Mana Mushrooms

I was at one of the local farmers' markets the other day, shootin' th breeze with someone who runs an organic certified farm. In our region, we have recently been heavily inundated with heavy rains. She mentioned that several farms have recently lost their organic certification (which can take years to get). Why?

Flood waters follow the path of least resistance. Stay with me here through a couple reasoning steps...

1) If you "use" and of the chemicals or compounds on the 'list' for Organic certification, you're disqualified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?navid=ORGANIC_CERTIFICATIO&navtype=RT&parentnav=AGRICULTURE
There's a couple links to find the source documents.
Bottom-line, I believe the system is flawed to the point of providing very little information to the consumer. If the intention is to give consumers information about what they're buying, this system does not have enough flexibility to remain viable.

2) If an adjacent farm or territory (to include roads and other property over which the farmer has little to no control) floods and the floodwater covers your organic cropland, you may lose certification.

Neither does this seem fair, nor does it seem logical. After all, where does intention come into play? The situation just described is not one in which farmers apply pesticides to their crops. It's applied for them, by an agent out of their control: nature.

The only sinister possibility I can imagine in this context is one in which a farmer A plants cropland immediately adjacent to Farmer B: another, more elevated farm that uses the same pesticides that would benefit Farmer A, with the express intention of benefiting from flood events. Unlikely seems insufficient to describe this scenario.

Rather than bash organic certification, which seems not to have won favor with many farmers with whom I've spoken, I'll suggest something I mentioned with the certified farmer: palace revolution. Why not develop a grass-roots certification process that covers the shades of gray necessary to address such issues as those presented in the flood example? With climate change delivering more frequent extreme weather, it seems that the flaws in the existing system doom it. Furthermore, organic farmers have to pay a percentage of their sales to the certifying organization. I understand th need to fund the certifying body, but tithing seems a bit stern. Sliding scale? There must be a way for us to work smarter here, not harder. And if the purpose is to give better information to consumers about the nature of their food and the conditions under which it was cultivated, why not allow for more detail? How about a flexible system that enables farmers to share as much information with the end-consumers as possible? In the Information Age, it only seems appropriate.

I understand that we also need to manage our information better, in ways that make it clear to the consumer as efficiently as possible, everything they might want to know and give them the ability to learn more easily if they so choose. That's a job for Grass Commons... ;-)