A Farming Fairy Tale

The life and career of Gene Kahn have tracked the growth and gawky adolescence of the organic food business perfectly. Kahn, now 59, dropped out of his graduate program in English at the University of Washington in 1972, leased some farmland near Rockport, Washington, and started figuring out how to raise food without pesticides, herbicides, or artificial fertilizers. He went on to create Cascadian Farm, one of the first organic food companies in the United States, which he and his business partners sold to General Mills in 2000. Kahn, the erstwhile hippie farmer and organic pioneer, has since become the big company's VP of sustainable development.

Today, it feels as though the organic food business has been around a long time and has had a huge impact. But the industry is actually so new that even a reliable measure of its size is elusive. The Organic Trade Association estimates that the industry sold $1 billion worth of products in 1990, and $15 billion worth last year--20% average annual growth over 15 years. But the whole business is still smaller than McDonald's, which sold $20 billion in burgers and fries in 2005.

Kahn, who splits his time between General Mills headquarters in Minnesota and a farm in Washington where he grows grain, was the perfect man to undertake an unusual thought experiment about the U.S. food supply.

Although the organic food movement is 30 years old, Americans still spend only 2% of their grocery money on organic products. At the same time, factory-style agriculture has helped make food much more affordable in the United States. In 1950, a typical family devoted 31% of household spending to food; that figure is just 13% now. So if we could wave a magic wand and make all American farming organic, what would that look like? Would we be able to feed the country? And could we afford to do it?

If you just extrapolate today's organic onto a gazillion acres, you do get an impossible dream.

No, that wouldn't work. Because that's simplistic thinking. But we're not going to be dumb about it. We're going to put the whole agricultural research infrastructure behind this thing, we're going to put public policy behind this thing. Organic has equal or increased potential to produce feed and fiber for the country, in theory. In practice today, that's laughable.

My assumption is that by waving the magic wand, we'd be doing it right. To create an organic agriculture that was the only form of agriculture in the United States--well [laughing], you'd need to deal with a number of broad areas. Where are you going to get all of the nutrients, the macro- and micronutrients to grow the food? Currently, we're using fossil fuel for most of that--to make fertilizer--but we'd need to find organic sources for a whole host of nutrients. The best, the most practical way would be to build a whole new composting infrastructure across the United States. That would require tremendous coordination across municipalities, and much more thorough composting of all human refuse. We'd have to find more practical ways of growing crops without the use of synthetic pesticides. You would need insect control, disease control, weed control--weed control is the single largest factor, the most influential, most costly.

Why is weed control so hard?

Weeds are very costly to control in agriculture in general. In organic, it's the single largest cost factor that differentiates organic from conventional farming. Instead of spraying or using Roundup-ready soybeans, you have to weed those fields. If you looked at the current process and extrapolated that to 100% of the agriculture in the United States, there would have to be an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of people who were essentially hand-weeding and doing the more labor-intensive forms of agricultural work. Are there people who want to do this work? What are the societal implications of having hundreds of thousands of people involved in stoop labor?

It's possible now to live an almost entirely "organic" life, even shopping at a grocery store--especially if you have access to a chain like Whole Foods. Organic products are everywhere--you can even buy organic frozen pizza. Consumers have the impression we know how to create food organically. What are we missing?

Organic is an infant industry. The commercialization of organic is a relatively recent phenomenon, so the support network--the distribution, the manufacturing, the research--is just gearing up right now. There's a lot of theoretical knowledge about organic, a lot of conceptual knowledge, but very little technical knowledge outside of the innovative farmers who really made this whole thing happen. If we're going to convert all the food to organic, we have a lot of people we need to teach. While there are certain universities--Cal Poly, UC Davis, Cornell, University of Wisconsin--that are involved in this, it's a very rudimentary effort compared with the money and effort that's spent in solving, for instance, the nematode issue in horticultural crops with methyl bromide. Then there's the institutional side--all of the support payments that go to certain types of farming, and crop insurance payments, a whole set of policies, governmental programs, institutional programs--that would need to change.