Badlands replies to Commissioner Lashbrook's information and commentary
To: Merced County Planning Commissioner Lashbrook
Thank you for your letter and the OTA press release. In the attachment you will find our reply.
Central Valley Safe Environment Network
San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center
Protect Our Water
San Joaquin Valley Conservancy
Stanislaus Natural Heritage Project
Badlands Journal
Badlands replies to Commissioner Lashbrook’s information and commentary
July 21st, 2007
“We are looking for a niche,” said (Merced County Planning Commissioner) Cindy Lashbrook,
a Merced County organic farmer who grows blueberries and almonds near Livingston. “We’re
looking to be legitimized, in a way.” — Merced Sun-Star, July 12, 2007“The word (organics) has been sullied.” Ted Simon, author, retired organic producer/distributor, Covelo CA, July 22, 2007
Badlands would like to thank Merced County Planning Commissioner Cindy Lashbrook for providing us with a letter of commentary and a press release yesterday. We have printed her correspondence in full except for the name of the neutral party to whom a copy was sent. These people have had no part in the dialogue. We are grateful for the opportunity Lashbrook has offered to continue this public dialogue. It is about important matters.
Following Lashbrook’s letter and the Organic Trade Association press release, the editorial staff will have a few comments. in reply.
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For Bill Hatch: Farm Bill Update: House Agriculture Committee Advances Organic Agriculture
From: Riverdance Farms (riverdancefarms@clearwire.net)
Sent: Fri 7/20/07 2:48 PM
To: ‘William Hatch’
Cc: XXXXXXXX
Hi Bill, These are the things we were in DC lobbying for, not the imaginary subsidies you pulled out of the vapors. Looks like some of the attention worked. By the way, I am on the Board of CCOF only to keep the voice of small-to-medium-sized family farmers and the original intent of the organic community in the discussion and mission of California Certified Organic Farmers. Why don’t you interview someone involved before writing your stories? When did you give up on being a journalist? Is it permanent? Hope not…
I look forward to the day when you’ll be able to look me in the eye again; Doors are never fully closed. Cindy
PS I forward my writings on to another party (neutral?) as I send them to you folks so that, when later twisted, there is a record.
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Agriculture Committee Endorses Aid for Organic Farmers
OTA Executive Director Says Proposals Vital for Continued Growth of Industry
WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 20, 2007) – The executive director of the Organic Trade Association (OTA) today thanked the members of the House Agriculture Committee for including key provisions in the 2007 Farm Bill that will help the organic industry continue to meet growing consumer demand for organic products.
“I am delighted with the support organic agriculture is receiving in this Farm Bill,” said OTA executive director Caren Wilcox. “The House Agriculture Committee included important provisions that will fund expanded research into organic production, direct USDA to provide timely domestic and international market data on organic crops, and instruct companies selling crop insurance to provide equitable products to organic farmers.”
Wilcox thanked Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand for her leadership in establishing a program to provide cost share certification and technical assistance for farmers making the transition to organic production. Gillibrand’s amendment authorizes $50 million to provide farmers with the mentoring and technical expertise required to transition land from conventional to organic production. Transitioning land to organic production is a
three-year process.
Wilcox praised the leadership of Committee Chairman Collin Peterson. “Organic farmers across the country owe the chairman a thank you for putting the needs of the organic industry into this Farm Bill. We are also grateful for the commitment of Dennis Cardoza, chairman of the Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic. We appreciate all that Chairman Cardoza has done to highlight organic agriculture and to work with us on
improving the safety net for organic agriculture.”
In addition to the Gillibrand amendment, key provisions for organic agriculture in the 2007 Farm Bill include:
1. Eliminating or reducing the 5% organic premium for crop insurance and providing compensation for crop loss at the actual price of the organic crop. Currently, compensation is provided at the price of the conventional crop. In addition, the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) would be required to submit an annual report to Congress detailing progress made in developing and improving federal crop insurance for organic crops.
2. $22 million to help farmers pay for organic certification. The certification cost-share program would provide up to $750 per farmer, increased from the current $500, to help cover the costs of organic certification. Farmland is deemed organic by USDA accredited certifiers.
3. $3 million for organic price and production data. USDA collects reams of data on agriculture prices and production, and will now include data on organic prices and production. In addition, information will be used to analyze crop loss data for organic production – leading to better risk management tools for organic producers.
4. Extending the Organic Research and Extension Initiative to examine optimal conservation and environmental outcomes for organically produced agricultural products, and to develop new and improved seed varieties that are particularly suited for organic agriculture. The committee authorized $25 million per year for each fiscal year through 2012.
5. The committee also included language making loans for water and soil projects to organic producers a priority, and permitted organic transition to begin at the end of CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) and gave recognition for organic farmers to have access to EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) Conservation Innovation grants. Each fiscal year, $5 million will be used for outreach to organic and specialty crop producers.
Wilcox also thanked Rep. Steve Kagen who spearheaded an effort to increase funding for organic research commensurate with the organic percentage of the marketplace. Currently, organic represents 3% of the agriculture market; Kagen proposed spending 3% of the research budget on organic research initiatives.
