Organic food goes corporate

Mass distribution belies idyllic image

IVANHOE -- For many shoppers, the word "organic" conjures visions of a farm much like Stefan Hartmann's in Sampson County -- bucolic fields spreading around a farmhouse, a lone man on a tractor, a small crop of carefully tended vegetables he delivered to the store himself.

But increasingly, the organic foods in grocery stores come from gigantic corporate farms in California, Mexico and even China, and are brought to market by the world's biggest food companies.

Consumers concerned about genetically engineered food, vegetables doused with pesticides and meat raised with the help of antibiotics and hormones are buying organics like never before.

Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg and Heinz own popular organic brands. And in the past year, Wal-Mart, the nation's largest grocer, has started stocking dozens of organic products, from fresh vegetables to ice cream.

Advocates of organic foods say they are glad the public and major food companies are recognizing the benefits of food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and processed without most synthetic additives.

"Every acre that is legitimately converted to organic is an acre where you're not polluting the soil or contaminating the groundwater or spraying toxic pesticides on workers," said Michael Sligh, who studies the organic industry for the Pittsboro-based Rural Advancement Foundation International.

But they also warn that, as big grocers push for low prices and vast quantities, farmers such as Hartmann could find themselves unable to compete with the gigantic farms of the West or the cheap labor of Asia and South America.

The corporate takeover of organics, some say, is eroding the ethic that many take for granted as they throw an organic zucchini into the grocery cart.

"Shipping our food around the world and burning fossil fuels, that's not organic," said Mark Kastel, head of the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute, founded in 2004 to preserve small organic farms. "That might be technically organic, but it's not what people think they're paying for."

Organic evolution

For many years, the world of organic farming was populated by people who believed in a live-off-the-land lifestyle. They had few weapons to battle bugs, diseases and weeds, and they produced small crops that they sold mostly at farmers markets -- for prices well above those of conventional produce.

Hartmann, 48, moved to his grandparents' farm in Sampson County 22 years ago after growing up in Germany. He remembers standing in a shopping center parking lot every weekend with other farmers, selling just enough vegetables to eke out a meager existence from 15 acres of land.

Then, as today, he planted most of his crops by hand, picked many of them himself and cultivated the land with a tractor hardly bigger than many lawn tractors.

His neighbors in the rural farming community of Ivanhoe, about 100 miles south of Raleigh, thought that growing without pesticides was impossible. Many shoppers didn't know what "organic" meant.

But Hartmann didn't want to spend his life spraying chemicals, even if it meant living in an old farmhouse with peeling paint and eating only what he could grow.

"I always figured, if I can't do it organically," Hartmann said, "I'm not going to do it."

He also figured that the organic market's low profile would shelter him from global forces that have driven out many small farmers.

He didn't know that within a decade, organics would be one of farming's fastest-growing niches.

Debate over benefits

The health benefits of organics are subject to debate.