Ken Cook

Is there a reason to be concerned about the use of pesticides in agriculture in the U.S.?

Yeah, I think there are lots of reasons to be concerned about it. For one thing, there’s a risk to the people who are using them every day. Probably the biggest risk, in a way, farm workers, farmers, whether they’re using bug killers, weed killers, or rodenticides to kill rats in the grain bins. Those are very toxic chemicals.

We regulate them federally and at the state level, precisely because they’re so dangerous. They can cause cancer, they can mess with your nervous system, they can cause all kind of skin rashes, some very serious. And they can have long-term effects, too, on the nervous system of children who are exposed to them. The children of farm workers and farmers are a principle group we’re worried about.

Consumers also should be concerned, not just because pesticides show up on the foods we eat — and they do on almost all the conventional foods that are out there. Pesticides of one kind or another show up. Sometimes there might be a half a dozen or more on a single serving of salad. Then we get them in drinking water, on top of that. So, in the Midwest, every major Midwestern capital — and I happen to be from St. Louis — every big city in the Midwest that gets their water from a surface source — which is most of the cities in that part of the country — they have tended to have over the years, low levels but steady levels of weed killers that come off of cornfields and other farm operations up the watershed.

And so, what you see is a constant exposure. They may be very low doses, but they’re mixtures, which we never study the health effects of. They’re combined with other industrial chemicals that we might get, in food or air or water. And so, we really have a regulatory system that’s allowed a lot of this exposure to happen, condoning a lot of this exposure, without fully understanding the risks.

We also tell people, when it comes to fruits and vegetables, that’s it’s much more important to eat fruits and vegetables. The risk there of not eating a healthy diet is greater than the risk of pesticides. But the fact is, we can have both. We can have steadily-reduced pesticide exposure in the food supply. We can certainly keep it out of our drinking water. And if we put our minds to it, and have an abundant, affordable food supply at the same time.

There’s no need for that tradeoff. But, we just have not pushed hard enough to get there.

Talk about the residues on food.

Well, what we’ve learned is that almost every produce item in the produce department has some pesticides on it. Some are lower than others, even if they’re produced chemically. Organic has the lowest levels. But there is still a legacy of the years in which we used DDT, for example, where that shows up even today on crops that are grown on old cotton fields. You’ll still get some DDT in. So, it just tells you, when something lasts a long time in the environment, you shouldn’t waste any time moving on to something that’s safer and doesn’t stick around for as long a period of time.

But lots of fruits and vegetables that we think are healthy, and are healthy indeed for us, have residues of pesticides on them that we are exposed to every time practically we eat. Big percentages of the produce we buy, large percentages of the produce we buy in the grocery store do have low levels of pesticide residue on them, in combination, sometimes, multiple pesticide residues. And I think that’s the concern.

And the EPA over the years, with lots of prodding from the public and public interest groups, has gradually tried to reduce the exposure in the food supply, and we’ve made some strides, but we still have a ways to go. The best bet for a lot of fruits and vegetables is organic, because pesticides weren’t used to begin with on those fruits and vegetables.

And so, you’re not going to be exposed as a consumer.

Are there concerns about pesticides in water?

Well, one of the most common synthetic chemicals we find in tap water is agricultural pesticides, weed killers in particular. When I was in graduate school studying soil science at the University of Missouri, back in the 1970s, the common understanding was that weed killers didn’t run off of farm fields. They were tightly bound to the soil, and stayed put after they did their job.

We learned not very many years later that that was completely untrue. We were seeing pesticide runoff, weed killers in particular, all over the Midwest. My hometown of St. Louis was one of the cities that first discovered weed killers running off and into the intake pipe of the water supply in St. Louis County and St. Louis City. They were one of the first to sound the alarm, and basically say, look, we’re going to have to clean this up if we don’t clean up the problem upstream.

And today, that’s still the problem. Water utilities all over the Midwest and other parts of the country, they apply basically an elaborate carbon filter process in the spring, when this herbicide is running off of farm fields up the watershed, coming into the intake pipe. They scrub it out, try and clean up the water as best they can. It’s not a pollution problem they caused, but to try and help their customers, they’re cleaning it up.

