Ken Edelstein
8/1/2009
Dee Dee Digby worked more than a decade for produce suppliers at the State Farmers Market. Then she stumbled upon a way to upset the applecart.
The facility in Forest Park bills itself as one of the “world’s largest” farmers markets, but it doesn’t quite bring to mind fresh harvests and folksy growers. Instead, rows of jumbo stalls occupied by wholesale distributors line asphalt swaths wide enough to handle the loading and unloading of tractor-trailers. The place looks more industrial than pastoral, which is appropriate when you think about Georgia’s deeply entrenched agriculture-industrial complex.
Early this decade, Digby became manager of a new distributor at the market, Destiny Produce. Soon afterward, an idea ripened into an opportunity. “All we were doing was conventional produce,” says Digby, who became president of the company early this year. “But the need for organic became apparent.” Consumers had begun to clamor for more produce grown without the help of pesticides and other chemicals. Big supermarkets that were her customers began asking if she could help them fill the growing demand.
That was the beginning of a radical transformation. Digby and her employees had to retrain themselves for a very different supply chain, one that started with an understanding of the variety of foods demanded by a more sophisticated market and that hinged upon dozens of new relationships with small growers and boutique food processors. “It’s a lot more difficult, but it is profitable and it has set us apart,” Digby says. “We love where we are right now.” Earlier this year, Destiny Produce changed its name to Destiny Organics. It is currently Georgia’s only certified organic produce distributor.
But if Digby and her team jumped at the chance to learn about the emerging organic market, the state’s mainstream agriculture industry has proven a recalcitrant student. Despite its vast farm sector, the Peach State/Peanut State/Poultry State has lagged well behind the nation (and much of the South) when it’s come to producing food the old-fashioned, natural way. A U.S. Department of Agriculture 2007 inventory found that only 2,015 of Georgia’s 10.1 million farm acres were dedicated to certified organic farms. That’s barely one-fourth the organic acreage reported the same year in North Carolina, which has 16.5 percent less farmland overall.
The 2007 survey wasn’t surprising. It reflects a familiar attitude toward organic farming within Georgia’s agribusiness establishment: What, no pesticides? No chemical fertilizers? Must be a bunch of hippies in Birkenstocks—not serious growers.
As if to personify the bias, Georgia’s most prominent politician on farm matters has earned a reputation for dismissing agriculture that’s out of the mainstream. U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, ranking Republican on the Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry Committee, collected more campaign contributions last year from food processing companies and other big-ag interests than any other senator who wasn’t running for president. In an April 1 hearing, Chambliss drew scorn from national food reformers for leveling criticism at President Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of agriculture. Her mistake: too sympathetic to organic farming.
The irony is the federal government is already spending nearly $30 billion a year on price supports and other aid that goes mainly to conventional farmers. The system encourages them to rely on pesticides and fertilizer the way a desperate weightlifter might pump himself full of steroids. Organic enthusiasts view themselves as simply asking for an even planting field.
There are signs that Georgia’s resistance to the organic movement finally is breaking down. A new generation of Atlanta chefs is seeking fresh, natural meat and seasonal produce to include in their menus. Whole Foods expanded in the metro area and became the Pied Piper for healthier produce just as “foodie” consumers started expressing deeper interest in the quality of fruits and vegetables.
The supply system is slowly morphing to meet the demand. Certified organic growers numbered ten in 2004 and fifty-two last year, while neighborhood farmers markets have jumped from nine to sixty-two. “We have more cultural challenges in the South,” says Alice Rolls, executive director of Georgia Organics. “But the momentum’s definitely in the right direction.” In 2004, Rolls’s advocacy group had 300 members; now, there are 1,300.
So with all that demand coming out of Atlanta, why has Georgia’s agricultural mainstream been so slow to hop on the organic hay wagon? Well, in many ways, it’s an unlikely state for small-scale organic farms. One hurdle is a deep suspicion in rural Georgia toward social reformers—even if the changes they push amount to reaching back from current convention to traditional methods of planting, growing, and selling harvests. In addition, Georgia’s bounty lies in row crops such as peanuts and soybeans, which almost always are grown and harvested using conventional practices—the kinds of practices that aren’t accommodating to the small farms with varied vegetable crops that tend to be the most avid practitioners of organic methods.
Nature is a hurdle as well. Georgia’s heat and humidity create fertile ground for pests and diseases, which are difficult to treat without chemicals. So over the last half century, machinery suppliers, pesticide salesmen, fertilizer plants, slaughterhouses, just about everyone involved in agriculture threw in together with farmers to build a land-to-crop-to-market complex that requires heavy tilling, chemical additives, high yields, and volume processing.
For decades, that’s also what employees at all levels of government knew best. They developed regulations, offered advice, and managed aid programs oriented toward serving that mainstream system.
A parallel infrastructure for organic farmers isn’t really in place. For example, Georgia plants more acres of peanuts than any other state does, but there isn’t a processing facility here for organic peanuts. “If you were to raise pasture-raised chickens,” Rolls says, “you’d have to drive to South Carolina or Kentucky to process your birds legally.”
The transition isn’t easy, because organic farming’s more intricate methods work best under a “systems approach.” In other words, organic farmers can’t just throw a bunch of chemicals into the soil to make the earth fertile and pest-free. They have to coordinate multiseason projects, such as crop rotation and cover crops, which work together to get the soil right. But there are long-term advantages: Labor-intensive organic techniques are more likely to produce jobs in rural areas. Organic practices tend to be easier on the soil and the water. And foods from small farms are often consumed locally, which means consumers’ dollars stay in state and help the economy.
Those benefits, together with rising consumer demand, amount to a strong argument for Georgia to do more to support organic farming. Other states back co-ops geared toward increasing the buying power of small producers and take an active role in developing farmer-to-consumer fresh-food markets. Some help farmers obtain federal organic certification and even offer tax breaks to ease the switch to organic methods. It’s not uncommon for state ag departments to work with educators to get fresh, locally grown produce into the schools.
In Georgia, there’s a hint of movement in the same direction. After years of indifference at the state Department of Agriculture, a new deputy commissioner—former Georgia House Speaker Terry Coleman—has ensured that smaller farm interests get a bit more attention. But nowhere has the movement toward state support been more striking than at the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, where Scott Angle has served as dean since 2005. Angle moved to Athens from Maryland, an organic hotbed. He’s worked with organic enthusiasts to tap grant programs and created a new position at the school: sustainable agriculture coordinator.
Julia Gaskin, who holds that new position, says organic farming’s rising fortunes can best be expressed by what hasn’t happened: In the midst of a recession, demand hasn’t fallen for such products as grass-fed beef and organic produce. “They’ve seen demand level off but not drop off.”
That’s given businesses such as Destiny Organics optimism. Digby feels she’s part of a trend that’s moving in the right direction. While she may not sell the volume of produce that she would have if Destiny had stuck with the conventional market, the company is handling a wider variety of higher-quality foods.
There’s another thing that makes her happy: “As we traveled down this road, we became more and more educated about what we were doing.” She and her employees found their environmental interest growing. The staff now recycles 95 percent of its garbage, and company trucks use biodiesel. “It’s been a learning process for me,” Digby says. “And you know what? I’m also now eating a lot healthier than I used to.” If the organic food faction builds on its momentum in Georgia, maybe the rest of the state will eat a lot healthier, too.
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