Indoor Farmers Face Uncertainty Over Organic Labeling
APR 24, 2017 @ 06:03 PM
Indoor Farmers Face Uncertainty Over Organic Labeling
Debra Borchardt , CONTRIBUTOR
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Indoor farms can stack plants vertically and grow more crops than a traditional outdoor farmer. (Photo by Shutterstock)
The National Organic Standards Board have kicked the can down the road on hydroponic and aquaponic farming. The group was supposed to decide on April 21 if the systems can be considered organic. The only decision they made was to learn more about the farming process and have pushed their decision until the fall.
This has left current hydroponic and aquaponic farmers that consider themselves organic in limbo. They can continue to call themselves organic until a decision is reached, but in the meantime the uncertainty is troubling.
“It's more about organic, certified farmers wanting to maintain their market share,” said JP Martin of GrowX, an aeroponic farming system. “The fertilizers are identical,” he said, “So the argument that they use different nutrients breaks down.”
Terra Tech is an indoor farming company that grows leafy greens and its crop that has some soil exposure has been certified organic. Chief Executive Officer Derek Peterson said, "If they came back and had some sort of ruling that disallowed organic, it would be tremendously hurtful. We would lose shelf space." He noted that the demand for non-organic produce continues to drop because the price premium is down for organic. "It's more affordable so the demand has increased," he said.
He's right. The market has grown tremendously. The USDA said that there was a 13% increase between the end of 2015 and 2016 of organic farms. This is the highest growth since 2008.
The point of contention is whether food grown without soil can be considered organic. The USDA admits that obtaining organic certification for crops is challenging and the guide is over 60 pages long. There is a lot of detail regarding the soil, but there isn't a hard and fast rule that the food must be grown in soil.
“It's really about where the nutrients are coming from and less about the methodology,” said Martin. He said it just boils down to money and market share because hydroponic farming has been around for years. If anything, the indoor farming is much more organic than outdoor farming according to Martin.