Those low-dose exposures were happening for decades before anyone really even bothered to look, which tells you something. We have big pesticide companies that tell us they understand the science better than anyone, they understand how the chemicals are used better than anyone, they understand how they interact in the environment better than anyone does. And yet, we come to find out only in the 1980s that we have high levels of pesticides in almost every stream in the country, and coming into our drinking water.

Well, that’s not an example of sound science, if you ask me. That means we’ve not been taking a careful look as we should have. So, these low level exposures in the food, in the water, are happening all the time. And we can prevent them. The main thing we’re worried about is kids. A small dose can make a big difference if the person weighs 15 or 20 pounds, and they’re growing rapidly. Those doses coming in, in some cases every day at low levels — maybe it’s in the formula that’s being mixed up for them, maybe it’s in the orange juice that’s being reconstituted, the ice cubes.

Maybe it’s in the Kool-Aid they’re drinking. You mix that kind of toxic chemical in with whatever everyone assumes is a perfectly normal food, and you get another exposure. And we should be cutting back on that. We have the capability to do it scientifically. We have the farming systems that could do it. But, we’re still using these old chemicals that came on the market in the ’50s, were used for decades before anyone looked to see if they were getting in our drinking water. And they’re still in use today.

Do you have a sense of trends of pesticides?

I don’t have the figures at the tip of my tongue. It’s very knowable, although, the truth is, we don’t keep as good a track of pesticide usage as we might. I think that the overall observation I would make is we’re not doing nearly as good a job as we should be doing reducing pesticide loadings into the environment, not just the exposures that we experience in the food supply, but also what we put on the farm fields across the country that shows up in drinking water, affects wildlife, and so forth.

And some of the worst offenders have been taken off the market, under a lot of pressure from public interest groups. But, it took a lot of pressure to get it done, because the pesticide lobby is pushing very hard constantly to make the case that even though these chemicals are old, and even though that we’re all being exposed, and there are concerns about their toxicity, we should just keep using them as we have been. It’s old technology. My colleague calls them pesticides from the Sputnik era.

And they really are. Those are still in the environment, unfortunately, for many years after we’ve stopped using them. [Albacarb], DDT, chlordane, heptachlor, we still find those in the environment, still find them in some foods. So, unfortunately, those, along with some of the newer chemicals, are things that we need to be concerned about. The trend is not going down as fast as it should. In fact, in many places, pesticide use is as high as it ever was.

Anything you’d care to say about the use of organophosphates in particular?

Well, just that this is a great example of a class of chemicals that really we should have skipped over completely. We all knew from the very beginning that organophosphate insecticides posed a very serious risk to the people who use them on the farm, farm workers and farmers. Very dangerous stuff. Very small amounts can make you very sick, very quickly.

But we also knew at the same time that it was getting into water, and staying on food after it was applied. The EPA finally took some action in the late 1990s, under a new pesticide reform law, mainly to protect children from organophosphate insecticides, both on food, and in the home. A lot of these things were sprayed around the house to deal with roaches and other household pests. And we should have moved much sooner to better technology to deal with those pests. These organophosphate insecticides go back decades. They have their origins in the nerve gasses that were developed in Nazi Germany. And as the technology stuck and kept being a mainstay — not just on the farm, but around the house — we were exposing a lot of people needlessly to a pesticide that can cause really serious nervous system damage.

We need to take more of them off the market and protect farm workers beyond what we’ve done already. We have made some progress.

Speak to your work with Body Burden.

We are carrying around a Body Burden. We’re really just beginning to explore it. We understand much more about the human genome at this point than we do about what we call the human toxome, the toxic profile of chemicals, synthetic industrial chemicals, including pesticides, that are in all of us.

