Bona Fide Organic
Hello SOIL apprentices and friends , I’m John, one of the apprentices at Northbrook farm in Saanich. I’ll be reposting to this blog from my own; fermierjohn.blogspot.com.
The organic certifier came to do her inspection yesterday, we followed her around and HOLY was she ever thorough. She went across this place with a fine toothed comb, poking her head into chicken coops, reading the fine print on the seed packages and following records from harvest to sale. There were many times where I would have felt violated if I were the farmer, but Heather was completely unfazed, after all, she’d signed up for it.
We really got into the nitty gritty while going through the records. The certifier asked if Heather could trace her veggies; could she say what seeds were planted, where and when? What treatment they received? Where and when the produce was sold? Heather reached for her binder and starting flipping through it…
“I’ll take that”, said the certifier, and flipped to a random page. “OK, Lettuce, sold on July 14th.”
Jill and I exchanged glances. Heather looked a bit uncertain. She flipped through her pages… looked through her spreadsheets… back to the binder again… and pieced the history of that lettuce together. That lettuce was planted in this exact bed, on this exact date.
All in all, the inspection went well. Northbrook farm managed to jump through the organic hoops and once again proven itself worthy. What I really realized through all this, was just how deeply Northbrook farm is affected by being Certified Organic. It’s not just keeping pesticides out. It affects the compost heap, the crop rotation, how the chickens are kept and certainly the record keeping. It looks like a pain in the butt to me, but living up to these standards also makes Heather a better farmer and a better steward of her land. That quality of record keeping doesn’t just make the inspector happy, it keeps her business affairs tidy.
I also got over that feeling of being violated by the end. When people pay extra for Organic veggies, they pay for that peace of mind that their food is being grown with consideration given to their health and to the environment. A grower should be able to proudly open their doors to prove that they’re living up to these high standards.
If you’d like to take a look at these standards, they’re actually somewhat interesting: http://www.certifiedorganic.bc.ca/standards/index.php
Leave a Reply