The House of Representatives is expected to consider the 2007 Farm Bill next week, and OTA is recommending support for the bill.
Organic Trade Association
P.O. Box 547 Greenfield, MA 01302
www.ota.com
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Our comments:
At last week’s East Merced Resource Conservation District meeting, the president brought a Costco newsletter featuring the Goodmans, handsome owners of Earthbound Farm, an organic produce corporation based in San Benito County. Earthbound was implicated in the E. coli outbreak last September that killed three and sicked several hundred. The company is the epitome of what has gone horribly wrong with organic produce production. In the EMRCD meeting, Lashbrook defended the couple, who she said she knows, as being legitimate organic growers. The chairman of the board of directors of the California Certified
Organic Farmers, on which Lashbrook sits, is Will Daniels of Earthbound Farm. Natural Selection Foods, the parent company of Earthbound Farm, is one-third owned by Salinas-based Tanimura & Antle, the largest fresh produce operation in the nation.
Getting on to the good news on the Farm Bill, rather than sending us an actual news report from a newspaper, Lashbrook sent us a press release from the Organic Trade Association. The president of OTA is Jesse Singerman of Prairie Ventures, Inc., a venture capital firm in Iowa City. The USA vice president is Julia Sabin, a Smucker executive. OTA’s Canadian vice president is Dag Falck of Nature’s Path Foods, Inc., an organic grain corporation marketing snacks, breakfast foods and pastas in 46 countries.
The actual news on the Farm Bill is far more ambiguous than the OTA press release would suggest. We will deal with that news in a later posting because it is a separate story in itself, beginning with question if the whole debate is not a sideshow concealing lethal amendments to the Iraq appropriations bill that drive us closer to war with Iran.
However, let us see how the Farm Bill, in its present form, is helping Lashbrook’s “small-to-medium-sized family farmers and the original intent of the organic community.”
1. Crop insurance. Badlands interviewed four people long known to the staff to be deeply committed to the original intent of organic gardening and farming. Betsy Bruneau is Secretary/Treasurer, Ecology Action; and Co-Manager, Ecology Action’s Bountiful Gardens International Mail-Order Service. Willits-based Ecology Action has been researching, teaching and publicizing biointensive organic gardening for about 30 years. Bruneau could not think of any customers of Bountiful Gardens who had crop insurance. One of her co-workers, a longtime organic farmer, said he hadn’t heard of it either. Both suggested we try to get in touch with large growers, which we weren’t able to do. Tom Paley, owner of Covelo Organic Vegetables, said he doesn’t have crop insurance and doesn’t know any organic growers who do. Ted Simon, retired organic farmer from Covelo, thought the idea was ridiculous.
2. Public funds to partially subsidize USDA organic certification. This one reminded us of the madman in the clown suit on TV selling his book on federal government grants. As growers who actually make a living selling at farmers markets and by community supported agriculture (CSA) repeat, it is your reputation with customers you know and who are your neighbors that is the backbone of the organic gardening/farming community. That connection and reputation were there before the multi-national corporations and will be there after organo-agribusiness corporations have folded.
Many fully organic small farmers don’t bother getting certified at all. Their customers trust their produce because they know how it is grown and by whom.
“Growing a bunch of stuff without chemicals is supposed to be organic?” Simon asked.”Their customers don’t have any connection with the people who grow their food. How many workers in these vast corporations aren’t indoctrinated in organics as we know it and just do what their bosses tell them to do? The word has been sullied.”
Simon added that his favorite perversion was in Tasmania, where natural forests were being cut down to provide growing land for mega-organic corporations when he last visited.
3. $3 million for organic price and production data. How would anyone know enough about organic prices and production to be able to assert before Congress the size and monetary value of their industry if it weren’t for the market reporting the USDA already does, and has been doing for some years, on organics? A Google search will generate more information than most readers have time for on the first page. Somehow, the organics industry has managed to grow to its present size, buying and selling, wholesale and retail, activities that would suggest that somehow supply and demand created prices in a real market.
Items #4 and #5 seemed to us to fall within the realm of underground grammarian Richard Mitchell’s “Less Than Words Can Say.” However, if one were to risk interpretation, #4 looks like a $125-million subsidy to land grant universities like University of California, and #5 looks like a $25-million pad to the USDA budget. We wonder how long it will be before a genetically engineered organic seed is created by our wonderful
agricultural research establishment for the organic agribusiness trade.
Although Commissioner Lashbrook addresses her contradictory statements to one member of the Badlands editorial staff, our reply to her is a collective effort, as usual. If we may be permitted one more observation, we notice that this county planning commissioner has a habit of treating her positions on a number of public and private boards and commissions, and of treating public funds, as opportunities for self-promotion and
self-dealing. We are pretty sure she actually doesn’t know what she’s doing. (See “Central Valley Safe Environment Network reply to a Merced County Planning Commissioner,” Badlandsjournal.com, July 10th, 2007)
Another fine product of UC/Great Valley Center “leadership” training, Lashbrook has emerged in public life as a bully who harasses and intimidates the public:
I look forward to the day when you’ll be able to look me in the eye again; Doors are never fully closed. Cindy
PS I forward my writings on to another party (neutral?) as I send them to you folks so that, when later twisted, there is a record.