We started off doing studies of pesticides and other toxic chemicals in air, in food, in baby food, in water. All kinds of environment exposures. And it occurred to us one day, well, maybe we should test people. So, we started doing those tests. They were very expensive. We had some very brave volunteers come forward, agree to be stuck with a needle, and we took quite a bit of blood from them.

We sent it to laboratories all around the world. And what we’re finding is, this incredible, very worrisome mixture of toxic chemicals, including pesticide, in all of us. And not only that, it’s not just people who are in the world and had been in the world for decades working — in my case, not doing anything particularly hazardous — we’re all exposed. But we found exposures to babies in the womb, when we tested umbilical cord blood a few years ago.

We tested ten Americans, and found that they had over 287 toxic chemicals, in just a group of ten babies that we tested. This included some older pesticides that have been off the market for 30 years. That tells you something about the exposure that’s happening in this country and around the world, even before people come into the world, even before they leave the womb.

And those exposures are something we really need to be very concerned about, because in many cases, there’s an elevated risk factor for diseases later in life. Sometimes not very much later in life, like childhood cancer. But, certainly diseases that we all are worried about. Nervous system problems. Cancer, including breast cancer. A great deal of concern now, and more scientific attention focused on the pollution in people, which it’s about time we started studying.

Talk about birth defects and spinal diseases.

Yeah, I think it’s really the whole gamut of health concerns. We have tremendous incidences of diseases in this country, now, that can’t be explained on the basis of evolution. We’re not evolving that quickly. Something is happening. Much increased rates of autism. High rates of brain cancer in children. Pediatricians weren’t missing brain cancer diagnoses 15 or 20 or 30 years ago.

It’s not an artifact of better diagnosis. This is a new development. And it’s a very worrisome one. Neurological problems, ADHD, developmental problems in children, infertility problems in adults, all of these things are on the rise. And again, it’s not because we’re evolving so quickly. This is not attributable to genetics. It’s the interaction of something in the environment with a natural predisposition of some people, probably, to come down with these diseases and ailments.

That combination is the cutting edge of science. And where pesticides are concerned, we have very little information, unfortunately, about the pesticides on the market showing up in people. We need to do that kind of Body Burden survey.

Why is there controversy about the tolerance levels the EPA is setting?

Well, the real reason why there’s so much controversy is money. There’s controversy because there’s a lot of money to be made in the pesticide business, and both the manufacturers and the farmers who use these compounds — and virtually every farmer in the country does — push back very hard when there’s any attempt to limit the use of these chemicals. What you’re really talking about when you’re talking about an exposure level is — when you step back a few more paces — you’re talking about what’s applied to the crop before it causes an exposure.

If you cut back on the amount of exposure that’s allowed, usually that means you’re changing how that pesticide is used on the farm. Sometimes you’re outlawing it all together. Well, there’s so much money at stake when you start to regulate pesticides, these companies push back very hard. So, they’re constantly in there, at every step of the process with their own scientific studies, they’re own research, pushing at the agency, saying, it’s okay to allow that exposure, and it’s okay to use that much on the crop. It’s okay that that much shows up on an apple, or a peach, or a leaf of lettuce.

And that pressure at EPA forces them to make political decisions that in many cases tilt in favor of the industry, not in favor of public health. It’s just that simple. And those of us on the outside, the environmental community and others who are pushing back, are constantly finding ourselves outgunned, in terms of money, political influence, access to decision-makers, because these pesticide companies hire the best lobbyists in town. They hire the access people, the former officials, the former members of Congress, the former Senators.

Those are the ones who can open doors. And it’s not just in the Bush administration; it’s in any administration. But, particularly now, the revolving door between the industry and the agency, between Congress and the industry, between the folks who are supposed to be regulating us and the folks who are regulated is constant. And when that happens, you’re really up against some very daunting odds. One reason we test people for pesticides and other toxic chemicals, and test food, and test air, and test water, is to shine a light on that.

But sometimes in the deep recesses of these processes, meetings are happening that we don’t know about. Deals are being cut that the public never sees, never in the light of day, until the very end when it’s too late. And when that happens, you end up with higher levels of pesticide exposure than we think is safe, and that independent scientists think is safe. It’s just the nature of the process.

