Will the Regenerative Organic Certified standards save us?
Issue 195: They're an important first step, but we need to move beyond thinking of ecological sustainability as merely one consumer choice of many.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food solutions newsletter.
Check out Monday’s reading list — Issue 194: What it really means to live sustainably. How to overcome the perceived frivolity of food. The queerest alternative milks.
Is today Thursday, the day Nosh Box is supposed to go out? No. Did my hard drive fully break down yesterday, leading me to need to get a new one installed (in a surprisingly smooth process, s/o Team Tech in tropical Woodbury, MN) and lose everything on it that hadn’t been backed up? Yes. (R.I.P. my fonts.) So here we are. Happy Friday, everyone! Let’s nosh.
Last Saturday, August 22, was what the Global Foodprint Network calls Earth Overshoot Day — the point in the year when humanity’s resource use thus far has surpassed what the planet can generate in the full year. We’re in deficit mode now, the Global Foodprint Network says. And instead of using more resources or even trying to be resource-neutral, we need to look toward regeneration — toward actively building up soils, actively making the food system’s treatment of workers and animals more just.
This is something the new Regenerative Organic Certified standards aim to address. A couple weeks ago for Food Tank, I was able to chat with Elizabeth Whitlow, the director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which oversees the ROC standards. The Regenerative Organic Alliance was formed in 2017, and the standards just finished undergoing a yearlong pilot program this January. After that, they went back to the drawing board, made a few tweaks, and just started their public “soft launch” this month.
The standards are organized around three pillars — soil health and land management, animal welfare, and farmer and worker fairness — and farms/brands can be certified at a bronze, silver, or gold level. Here’s a PDF of their framework.
screengrab from ROA’s website
And what I find interesting is that, at any level, producers have to be consistently making improvements in certain areas to maintain their certification. So to earn bronze ROC certification, 25% of an operation’s land needs to meet the requirements immediately — but they must increase to 50% within five years to stay certified. Silver moves from 50% to 75%, and gold calls for 100% of land to meet all the criteria upon certification (and for 100% of revenues to come from land that’s gold-certified). The levels are also correlated with progressively increasing rates of year-round cover crop usage, number of crops in a rotation, and number of additional regenerative practices in use, like agroforestry, pollinator habitat development, integration of animals into croplands, etc. Genuinely cool stuff!
It’s one of the most rigorous, holistic standards I’ve seen — primarily because it aims to build on existing certification programs as a sort of aggregate certifier. The ROA developed their own standards and language for the program, but in order to even be eligible to enter ROC auditing at all, a farm has to already be USDA organic certified (or an equivalent in their country). And then certain other ROC standards can be met by compliance with other programs. Fair Trade satisfies certain social requirements; A Greener World’s Animal Welfare Approved standard checks off some boxes in the animal welfare pillar. The Food Justice Certification from the Agricultural Justice Project actually meets more ROC requirements than Fair Trade does. Here’s the ROA’s equivalency chart:
I see the expediency of doing it this way. I can’t imagine the ROA has the resources — nor the desire, for that matter — to completely reinvent the wheel. And of any existing standard, the USDA National Organics Program criteria certainly is the most widely accepted and common one to use as a baseline. (That said, it’s not as if the ROA is holding up the NOP as a shining example of agricultural perfection. Whitlow told me a major catalyst for the development of the ROC standards in the first place was the move to allow hydroponics in the NOP.)
“Organic farming happens in the soil. From our perspective, if you’re talking about organic farming, you are in the living trust of the earth,” Whitlow said.
In my view, the problem with placing so much stock in existing certification programs, however, is that ROC risks replicating or reentrenching some of the shortcomings of those programs.
The requirement that farms be USDA certified organic to achieve ROC status puts the new status even further out of reach for some small farms that already find obtaining organic certification to be an insurmountable hurdle.
Sociologist Connor Fitzmaurice, in his book “Organic Futures,” talks with farmers who both are and are not USDA-certified. In one instance, at a farm called Old Times Farm, an employee named Sally said the farm found USDA certification costs to be too high and the record-keeping requirements too onerous for a two-employee farm to manage. Collin, the owner of Viridian Farms, told Fitzmaurice he’d forgone USDA organic certification because he felt that his ability to directly communicate with customers about his sustainable farming practices (without having to pay more) was more useful than a certification. But by and large, Fitzmaurice found, when a farm chose not to be USDA certified, it was not because they felt organic was insufficient for them but instead because it simply felt impractical. Fitzmaurice writes:
“For the majority of our non-certified but sustainable farmers in New England, the choice to forgo certification was not because of a desire to be ‘beyond organic.’ Rather, it was a practical decision that the strictly bureaucratic regulations of certification were incompatible with the real world of agrarian life—a life where a year’s worth of literal blood, sweat, and tears can be undone in nearly an instant by unforeseeable pestilence, disease, or weather.”
