Another Hudson Valley grower, Ron Khosla of Huguenot Farms, further elucidates problems with USDA certification. Earning and keeping the seal is supposed to work like this: The farmer maintains detailed logs of planting, fertilizing, and pest, weed, and disease management. Once each year a third-party certifying agency hired by the farmer and licensed by the USDA dispatches an inspector to assess the farm and review its records. Then the inspector submits the report for evaluation by the certifier, and if everything is up to snuff, the organic seal is granted.
But, as Khosla explains, inspectors are only required to do what’s called a “visual inspection” of the farm. Khosla—who founded a peer-based certification program called Certified Naturally Grown and formerly served as a consultant to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—tells me of instances of inspectors visiting farms, yet never setting foot in a field. He knows farmers who’ve had auditors conduct visual inspections by peering at crops through living-room windows. Astonishingly, official USDA rules require no soil samples or chemical-residue tests on produce. That means any such tests are entirely at the discretion of the certifier. Because certification companies must bear the cost of running these tests, plus time for the added paperwork, they have an incentive to avoid it. Consequently, visual inspections are all consumers can rely on.
Because inspectors typically have such heavy workloads, Khosla explains, they may not always make it to some of the farms that bear the organic seal. Khosla also tells me how a certification company he contacted brainstormed with him on how to cheat. “It was incredible!” The bottom line: “Certification companies don’t want to pressure farmers because they don’t want to lose the business,” Khosla imparts. “The for-profit certifiers and the nonprofits, too, they don’t want to lose their jobs.” Being too strict could increase the risk of farmers switching to the competition. This capacity for fraud is another reason growers such as Pitts dismiss official organic.
Back at the Pitts farm, perched in front of the main house is a hand-painted sign that reads WINDFALL FARMS. Underneath the name are letters that used to say ORGANICALLY GROWN VEGETABLES. Pitts tells me that while he was away at a conference in California in 2000, the USDA announced the first phase of implementing federal organics standards. As soon as he heard, he called Gonzalez to repaint the sign immediately. With a few tight insertions and alterations, it now reads UNCONVENTIONALLY GROWN VEGETABLES.
Pitts doesn’t have a mortgage because he inherited the place, as the farm’s name suggests. So, unlike many of his fellow small-scale cultivators, he doesn’t have the burden of debt. Yet he is still facing circumstances that are driving him off his land.
Most significant is Pitts’s hefty property-tax bill. He tells me the Montgomery Town Council rezoned a large area as commercial about fifteen years ago, including Windfall and several other farms. The council realized they could shift to a more lucrative commercial tax base by taking advantage of the transportation infrastructure, which includes a major freeway, railway lines, and a small airport. But by encouraging a change in land use away from agriculture, the town officials have created an impossible situation for most local small farmers. Among the new neighbors is a manufacturer of medical and surgical supplies called Cardinal Health, which, Pitts tells me, built a single warehouse covering twenty-three acres. These operations generate considerably more income from their fertile Hudson Valley land than does farming, yet Pitts must fork over as much in taxes as his corporate neighbors. “It’s like you’re renting your own farm forever and the rent just keeps going up,” he says. “The tax system is thwarting people who want to preserve farmland.” Consequently, he laments, “Farms are just gone from here.”
To beat the precipitous taxes Pitts, too, must leave. For the past several years he’s been looking for a new farm, and while some prospects have been exciting, they’ve all fallen through. Finding the right spot is a tall order. Pitts has spent a generation building up his soil, and accumulating local knowledge of such things as weeds and bugs and weather patterns. Now he must go and begin again somewhere else, hopefully not too far away. At this point he could stop or be stopped by circumstance. No meaningful subsidies or supports exist for farmers such as Pitts, even though the environmental value of what they’re doing is indisputable. If he used industrial methods and doused his fields with chemicals to grow commodities such as corn and soy, he’d be better able to tap into the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s knowledge base and resources. But as it is, he’s pretty much on his own.
As Pitts is showing me the squat, narrow greenhouses where he raises baby lettuces and tomatoes, the sky opens up, dropping long, full lines of summer rain. He joins several workers outside to secure things around the farm from the storm. A few of us shelter inside the sloping walls of one of the greenhouses. No one talks over the beating of the midafternoon rain. Looking up, I can see through the clear plastic roof as the drops hit, fleetingly puddle, then slip down the side.
The next morning the place is abuzz with activity; it’s Friday and a lot must get done before market tomorrow. I eat a breakfast of dandelion and mustard greens, Sungold tomatoes, and eggs we gathered yesterday while Pitts sits at the table wiping down the handwritten, laminated signs he uses to label his produce at the stand. Meanwhile workers bag lettuce in the basement’s refrigerated room. Gonzalez, who grew up tending his family’s orchard in Mexico, walks into the kitchen. “It’s too wet to hoe, and too wet to plant, but it’s good weeding weather, so perhaps we’ll do that,” Pitts says out loud. Gonzalez cuts Pitts off by gently casting his eyes down. It’s a subtle no. Gonzalez has other plans for the workers today, which he doesn’t actually articulate. It’s the nonverbal exchange of brothers or an old couple. Without discussion, Pitts consents.
The farm has six full-time workers whose starting pay is $7.50 an hour. A few of Pitts’s additional laborers, such as Kevin, who minds the farm stand, are volunteers. Pitts’s employee situation has gone through several configurations: early on he used interns, then local high school kids, then his sister Kathy brought in disabled people to work—“It wasn’t the right setting for them,” he tells me—then he went on to college kids from the nearby town of New Paltz, then Gonzalez arrived. Gonzalez, his brother and sister-in-law, and their relatives now fill many of the jobs on the farm.
At one point Windfall employed twenty-eight people, but the payroll taxes and workers’ compensation fees got to be too much. The only company in the area that offers workers’ compensation insurance once recommended to Pitts that he should stop farming organically because then he’d need fewer employees and that would lower his costs. Pitts sees the problem as being deeply embedded in current economic policy. “If you’re going to employ people here, the government will tax the hell out of you,” he says. “But if you employ slaves in China, they’ll reward you.” He also thinks agricultural policy is to blame: “Lots of little farms could meet the needs of the market. Why doesn’t this happen? Because the USDA thinks it’s good to stop farming, get people off the farm. This made sense during the Dust Bowl, but not anymore.”
Pitts tells me it can get tricky managing his employees—Gonzalez and his field hands are prone to working too hard, picking more than will sell at the farmers’ market. The extra labor drove his earnings down considerably last year. When I ask, Pitts tells me that in 2006, he earned about $7 an hour. That’s fifteen cents below New York State’s minimum wage. “It’s not a living, it’s a life,” he tells me. “You’re not gonna get rich, but you get to do what you love all day. And if you’re working on the farm, you’re not spending much money, so the money you make you can just put back into the farm. And believe me, the farm will gulp it all down.” Before leaving Windfall I ask Pitts how economically sustainable his farm is. “It’s basically not,” he says.