We have entered several meetings in recent weeks where Lashbrook operated as either a board member, a staffer, or both. She has insulted us and concealed public documents from the public. We oppose a grant proposal for public funds that would provide staff salaries for, among others, Cindy Lashbrook. She has declared political war on us because we stand in the way of her agenda and money.
This business of bringing in others, who knows nothing about this controversy but are associates of ours, is a hostile abuse of public position to victimize the innocent. This county planning commissioner cannot control her emotions when opposed in public on public issues. She has turned into a politician whose primary mode of operation is the vendetta. She has now come up against people who do look her in the eye, look at what she does, look at her paper trail, and don’t blink. She has seen us do this repeatedly through the years and she has benefitted from our work. The only surprise here in Lashbrook’s behavior.
Evidently, the county political class, in promoting Lashbrook, was attempting a political bargain-basement two-fer — someone they thought would be acceptable to both environmentalists and agriculture, meanwhile doing the bidding of the political class. It is evidence of how deeply these political leaders have sunk under the influence of finance, insurance and real estate special interests, that they are now so far out of contact with their constituencies that they promoted someone largely unacceptable to either environmentalists or agriculture who, moreover, is incapable of successfully manipulating environmentalists or agriculture into supporting the agenda of finance, insurance and real estate.
CENTRAL VALLEY SAFE ENVIRONMENT NETWORK
MISSION STATEMENT
Central Valley Safe Environment Network is a coalition of organizations and individuals throughout the San Joaquin Valley that is committed to the concept of “Eco-Justice” — the ecological defense of the natural resources and the people. To that end it is committed to the stewardship, and protection of the resources of the greater San Joaquin Valley, including air and water quality, the preservation of agricultural land, and the
protection of wildlife and its habitat. In serving as a community resource and being action-oriented, CVSEN desires to continue to assure there will be a safe food chain, efficient use of natural resources and a healthy environment. CVSEN is also committed to public education regarding these various issues and it is committed to ensuring governmental compliance with federal and state law. CVSEN is composed of farmers,
ranchers, city dwellers, environmentalists, ethnic, political, and religious groups, and other stakeholders.
With gratitude to Commissioner Lashbrook for providing another opportunity for dialogue,
Central Valley Safe Environment Network
San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center
Protect Our Water
San Joaquin Valley Conservancy
Stanislaus Natural Heritage Project
Badlands Journal
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Spinach Cycle
Latest E. coli outbreak should prompt rethink of industrial agriculture
Grist:Environmental news and commentary
By Tom Philpott
21 Sep 2006
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2006/09/21/E-coli/index.html
For the ninth time since 1995, California’s Salinas Valley — the “nation’s salad bowl” — has been implicated in an E. coli scare involving salad greens. I write this, no definitive explanation has emerged for the latest outbreak, this one involving pre-washed, bagged spinach. But while the feds haven’t yet figured out how the spinach supply became tainted, they have pointed to a specific company: Natural Selection Foods, the nation’s largest pre-bagged spinach distributor, which runs a major processing plant in San Juan Bautista, near Salinas Valley. The company sells spinach under the Earthbound Farm label — a ubiquitous organic brand — as well as 33 others…Natural Selection Foods buys, processes, and packs salad greens for such giants as Dole, Trader Joe’s, and Sysco, among others. The company’s Earthbound Farm brand boasts on its website that it produces “[m]ore than 7 out of 10 organic salads sold in grocery stores” in the U.S. In
1999, Salinas-based Tanimura & Antle, the largest U.S. fresh-vegetable grower and shipper, with 40,000 acres under cultivation in the United States and Mexico, bought a 33 percent stake in Natural Selection/Earthbound…I can see why pre-washed salad greens have grown into a $4 billion industry since 1986, when Earthbound Farm first sorted out the technology for keeping them fresh. It’s undeniably tempting to pluck a sealed bag of uniform greens from the supermarket counter and dump it right into the salad bowl, ready for a lashing of pre-made salad dressing. But in doing so, you’re making huge demands on
the environment. Even assuming organic production, consider that California salad greens consumed on the East Coast must be trucked across the continent and kept cool at a constant 36 degrees Fahrenheit. “At least given the fuel burned to get it to my table,” Michael Pollan writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “there’s little reason to think my Earthbound salad mix is any more sustainable than a conventional salad.” Also, as someone who grows salad greens commercially on a micro-scale, I can state bluntly that pre-bagged
greens from mega-farms have zero flavor compared to the mixes small growers are producing for their local markets. One factor may be freshness. The California greens currently under recall include packages with sell-by dates of Oct. 1. Most small-scale greens growers I know distribute their product directly to customers within a day or two of picking. Finally, given the industry’s (and the federal government’s) inability to stop
deadly E. coli outbreaks from within the nation’s industrial-salad capital, our obsession with convenience bears a significant health risk. The wisest strategy for consumers might be to buy greens in season from a nearby grower whose practices you trust — or, if possible, to grow your own…