Organic food products rang up nearly $47 billion in sales in 2016. But while the market grows stronger, a battle over defining what is and what is not truly organic could be weakening the industry from within. The debate stems from the addition of hydroponic, aquaponic, and aeroponic products that have been carrying the organic label.
Traditional organic farmers feel that unless a crop is birthed from the soil, it is not truly organic. Additional arguments from this group entail:
- Including those utilizing other forms of agriculture within the organic family will diminish the integrity of the term.
- These non-soil-based farming models could muddy decades of messaging that reinforced a natural process and bonded growers and consumers in ensuring product integrity.
- These new-age producers are benefitting from a legacy of farming methodologies and product brand that is far removed from the fish tanks and warehouses used by hydroponics and others.
Others argue that it’s a lack of pesticides and other unnatural substances that make these foods organic. Furthermore, creating a movement that follows a line similar to “just as organic as” would create even more confusion and draw financial resources towards promotion and education instead of production and distribution.
In a series of close votes, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), an advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), recently voted to allow many of these new-age farmers to stay within the National Organic Program. The Board also created an organics standard for non-soil farming, which did not previously exist.
The NOSB also ruled that crops grown using hydroponic systems, which grow plants in water-based nutrients, and aquaponics, which combines hydroponics with fish farms, can use the organic label. However, aeroponic farming products, which grow suspended in the air with exposed roots, are not organic.