Going Organic: Tools for Transition

If you're still getting pushback from neighbors, farmers and extension agents when you reject chemical additives for your garden and yard, here's an idea to get started in your county.

Phoenix woman at Firedoglake:

While browsing around the website of Lanesboro Local, a cooperative dedicated to promoting local foods in southeastern Minnesota (and filling the gap left when Lanesboro, Minnesota’s last grocery store shut down three years ago), I ran across this:

Tools For Transition is a project, partially funded through a grant at the U of MN, that will compile actual production and income/expense data for farmers transitioning to certified organic production. This data has been deemed important and useful to the extent that it has long been anecdotally surmised to cost too much money to transition to organic. This data is compiled through the Farm Business Management (FBM) programs throughout the state. FBM is basically an accountant for the farm that assists with developing annual cash-flows, business plan development and tax-planning. Once the data for the farms is collected, it is anonymously compiled into a database that provides analysis on profit and loss measures for the various enterprises (i.e. dairy, beef, row-crop, vegetable, swine, etc.) which then can be used to measure financial and production performance of transitioning farms against conventional or certified organic farms.

In 2001, Paul Schmidt and a select few organic farmers who were participating in the FBM program met with U of MN and developed the criteria and specific account codes to be used for organic enterprises for the FBM system. Since that time, there has been specific data compiled for organic producers, but it has not been differentiated between transitioning and certified. Hopefully this project will provide the data.

This sounds like a really good project, and just the thing to help put smiles on your faces after a long week of hard work.

Here’s some more info about it. Got anything similar going on in your neck of the woods?

For 70 years, since Robert Rodale founded Organic Gardening and Farming magazine, Big Ag and Big Chemical have pushed the same myth among farmers: "Organic is really cute, and may be OK for backyard hippies who don't mind losing 90 percent of their crop to bugs and weeds, but it can't work on a large scale for cash crops and livestock."

It was lies then and it's still lies today. Learn the facts about organic here.