Hi my name is Nicole Dehne I'm the director of
Vermont Organic Farmers and I'm here to talk to you today about organic certification and give
you an introduction to what uh this process means and what this process looks like so first I want
to tell you a little bit about our organization Vermont Organic Farmers is an LLC we're also a
USDA accredited certification agency and were owned by the nonprofit NOFA Vermont so we started
in 1985 by a group of farmers um we have served as a third-part
y verification for organic food
production since that time and we have also been accredited by the USDA National Organic Program
since 2002 which is when the National Organic Program came into effect we certify close to
800 farms and processors we only certify within the state of Vermont and those farms include
lots of different types of farms we certify vegetable dairy livestock and um more organic
maple producers than any other production type so the reason it's important um to talk about
the
structure of our organization is because having a USDA um certification program that is owned and
connected to a nonprofit affects our approach to certification because it instills values into the
certification process and so traditionally those values have been to ensure that the organic
certification process and practices have integrity to ensure that producers are engaged
and have a voice in the certification process and one of the tenants for um the foundational
principles for org
anic certification have always been about striving for continuous improvement
both for our farmers and for our organization so of course um organic farming has always
been about values-based farming and another one of the foundational principles for organic
farming has been about healthy soil and the idea was that focusing on healthy soil would be what um
created healthy plants and in turn healthy animals and then in turn healthy people so this was in
contrast to the more conventional appro
ach that saw the soil as more just a medium to hold the
plant and then you know give the plant what it needed through synthetic fertilizers and protect
the plant through herbicides and pesticides um but organic farming has always been about uh
making sure that soil itself is is healthy so that uh we can produce healthy plants another
value in organic farming has always been about protection of natural resources um the promotion
of biodiversity working with natural systems versus against nat
ural systems so learning about
a pests cycling um so that we could understand how to break that cycle for example and then of
course um continuous Improvement so I wanted to also talk a little bit about the growth in the
industry just to give a sense of you know where we're at now and where we have been in the past so
US sales of organic food and beverages grew from $1 billion in 1990 to $61.9 billion according to
you know recent industry statistics so that's this huge growth this huge grow
th in popularity for
organic for the organic market and yet you know we like to see ourselves as like having arrived
as being considered mainstream but we are only 6% of the total food and beverages sales in the
United States so we really have a long way to go before we are you know mainstream and have
really infiltrated into uh the common kind of consumer if you look at organic as a percentage
of us total then those numbers look a little bit different so for fruit and vegetables organic
f
ruit and vegetables are 14% of the total fruit and vegetables sold in the US dairy products are
8% of all the dairy products sold in the US 8% of those are organic 5% of all the layer hens in
the United States are managed organically and unfortunately only 1% of all the acreage in the
US is um certified organic now if you look at these numbers just to the state of Vermont it's
a little bit of a rosier picture because we have about 20% of all the dairy farms in the state are
certified organi
c um and in addition we have the most organic farms per capita in the state so
how is the organic program structured so the National Organic Program is housed within the
United States Department of Ag and the USDA is in charge um of enforcing the term organic and
also accrediting certifiers they do not certify operations that's they accredited certifiers to do
that work so it's the certifiers who are applying the rule and certifying the farms and processors
there's one set of national stand
ards so we're all working from the same set of regulations
but these regulations are intentionally broad in order to be applied to all different types
of operations you know for dairy farms to maple um they some of the rule is specific enough to
address um you know specific production types certainly but broad enough so that certifiers can
make decisions um that apply to specific scenarios so um it's good to sort of understand too that
in some ways it are two definitions um within the natio
nal organic program about organic right
there's this negative definition that probably most people are aware of which is when you think
of organic you probably think of the absence of chemicals right so uh the rule describes this
as food produced and handled without synthetic substance without synthetic substances there
are some specific you know limited exceptions to that rule and we'll get into that later um
we don't allow GMOs sewage sludge and radiation so that's sort of like the absenc
e model the
the negative definition of organic but because there's often more familiarity and focus on the
negative definition we forget about this positive definition which is incredibly important which
is really all about what farmers are trying to achieve right so it's an organic system that
integrates cultural biological and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources promote
ecological balance and conserve biodiversity and this is you know these are terms pulled from
the Nat
ional Organic Program rule so what are the organic standards standards exactly they are
a set of definitions and practices that encompass both organic farming and organic processing so if
you want to produce um an organic salsa product then there's also regulations determining you know
what how and how you can do that how you can label it what ingredients you can put in it that sort
of thing so there are different sections of the rule a section for crops a section for livestock
and a sectio
n for processing and then it the rule also includes what's called the national list of
allowed and prohibited substances and essentially the national list is um sort of the tools that
are allowed for producers to use so in general everything synthetic is prohibited except for
um a short list of allowed synthetics and then everything natural is allowed except for an even
shorter list of allowed naturals so for example arsenic is a natural ingredient but it's a poison
so that's a prohibited n
atural and then an allowed synthetic might be like anesthetics allowed for
livestock production or baking soda allowed in um organic processing standards so it's important
to realize that the standards are dynamic they continue to be improved and they continue to be
improved with input from farmers from consumers from nonprofits and from private businesses
so I'm just going to very quickly go into a little bit of some of the standards for the
for crop and livestock so for crop production fa
rmers are required to feed the soil with the
use of cover crops green manures compost and animal manures like I said no toxic pesticides or
synthetic fertilizers are allowed farmers have to work to protect ground and surface waters from