Granted, certification has its benefits: Besides a farm being able to access the higher prices an organic label commands, a consumer can use it as a heuristic of quality; if they were to communicate directly with a farmer, they might not be as equipped or knowledgeable to judge the farm’s true sustainability as an organics auditor would be.
Worth noting that earning ROC certification does come with additional fees (here’s their cost structure). By and large, farms are charged 0.1% of their organic production value, plus a few hundred in application fees. Whitlow told me she sees this as friendly to small farmers, and that her next goal is to fundraise for a cost-share program; farms might see dips in yields or additional costs to meet soil sampling requirements, etc., so Whitlow wants the ROA to be able to help offset those costs so more farms can participate.
But OK, back to the potential shortcomings of ROC standards’ reliance on existing certifications. As my fellow BU Gastronaut Danielle Jacques points out in her research, Fair Trade marketing has racialized imperialism baked into its core. In a presentation at this year’s Association for the Study of Food and Society Twitter Conference, she argues that Fair Trade imagery is designed to invoke a paternalistic, emotional link between consumer in the Global North and producer in the Global South. This perceived intimacy is part of what encourages consumers to pay more for Fair Trade products. She writes:
This unidirectional ‘emotional link’ is one common thread that ties fair trade advertising efforts back in time to ideologies of benevolent imperialist expansion, though the messaging in these images and the nature of the bond they seek to create have changed.
Jacques examines one particular marketing poster that features a cartoon white man in an Equal Exchange sweater shaking hands with a farmer of color, wearing a bright apron and an Equal Exchange baseball hat, as they both stand in front of a banana tree.
The relationship between these two men is represented through a firm handshake, a mutual agreement that evokes masculine, capitalist rationality. In this case, “personal” relations and social intimacy exist purely, explicitly as a means to economic ends. This image relies on a racialized depiction of the producer to communicate its message. The handshake signals market solutions (ethical business/consumption) that bridge economic fissures between north and south on mutually accepted (and race-neutral) terms.
By interrogating how these images forge a sense of connection between consumers in the global North and producers in the global South, I found that FT ads highlight racial difference to naturalize poverty and the respective roles of producer and consumer, while text and stories that frame these images articulate this relationship using the colorblind language of markets. This dissonance works to shield consumers from the unpleasant histories of racial capitalism that created this configuration of trade.
I should also point out that all the Regenerative Organic Alliance board members are white, which seemed off-base to me for a movement that aims to advocate for justice for a largely non-white farm labor workforce. I asked Whitlow about the lack of representation, and she said it was something she’s “painfully aware of.” She did say one board member is stepping down soon, which she hopes to use as an opportunity to expand the board. So, something to keep an eye on — but the standards are already developed with the board as is, so it should have been something the ROA had thought about or acted upon sooner.
And Fair Trade isn’t required, so it’s not a given that all Regenerative Organic Certified participants would have to grapple with this. Already having Fair Trade, Animal Welfare Certified, Food Justice Certified, or anything else just makes it easier to meet the ROC requirements.
I haven’t done a deep content analysis of the ROC standards (perhaps I’ll dig deeper in the future), but they certainly seem all-encompassing. As I said earlier this week, I’m cautiously optimistic about them. Within the current agrifood paradigm, I think increasingly stringent standards can help customers (consumers with enough economic capital, that is) know that the products they purchase are at least better than certain other products they could purchase — but, of course, that’s about the extent of it.
The introduction of a stricter voluntary standard, on its own, does not force farmers to be greener or help those who were previously unable to afford organic produce make more sustainable choices. And the idea of sustainability as a choice is worth examining. Insidiously, ecological regeneration now becomes even more reified not as the ethical imperative it is, but as a consumer choice, no different from picking between Double Stuf Oreos or their single-stuf cousins. (Please take this as a formal petition to Nabisco to spell “stuff” properly, thank you.)
My view is that the existence of these standards is a useful first step within the existing food system, a sign that at least somebody in the industry is thinking about justice, welfare, soil health. And I think it would be worthwhile for consumers who can to show support for better farming practices by buying these products. Not a systemic fix yet, and I’m still concerned that ROC seemingly makes no moves to meaningfully address the issues plaguing the existing certifications it builds on. Whitlow told me she intends to keep the ROC as a third-party certification instead of trying to integrate it into national agrifood policy — but I think policymakers would do well to look to ROC standards in beefing up labor laws, animal welfare regulations, and more.
In the long run, regenerative agriculture shouldn’t be a simple consumer choice. To slow climate change and protect our dwindling natural resources, it’s our moral obligation to make it standard practice.
I’m curious to hear what you think, too — weigh in using the comments below!
See you on Monday,
Jared
