A Way of Life in Danger: Organic formers face unprecedented challenges.

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Eisen, Marc

Passion comes quick when organic farmers talk soil. Their commitment to land stewardship--nurturing and improving the soil's life-giving qualities--is a point of immense pride.

Take Glenn Elzinga, whose vast Alderspring Ranch grazes around 500 head of organically certified beef cattle in an Idaho mountain valley. As a prominent advocate of grass-fed beef, Elzinga is obsessed with rotational grazing so his cattle can munch on a healthy variety of native grasses, small shrubs, and wildflowers. After a few days, they are herded to the next mountain pasture, while the old pasture is left to regenerate.

Alderspring is doing its level best, he told me, to replicate the ecologically rich environment that existed hundreds of years ago when sixty to seventy million bison roamed the Great Plains. It can be backbreaking work. Because Elzinga and other certified organic farmers renounce the harsh industrial chemicals used in conventional farming, Alderspring work crews--led by Elzinga's seven daughters--are on their hands and knees pulling out a deeply rooted invasive plant known as field bindweed.

"It's the only way we can deal with it," he says, matter of factly. There are no organically approved methods that kill it. (The toxic herbicide glyphosate, found in Roundup, is most definitely off limits.) "For some weeds, we'll distribute these beetles that have tested not to be predatory on native plants," he tells me. "But, Marc, it's like a dollar an insect, and we'll dump out 20,000 in an afternoon. We're talking $20,000 for bugs!"

Elzinga was initially incredulous, but pleased with the results. Sixteen years into refining his rotational grazing system, he says, Alderspring has doubled the amount of organic matter in its soil, which has major implications for carbon sequestering that mitigates global warming.

I hear the same sort of satisfaction from Shirley Young as she tells me the story of her Young Earth Farm in Randolph, Wisconsin, a rural town about forty miles from Madison. Now in its fifteenth year, her certified organic vegetable farm is a mere five acres. It is practically micron-sized compared to Alderspring Ranch, which is big in that outsized western way--47,000 acres, most of it leased federal scrub land. Yet Young and Elzinga are kindred souls in their pursuit of soil excellence.

Young's inspiration is a fertilizing technique known as Korean Natural Farming, which got its start in the 1960s as a low-cost alternative to South Koreas embrace of U.S.-made chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It's all about multiplying native microorganisms and enzymes in the soil, through composting and fermentation. In Young's case, it means fermenting her unsold squash and brussels sprouts in twenty-five-gallon crocks that are carefully layered with brown sugar, chopped produce, and other ingredients. She irrigates her fields with the finished juices.

She swears her produce tastes better and is packed with more nutrition because of her farming technique. "My sales have gone up over the years," Young says, sounding satisfied. A farmer's daughter, she worked eighteen years in the printing business before returning to the farm life that her dad ultimately relinquished.

Jim Young went from dairy farming to hog raising to cabbage growing. In the end, he couldn't compete with the big guys, as she put it, who cut their prices to force small farmers out. "He just said, 'Enough!' My dad had been farming his entire life. He was in his fifties. He had been doing all right. All of a sudden, he was losing money. He got out."

Shirley Young says her success "has everything to do with me being certified organic." Her business model is to sell at Madison's popular downtown farmers' market on Saturdays, at her farmstead one day a week, and directly to select restaurants. That green, USDA-certified organic logo creates an economic environment for Young to sell a premium product at a premium price. And that, in turn, provides the means for Young to support herself on a sustainable, organic five-acre farm.

Elzinga and...