I looked at the statewide application, I thought about health and all the other environmental benefits,” Kessler said.

Kessler worked extensively with the Rodale Institute to learn the potential of organic farming to impact soil carbon sequestration, and spent lots of time getting to know organic farmers. He wanted to know their motivations, their challenges and what it would take (financially and informationally) to help other farmers make the switch.

The breakthrough from dogged pursuit of an agricultural innovation to political viability came one June 2008 afternoon in the heart of the state when a key urban representative concluded his first-ever serious day of visits to organic farms. When Dwight Evans asked organic grain producer Bucky Ziegler why he farmed organically, he described his own realization years earlier that started his conversion. “I had to wear a mask, or even a full suit, to spray some pesticides, and I’m not supposed to breathe them. I asked myself ‘What is this doing to the environment?’”

Dwight Evans understood, and as chair of the House appropriations committee, that understanding mattered. It clicked with the kind of upstart new urban agriculture that’s happening in vacant lots and donated parcels in Philadelphia and other cities. Evans has since invited Kessler to Philadelphia to show off the Weavers Way Farm in the Awbury Arboretuem. Children learn to plant crops in a wooded clearing, while older students in the neighborhood have set up a storefront market across from Martin Luther King High School to sell what they harvest.

The experiences of the 13 farms, and the early-phase ecological impact data they generate during their transition years, will shape how the state approaches further policy with this mix of business, public environmental benefit, technical input and state funds.
 
Program details

The bulk of the $500,000 appropriated funds will go to the participating owner-operator producers in line with their per acre-per bids, with the balance for technical assistance in production changes, certification processes and marketing certified organic products. Payments may be made for up to four years, provided that no participant will receive more than $7,500 in a single year or $30,000 total.

The program will reimburse producers for their transition costs and losses such as a temporary drop in yields. It includes producers who are somewhere in the three-year transition process required by the National Organic Program and producers who have not yet begun that process.
 
Participating farmers will have a periodic assessment of their soil carbon levels, which may assist in the sale of carbon credits to any of several carbon-offset aggregators doing business on the Chicago Climate Exchange.
 
"Path to Organic will make farming more profitable and help the environment. It will be a pilot program providing temporary financial aid, during the transition period, to dairy, beef, vegetable and other crop farmers who want to convert from conventional to organic agriculture," Kessler said. "In the first two to four years, farmers who switch may see lower yields, but as the soil returns to a more natural state, their yields are the same as before, or better.
 
Technical assistance will focus on sharing techniques to minimize yield drop through advanced organic crop rotations. Strategies include using a careful mix of crop variety selection, cover crop use to add fertility and suppress weeds, and marketing diversification to optimize income for new outputs.

Selling the crops, livestock and value-added products that have the added consumer benefit of being grown under organic conditions requires new market discovery and development. It’s the added income from direct and local sales, and sales into the broader certified organic market nationally and globally, that Kessler and other organic advocates believe will give the Path program a measurable economic impact.

Despite the economic downturn, "Organic food has been the fastest-growing sector of the food industry for years, and can provide a net return to farmers as much as two times higher than for traditionally raised farm products," Kessler stated. Many consumers are staying with organic products, a late 2009 assessment shows.
 
Kessler said all Pennsylvanians will share in the environmental benefits and other advantages of organic farming:
• Cleaner water: Organic farming eliminates the use of pesticides and other chemicals. It will reduce the amount of nitrogen entering local drinking water supplies and the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed.
• Saving taxpayer money: Pennsylvania is facing a federal mandate to reduce the amount of nitrogen going into the Chesapeake Bay due to effects such as a 70 percent drop in the number of blue crabs caught now compared to 1990. The nitrogen reduction that organic farming can provide could save Pennsylvania taxpayers millions of dollars.
• Healthier food, healthier people: The Rodale Institute reports that 11 important nutrients were on average 25 percent higher in organic foods compared to conventional foods.
• Cleaner air: If every farm in Pennsylvania used organic no-till practices, it would have a clean-air effect equal to taking 2 million to 3 million cars off the roads in terms of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas pollutant.
• Preserving farmland: This initiative will help more farmers to keep farming.

Farmers on board

The program manager is PDA’s Dennis Hall. He finished visits to all farms by mid-December, learning their situations: farming history, organic familiarity, progress in change to organics, status of land (existing and newly acquired), enterprise mix, marketing history and goals, involvement with other organic farmers, and need for wisdom particular to their farm’s organic transition.

“These are 13 very different farms, each unique in their own way, and they are all good,” said Dennis Hall, program manager. He explained that Path to Organic is housed within the department’s Center for Farm Transitions (CFT), which is in turn part of PDA's Bureau of Markets. 

He explained that like the CFT 's other areas of work on farmer transitions, the conversion to organic in the Path program will be highly customized in how the PDA supports the farmers. “They decide where the information gaps are, and who they want to fill them,” he said.

After identifying areas of production, certification or marketing where they have need for assistance or explanation, the farmers can suggest people for their individual “transition team” The PDA will suggest names, if needed, with the farmer making the final choice of the specialists, who may be farmers already certified under the National Organic Program, qualified experts from nonprofit associations, consultants, or university and land grant personnel. 

These transition teams will vary in size and makeup, just as the farmers vary in scope of their operations, their farming skills and understanding of how to comply with organic standards. “We’ll work with their goals for success, however they want to define success,” Hall said.

Path farmers gathered during the Pennsylvania Farm Show this month for a producers’ panel of experienced organic farmers. Hall said another element will be showing participants who are planning direct marketing how to access data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). County-level results can show demographic and income levels to guide marketing plans.

Business plans, farm goals

Individual farmer transition teams will meet as needed, perhaps as often as two times a month for the start-up phase, but no less than four times per year. Major items for 2010 will be working on business plans and making realistic progress on meeting the farm goals, according to Hall.

Hall sees the program as a continuation of the PDA’s investment in all of the state’s agricultural sectors, to the exclusion of none. He said the USDA’s NASS data shows the Keystone state ranks fifth in the country in the value of organic production, ahead of New York at number six. He said what the department learns through the close farmer interaction of the Path program will improve its response to future queries about organic conversion challenges and problem solving.

Kessler explains that the Path to Organic is on relatively firm financial footing because it was funded with $500,000 based on a continuing resolution. The money does not need to be spent by a deadline, allowing it to be drawn down as needed as the farmers go through the four-year funding period. A minority of the funds will be used for soil and water testing (benchmarks at the start, then tracking progress), and for technical expertise.

He will monitor the progress of the Path to Organic farmers, watching the challenges and successes of these “eco-preneurs” in this collaborative public-private process.

Greg Bowman is communications manager at the Rodale Institute. He’ll be watching the Oley Valley Organic website for the first spring firing of the farm’s brick bake oven bread event.