What Does Organic Mean?

Companies and people toss the term organic around a lot. However, no one seems ready to define exactly what they mean by organic. In terms of gardening organic has change quite a bit. Twenty years ago, gardeners did not have many choices among commercial products. If they wanted to use all natural fertilizers or pest control products, they needed to either make their own, or pay high prices to purchase from an extremely limited number of products. Gardeners that wanted to learn about gardening without using chemicals or manufactured products had limited resources to explore, Organic Gardening was the only periodical focused on the topic and there were few books that were accessible to the public. Interest, publicity and information only began increasing in the 1990’s.

The government in the United States got into the game with the Organic Food Production Act (OFPA), which simply directed the USDA to set some standards for commercial organic food production. This included dairy products, vegetable crops and processed foods. The legislation was intended to help protect the consumers. The response to the legislation was the development of the National Organic Program (NOP), which worked to write the detailed rules that govern organic for production and established the certification program. With the enforcement of OFPA and standards set by NOP, ideally we should be confident the commercially grown produce that is labeled with the USDA organic seal is grown under conditions that met certain defined standards. Farmer that want that seal need to create a written plan detailing how their farm will do business in accordance with the government standards and will be inspected once a year by the certification agency.

The regulations in question restrict what substances can be used as fertilizers and in pest control efforts by the farmers that want to meet organic standards. In the most simplistic form, these rules prohibit the use of synthetic substances, the official definition from OFPA is that synthetic means “formulated or manufactured by a chemical process or by a process that chemically changes a substance extracted naturally occurring plant, animal or mineral sources.” Ionizing radiation, sewage sludge and genetically altered seeds are also not allowed through the regulations. There are a few synthetic substances that can be allowed, but only if other conditions are met. One example is copper sulfate. This synthetic kind if copper fertilize is allowed if the farmers can use soil testing to shoe evidence of a copper deficiency on their farm. The complete list of regulations is long and very complicated. To read and study the complete set of regulations, you can find them on the NOP’s website.