Do you think there is pressure brought from the Executive Branch?

Yeah, there’s constant pressure. Even the most impartial bureaucrat at the EPA or the Department of Agriculture, at some point if they’re making a decision about pesticides that might affect the amount of pesticides that can be used, sold by a company, used by farmers, they’re going to hear from the powers that be.

And they may be on Capitol Hill, a Senator, or a Congressman, or their staff members, picking up the phone and saying, “I’m very concerned about the decision you’re making down there.” Or, it may be someone in the White House. And the reason they’re making those calls, in fairness to them, obviously they want to defend the interests of their constituents, and that may be a chemical company. It may be a farmer.

But another factor in all of this is money. What they thrive on, what they need to service in our political system, is campaign contributions. If they don’t get those campaign contributions, they’re not going to be able to compete, whether it’s in a full election, or even a primary. They have to constantly be raising money up there.

A good source of money is a pesticide industry representative. They’ll come in, and they’ll make the case that their product is perfectly safe, they want to have a fair hearing down at the EPA. Maybe you could make a phone call or have someone on your staff inquire how that process is going down there? Sometimes it’s very subtle. Sometimes it’s not.

But the fact of the matter is, the pressure is constantly there, and underneath that pressure is money.

Why is most of the money in the farm bill, that’s supposed to support agriculture or growers, going to commodity crops?

There’s a really simple reason. The reason most of the subsidy money goes to big commodity crops is because they have lots of acreage and lots of producers, and they’ve built up a lot of political clout over the years. Unfortunately, five crops — soy beans, wheat, cotton, rice, and corn — get over 90% of the farm bill money we’re going to be spending this coming cycle.

Over the past few years we’ve spent over $20 billion a year, year after year, and almost all of that money goes to those five crops. And the reason it goes to them is because historically they’ve produced much more than the domestic market can bear. They’ve desperately needed an export market. So, we’re constantly trying to ship that grain, ship that cotton overseas.

When that doesn’t work out, when the market’s not there, taxpayers are asked to step in and provide the money, as if we were the market. And in fact, we are often times. So, that stimulates a great deal of excess production right there. It’s a vicious cycle. Technology allows these farmers to grow more crops. As they grow more crops, they have greater need for exports.

As they have shortfalls in the export market, surplus crops accumulate. They need more subsidies from taxpayers. That fuels more production of those crops. Meanwhile, what we should be doing, I think, is shifting in the direction where we’re helping more farmers deal with not just how much they grow, but with how they grow it. A lot of these environment problems, we could deal with if we were investing more wisely in nutrient management, so we didn’t have these fertilizers running off into farm fields and into the Des Moines Water Works and lots of other places.

If we cut back on pesticides, many smaller crops — asparagus, broccoli, not big acreage — we don’t invest very much in figuring out smarter ways to control pests on those crops. We end up with higher residues on those crops in the food supply that we eat. We end up with runoff coming from those fields into our drinking water supply.

If we invested in a smarter way — which I think most taxpayers would support — we could probably deal with both problems at once. We could cut back on the amount of money we’re spending on the big commodity crops. And the best way to do that, I think, is to have the biggest guys be on their own. If they want to grow and expand to 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 acres, this is America. We let people do that in this country. You can get big.

But taxpayers shouldn’t be involved in every single bale or every single bushel that they raise. They should be on their own at some point. Then we should take the money that we save from those subsidies that are unlimited to big growers, and reinvest that in smaller family farms. Invest in conservation programs. Invest in fruit and vegetable production, including organic fruit and vegetable production, so we can have the fruits and vegetables we all know we need to eat more of, and they ought to be produced in the safest, most responsible, and assured way.

And we can do both. But, you can’t do it if you’re spending billions of dollars on corn, and cotton, and rice, and wheat subsidy programs year, after year, after year. The money runs out before we ever get around to these other priorities.

With commodity crops, if most of the money is going to an export market, what does that have to do with feeding America?

