Book Review: "Organic Struggle:The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture

Obach, Kevin. 2017. Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture. MIT Press.

           

“Organic Struggle” is first an analysis of how the various, and sometimes disjunctured, organizations of the early organic movement in the United States came to be the Organic label that is easily recognizable today. Dr. Brian Obach is first a scholar of how social movements come to fruition, and this lens of analysis is the driving force behind this book. While it can be easy to get caught up in the morality of organics and sustainable agriculture versus conventional agriculture, Obach takes the reader through how those morals guided and greatly affected the creation and structures of grassroots and consumer based organic communities, to the larger legal structures at the state and federal levels. Most importantly he shows how variations of those morals simultaneously pushed forward, held back, and altered, the achievements of the organic movement.

Obach begins the book with vignettes of various actors who are currently involved in on-going organic legislation and advocacy, and those who were initially involved, but phased themselves out of the “Organic” movement and are currently on the ground, local actors in the sustainable farm movement. He gives a detailed history of the various organic communities in different states and regions; from the fringe-hippy, radical days of back and forth debate within the “Organic Farming and Gardening” magazine, to the formulation of private organic certification organizations. He shows how the early struggles of the different organic movements continued to persist through today- mainly that they all had diverse and competing guiding principles about what “organic” should mean, not just in farming practices, but also in regards to social issues and concerns, and spiritual elements, connected to certain farming methods.

These fractures between organic ethics is ultimately what led the organic movement out of the hands of on the ground local and state actors and private certifiers, to federal involvement. Which also eventually allowed the entrance of big agriculture into “Big Organics”- the antithesis of the original organic movement ethos. Essentially, Obach is able to capture how the seemingly exponential growth of interest in organic was also the movement’s crutch- the bigger the movement became, the harder it was to keep the original interests of not only environmental ethics intact, but also those interests of social justice, and especially spiritual elements in focus. Because the organic movement was composed of various local, regional, and state entities, and because the market for organics exploded, with various levels of cohesiveness, the federal government began to step in to regulate and formulate standards for organics. This is where the level of detail regarding local and large corporate actors and how big agriculture gained entry into the organic movement, becomes hefty. While showing how small, successful organic producers became enveloped by large corporations is important, to essentially show the land grab rush mentality of the movement once it started catching on, it is easy to get buried in the details.

However, learning about those various actors is important to understanding why the United States Department of Agriculture stepped in (mostly to prevent fraud…) which was both welcomed and not by early organic certification organizations- because they realized organics could easily be co-opted into something entirely different without formal regulation, but they also feared losing control of the meaning(s) of organic. As such, the Organic Farmers Association Council (OFAC) was formed, which both encompassed and demonstrated the complexity of diverse views on the meaning of organic. From the OFAC, a bill was laid out that created an advisory board (National Organic Standards Board) which would inform the creation of the National Organic Program (NOP). The NOP is the formal, federal level organic certification entity, which made “organic” a legal term, and in the 1990 Farm Bill, the Organic Foods Production Act was written into law. Eventually this is where the plurality of organic farmers, both small and big agriculture, and various other interests, battled it out to determine what “organic” meant began and the standards which allowed for Big Organics became law- a new form of monoculture that original proponents of organic had fought against.

As daunting as this may seem, Obach ends the book with practicality and movement- that the original ethos of the organic movement is still alive and taking shape under the (newish) umbrella  of sustainable agriculture and various social justice movements focusing on food. He discusses how the sustainable agriculture movement could still gain back the original organic ethos by defending organic integrity at regional and state levels through independent certifiers, as well as bringing farmers back into the certification process, while also working toward building local, sustainable communities and markets. He even discusses the pros and cons of the more recent GMO labeling movement. The ending of his book is extremely practical and realistic, he states that the development of the National Organic Program was both necessary for a bigger sustainable agricultural movement to occur, but that it isn’t, and should not be, the end all toward creating a sustainable agricultural based food economy, and that unification under the NOP was necessary to create a solid advocacy front at the federal level for a movement that has always had a variety of principles and goals.

As a former sustainable farmer who worked on a farm that sought Organic certification, Organic Struggle has become a must read for me. I learned a lot that I thought I already knew about the history of the movement and how the certification process came to be. I also understand deeply why so many local, small farmers have rejected the Organic label process and opted instead for independent, “better than organic,” labeling and certification. Obach’s focus on how the organic movement’s plurality of actors with variations on similar morals became united, is also useful for movements that seem disparate but actually have very similar end goals in mind (looking at you Women’s March/Movement). All and all, Organic Struggle should be required reading for any scholar or person interested in sustainable agriculture, and/or propelling social movements from grassroots beginnings.