Beyond Organic,
Cultivating a
Revolution

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from a keynote speech presented to the International Association of Organic Agriculture Movements conference this past August in Copenhagen.

The revolution in our food system can only take hold if those who are farming have some security and longevity to the land that they farm. The Mexican farm workers that work with me return to homes and land in Mexico that they own. I do not own the land that I have farmed and cared for and developed for the last fifteen years. Many of the small farmers growing organic food cannot afford to own the land that they farm. Not that anyone really owns land even when they hold title, but to build and regenerate soils, to lovingly raise crops, to plant trees one must have some long-term relationship with the land. We have been so busy pushing land reform in other so called third world countries we have forgotten that we need it at home. We can do this by supporting and taking part in community land trusts and making use of conservation easements to help protect both the land and those who are working it. It also requires that we look hard at what it means to us all when large corporations like Pillsbury or Disney begin to absorb smaller independent organic food stores and manufactures into their corporate fold.

The revolution must also include education. Agriculture in Europe and America is graying. The average age of an American farmer is 63. Many of the children of these farmers watched their parents struggle and did not wish to pick up the standard. Farming was, as it is in the minds of many, a life of drudgery. If the revolution is going to take place we are going to have to return the sense of art and refined craft that small scale organic farming represents at its best, and get more people involved. Those of us who have refined our skills must now be willing to teach others. We must concern ourselves as much with the future of agriculture as a whole as we do the present success of our farms. Without inspired young people moving into our profession there is no future, not just for agriculture but for society as a whole. For the future of every nation is only as good as its soils and those who cultivate them.

Ultimately my observations world wide tell me that the revolution is not so much happening in the farms, warehouses, and retail stores of organic food producers. It's happening in communities, neighborhoods and towns. When I finished ten years of working on the book, having traveled thousands of miles through five continents someone asked me in an interview "what was the most inspiring thing you saw?"... I described my experiences one half hour from where I grew up at Twentieth and Dickinson in south Philadelphia beneath the railroad tracks in one of the lowest mean income neighborhoods in the U.S. Here people had cleared a large city block of trash and rubble and were growing food for themselves and their neighbors. Eighty-three year old Alta Felton who helped start this garden told me that they always grow a little extra food for the poor. You had to wonder who were the poor? I realized if renewal could take place under the most difficult of conditions it could take place anywhere. I know we think globally... But we also must build our own revolution locally. Even if our success is based on global or even national distribution and sales, a portion of what we do must be reinvested locally.

...We know that Monoculture in our agriculture fields often leads to unhealthy results, we must also guard against that same monoculture in the way we view this movement, we must be wary of the globalization of organic, we must recognize that diversity is a basic principle of health in biological systems - diversity of food, diversity of farms and diversity of farmers...

And when we talk about diversity we cannot forget the fundaments of genetic diversity that provides the real tangible physical insurance for the future of the world's food supply - our seeds. We now face a situation where 10,000 years of experimentation, selection, and development by native peoples around the world, our entire agricultural history contained and coded in a vast diversity of seeds is virtually disappearing in a single generation. Most organic farms use hybrid seeds, the marketplace demands it, but what is our responsibility to this issue?

...Food is one of those things that still has the power to bring people together, to build community - it is an area that individuals and families can make a difference in their lives and in the world. Whether it is an organic farm or a backyard garden, a farmers market or community land trust - it is the small steps that make a difference. We can appeal to our government, write letters, seek new laws, even stage protests but real environmental, social, cultural, and political salvation will only come through increments - one handful of seeds, one bucket of compost, one garden, one local movement at a time. We can be the front line of this revolution, but only if we choose to reevaluate our motivation and our direction. If we're honest with ourselves, none of us is yet practicing sustainable agriculture. Not yet.

Michael Ableman is the author of From the Good Earth - A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1993).