We would do fine in this country feeding ourselves with much more sustainable methods. And what you hear time and again from these companies, and some of the larger producers that use these products, is that if we don’t have the pesticides that are now on the market, we won’t be able to supply the food and fiber we need for this country, or for others around the world.

But they’ve said that so many times, when we’ve faced a difficult decision about getting red of a pesticide or restricting it. In the case of DDT, if we ban it, we won’t be able to provide the food and fiber we need. In the case of organophosphate insecticides, if we take them off the market we won’t have fruits and vegetables anymore.

Chlordane, heptachlor, all these chemicals, we got rid of most of them, many of them, and we still have an abundant food supply. And the answer is, if we push the technology of agriculture of make it safer, it gets safer. These big chemical companies now brag about cutting back on pesticides, or developing safer alternatives, when they were forced to do that by environmentalists, and when we have them on our side, the EPA.

And it’s one thing to brag about doing something when you volunteer. It’s another thing to brag about it as if you volunteered, and in fact you were forced to do it by regulation. To my mind, the opportunities are enormous, to cut back on the amounts of pesticides we use — particularly these older products — and still have the food supply that we need.

The other important thing to point out is, there’s a great deal of emphasis now in understanding how other countries need to feed themselves. And while it’s important to have world trade — and we certainly agree that it’s important to have a trading system that’s fair to everybody, and that poor countries and wealthy countries alike can participate in — it’s one thing to have that kind of regime. It’s another thing to have one that’s so unfairly tilted against developing countries and those markets by our subsidy system, that dumps cheap grain and cheap cotton on the world market at the expensive of U.S. taxpayers.

It’s one thing to ask a cotton farmer from Mali to compete with a few acres of land, family labor, no mechanization, not much fertilizer. It’s one thing to ask someone like that to compete against an American farmer who’s well-capitalized and has modern equipment. It’s another thing to ask them to compete not just against that American farmer, but against the U.S. taxpayer, who’s putting billions of dollars behind that cotton production, to ramp it up higher and higher, and year after year, even though the market would be signaling otherwise.

We don’t need that much American cotton. So, I think the combination of the myth that we can’t do without any of the pesticides we now have, when we look at history, we know we’ve done it without them time and time again. We’ve taken them off the market, and we’re doing fine. And we could do even more with safer technology. But, you have to push the system.

And one way to do that is to shift some of the money that we’re now investing in encouraging farmers to grow tremendous amounts of crops, and reinvest it in ways that encourage them to grow those crops in a safer, more effective way, environmentally.

Can it be said that taxpayers are subsidizing an immigration problem?

No, I don’t think there’s any question that particularly in Mexico, where we after NAFTA started exporting a huge amount of corn, it put tremendous pressure on corn producers in Mexico. Many of them just couldn’t make it. Again, not because they were competing in a free market setting, as NAFTA was suppose to create, but because they were competing against our corn subsidy program.

Now we’ve kind of seen the reverse happen, with ethanol coming on, and huge amounts of corn being devoted to producing an additive to our gasoline that goes into sport utility vehicles, now we’ve got very high prices. So, we’ve cut back on corn production in Mexico, as a consequence of our earlier dumping, and now they’re facing increases in prices of staples like tortillas, because corn prices have gone sky high under ethanol.

So, they’ve really been [whip-sawed] both ways, and it tells you that when you monkey with prices, and insert subsidy programs that can distort prices, you can have some really terrible affects. Not just abroad, but also at home. Driving farmers out of business here, because the big farmers who get the big subsidy payments, that’s their nonpayment to buy out their neighbors, right down the road. When the section of land comes up for rent or for sale, who gets the best shot at buying it or renting it?

Well, it’s the big farmer who’s been getting that big government payment all along. So, whether you look across our border, and the problems we’ve caused with illegal immigration in this country, when we’ve put Mexican corn farmers out of business, or you look down the road in any part of the Midwest and see someone who’s going out of business because they can’t compete with somebody who’s gotten so big with taxpayer money, you’ve got problems with the subsidy system all through.