contamination of um nutrients and chemicals um they are required to rotate crops to improve soil
and also to prevent pest and disease problems so often because organic the tools that organic
farmers have in their toolbx are not as um they don't work as well
as the tools that conventional
producers have so really what organic producers have to do is and this is also required in the
standards they have to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place so hence the rotation
of crops hence the picking out varieties that are resistant to certain diseases you know prevention
is a big piece of the organic farming puzzle so for livestock production um animals have to be
raised on organic feed they can't be raised with the use of hormones or anti
biotics they have to
be raised in a stress-free environment and they have to be able to exhibit natural behaviors so
some of those natural behaviors would be dust baths for chickens or rooting for uh poultry I'm
sorry rooting for for pigs um and then health care treatments um that you that farmers use have
to be natural or they have to be an approved synthetic so like I said another example again the
anesthetics for de-horning um animals have to have access to the outdoors year round and uh
ruminants
must be raised on pasture and there's very specific regulations on exactly how much pasture
and for how long pasture has to be available so the organic certification process is a
three-part system the first part involves the organic application or what's called the
organic system plan and the organic system plan is basically a description of all the practices
that the farmer is um going to engage in in their in in during the upcoming year so how they're
going to improve soil fer
tility what their crop rotation schedule is a description of all the
fields that they certify and the acreage of all the those fields a description of the plants
they plan to grow those are you know some examples um and the organic system plan is um filled out
every year um we at Vermont Organic Farmers have an online application so you can fill it out on
paper but then um you can also fill it out online and every year we give you the information that
you gave us the year before back to you
and then you just update it for changes so every farm has
an annual inspection and those are pre-arranged and the inspection is essentially the role of
the inspector is to verify that what you said you were doing in your organic system plan is
what you are actually doing um so that happens every year as well as a certification fee that you
pay every year to cover the costs of the review of the organic system plan and the payment for
the inspector um luckily the certification fees are reimb
ursed by the USDA for 75% of the cost
cost of certification up to $750 per scope and the scopes are crop livestock processing and wild
crop um so again this is an annual process every year you submit your organic system plan you
have the inspection and you have and you pay the certification fee so generally this is a
trust-based system and it's also backed up and supported by education so that people understand
why they're doing these practices and hopefully come to believe in them um so um
however there
are also parts of the system that are also you know um surprise and unannounced to kind of verify
that that trust is warranted so as when you sign up to be certified organic you also will get um
we do residue testing on 5% of all the operations that we certify and we also do unannounced
inspections on 5% of all the operations we certify so we're basically doing about um 80
samples and unannounced um inspections a year so a big piece of the organic certification
is record-kee
ping right so all farmers and processors have to keep records that demonstrate
how they comply with the rule and that means you basically have to you know keep reciepts and
and records that allow us to see the activities and transactions that you've had as a business
technically those records have to be um maintained for up to five years um and basically again
these are records of activities that span the time of when you purchase or acquire a product
through your production and then final
finally through the sale or transport of the product so um
producers have to maintain records that trace back to the last certified operations in their supply
chain and then forward to their customers so that might seem like a lot that might seem a little
intimidating but usually these are all records that you want to keep for your own analysis of
your business anyway right so we're talking about if you're a crop producer we're talking about
um your seeding records your um planting records
if you're spraying any pesticides which again
you'd have to show first you sort of prevented you tried to prevent the pest from occurring
in the first place but you would keep track of what you sprayed and what date you sprayed
um purpose records and then records of sale again a lot of these records are really handy to
give you good information about your business and your farming practices so during the inspection
the the records are going to be used to do two things there's going to be a
traceability audit
where basically the inspector is going to take a final product and see if they can trace it
back through your records to acquisition um so if it's a you know if they're looking at a bunch
of carrots they're going to look back to say when were these harvested from what field um when
were they seeded and from what seeds were they purchased and then the mass balance audit is the
inspectors are going to pick product and they're going to say okay they're going to look at the
size of the operation and how many row feet were planted to a particular crop and they're going to
say what is a reasonable yield for this crop and then they're going to look at the sales records
to see that um that you're not selling more than would what would be expected based on the
acreage and square footage that you have planted so if that's sounds intimidating we as an
organization and um through support from the USDA are here to support you so there is
a new program called the Transi
tion to Organic Partnership Program or TOPP and TOPP um the USDA
is investing up to a hundred million dollars over the next five years um to work with nonprofits to
help the nonprofits provide technical assistance and support for farmers that are interested
in transitioning to organic production or just learning more about organic production
so uh NOFA Vermont has a Farmer to Farmer Mentorship Program um that people can enroll in
if like I said if you're interested in organic practices or i
nterested in getting certified
organic either one is okay the farmers that are doing that are the mentors get paid um the
mentorship um if you're a new farmer you'll be paired with an organic farmer for a mentorship
and that mentorship will last 12 months um so mentees get this incredible opportunity to
learn from an established organic farmer and there's also a $500 educational stipend to
attend an educational event with their mentor so if you're interested in the Transition to
Organic Pa
rtnership Program and in general if you have any questions about organic
certification you can we encourage you to get in touch with us so that is really just
a quick introduction um to Vermont Organic Farmers to organic certification I think the
real message here is email us call us get to know you know don't make assumptions about what
the organic certification process is call us and ask and we are here to support you so thanks very
much and and I hope you enjoyed the presentation
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