Why did you personally get into this?

Well, I think what got me started in working on agriculture issues — pesticides, and farm policy issues generally — was, I grew up in the city. My dad moved to town, but he was a farm boy. My uncle stayed on the farm, and I would spend my summers in cow-calf operations in southern Missouri. And then I went to Ag School at [Missoula] and got my Master’s Degree in Soil Science at the University of Missouri.

And I always wanted to make the connection between how we produced our food and what impacts we were having on the environment, good and bad. There’s a lot about agriculture that’s very good for the environment, that we want to keep in place. But some of the excesses of modern technology and some of the things that policy is driving farmers to do are causing profound impacts on the environment. And so, over my career, I’ve just found that this is an area where I’ve been able to use what I learned at the university and what I learned growing up on my uncle’s farms, and try and apply it.

And what you see over time is, we’re facing some much more difficult problems now, than we’ve faced before. We do have a lot of people to feed, a lot more than when I was growing up. We’ve got a lot more challenges on the landscapes, stressing water systems, soil systems, stressing human health. And we have got to bear down and invest in ways to do this in a smarter fashion, because if we don’t, we’re not only going to end up with a food system that is not serving public health, but we’re going to end up destroying a good portion of the environment, producing food that’s not healthy.

What can an average person do?

Well, first of all, if you eat, you should be involved in this fight for a safer food system, one that’s more respectful of the environment. And there are a couple things you can do. First of all, the way you shop makes a difference. Purchasing foods that are grown organically, purchasing foods that are natural, free of antibiotics, and so forth, that sends a signal back through the system, that there are customers out there — and there’s a growing number of them — that want food produced in a different way, because they’re saying at the grocery story, I’m going to vote with my dollars and buy something that is different from the ordinary.

Secondly, you can get involved with the many community organizations and regional and national organizations that are trying to make a difference in agricultural policy. How your tax dollars are spent makes a big difference in what’s on your plate at the end of the day. So, if you’re concerned about what’s on your plate, get involved in a big part of the funding for it, which is our food and fiber policy system.

We spend billions and billions of dollars every year on agriculture research, agricultural subsidies. Organic farmers, and organic researchers get almost none of that. A very small amount of money being spent researching better ways to grow fruits and vegetables, with less risk to the environment and human health.

One of the best ways to do it is to join one of these groups, add your voice to the chorus that’s growing. We want a food system that operates differently. I don’t want pesticides in my tap water, thank you very much. I don’t want pesticides on my fruits and vegetables. I’m not saying it has to happen tomorrow. We know there are technological difficulties with that, and potential hardships for farmers, if we try to do that. It wouldn’t work.

But, we can make progress. We already have. We’re doing without lots of the pesticides that just a few years ago, pesticide companies and some farmers told us we couldn’t grow food without. We can continue to push that process, but we really need people to stand up and make a statement. In the grocery store, in community meetings, joining groups that are fighting this fight.

What can people do about policy makers relying on special interests?

Well, there’s nothing like getting involved in an election. I don’t care if you’re involved, whatever party it is. It’s really important to step up. And in agricultural issues, someone who goes to a meeting with their local member of Congress, or goes to a Congressional debate, and simply asks a question, “Why do we have so many pesticides in our food? Why do we have pesticides running off in our water? Why is it we’re spending so much of our tax dollars on so few crops, when so many farmers are going out of business and struggling?”

Just asking those questions can really shake a member of Congress or a candidate up. You’d be amazed at the power you have simply by stepping up and doing that, or writing a letter. It’s really just a matter of believing that you can make the same kind of difference doing that, that you can make in talking to your kid or going to a grocery store and complaining, or making a point about what’s stock and what’s not.

These politicians will listen. Right now, they’re listening to money, but ultimately they’ll listen to voters. And so, if you’re going to step up, one of the best ways to do it is in the electoral process. Get involved in a campaign. It doesn’t matter which party. Go to the headquarters, start asking questions, and see where these candidates stand. Just asking them to be accountable is the first step that everybody should take, in making sure whatever policy issue you’re worried about is getting heard.

Speak of the amount of land devoted to organic growth.

We hear a lot about the growth in the organic industry, and it’s been very exciting. I think we’re at $14 or $15 billion, which sounds like a lot, and it is a lot compared to what it was just a few years ago. But when you look at the amount of acreage that’s devoted to organic production in this country, it’s very small. Less than half of 1% of all the farmland in this country is producing crops and livestock organically. Half of 1%.

We’re not having the impact we need yet on the landscape, with agricultural production that’s organic at that scale. It needs to be bigger. Likewise, the public health. We’re not producing a lot of food organically. We’re seeing an increase in the value of foods, because we’re seeing more and more high-priced organic offerings in grocery stores. That’s great for people who can afford it.

What we really need, is more organic production to begin driving that priced down a little bit, so it’s more affordable, and it’s affordable and available through more of the year. My concern is not that organic has gotten too big — there are some abuses out there. I’d like to see some of these big dairy operations adhere to the rules. I’d like to see some of the big crop operations likewise be more integrated and use more crop rotations. No question about that.

But the big issue for organic right now is, can it really grow to be a significant factor in the environment and for public health? Cut down pesticides for a vast majority of the public. Cut down pesticides over a vast part of the agricultural landscape. We’re not there yet, and we need a major effort to get there.

We’ll look at how the government could be doing more to make organic food available.

Yeah. A friend of ours, Dr. [Phil Landgren] of Mt. Sinai, has a great saying. “Organic is private school for food.” It’s great if you can afford it, great if you can find it, but for most people it’s just not a big factor. So, even though we have a $15 billion organic industry, it’s still not making a dent where I think we’d be most concerned to have it make a dent. Let me give you an example. Low-income kids who don’t have enough to eat anyway.

If left to their own devices, and left to what’s available to them, they’re going to have a very unhealthy diet. It could make them overweight at an early age, it could cause problems with their growth. Those are the kids that we want to get a good, healthy supply of fruits and vegetables — and ideally organic fruits and vegetables — right from the very beginning. Change their eating patterns. Give them a chance to have a healthier life from the start.

We can’t do that with the scale at which we’re operating now in the organic industry. We need to grow it. And there’s going to be some growing pains when we do that, some tension between the larger operators and the smaller ones, and the medium-sized ones. We need to have an organic industry where there’s room for all of them.

I think we can do that, with farmer’s markets on the one end of the spectrum, and big wholesalers at the other. But we need to make sure that we grow the overall industry, or we’re not going to see the health benefits we need, particularly for children.

Is this something that a more enlightened farm bill could encourage?

Oh, yes, we invest almost nothing in helping farmers transition from conventional to organic. We invest almost nothing in research to solve pest problems that organic farmers face. If you’re switching from conventional to organic, under the current rules — and it makes sense — you have to wait for three years before you can sell your crop as “organic,” even though you’ve stop using pesticides and fertilizers.

Well, during that period of time, you’re not getting the premium price for organic, but you might have a temporary drop in production, in yield. These are all serious problems that have to be overcome. We only have about 10 or 11,000 organic farmers in this country, out of 2 million counted by the Census of Agriculture. Many of them are very small, and they’re making a living, and that’s great.

But we need to double, and triple, and quadruple that number. That’s going to get more people on the landscape making a living through organic farming. It’s going to put more food in the farmer’s markets. It’s go to put more food in the supermarkets that’s organically produced. That’s the direction we should be going in, and that’s, I think, if you ask most people in this country, where would you like your taxpayers’ dollars to go?

They wouldn’t come up with the list that you see on our farm subsidy database, big payments to big producers of a few favorite crops. They’d be saying, let’s invest in the small farmers that are growing fruits and vegetables that I’d like more of. I’d like to be able to afford it. I’d like it offered during a bigger part of the year. Let’s invest in that. That’s the kind of smart farm policy and food policy we need in this country.

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