Organic certification comes with price

Sales of organic foods and beverages in the United States are estimated to reach nearly $10 billion in 2004, a tripling of business during the past decade.

That’s good news for Colorado farmers, as the state leads the nation in acreage of certified organic farmland. In fact, with about 580,000 acres devoted to organic crops or livestock, Colorado accounts for 25 percent of the country’s 2.3 million organic acres, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Although the nation’s organic acres make up less than one-third of one percent of total U.S. farmland — and organic sales account for less than 2 percent of total U.S. grocery sales — organic farming is one of the fastest-growing segments of U.S. agriculture, according to the USDA.

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The average 20 percent to 25 percent yearly increases in organic sales during the past decade are encouraging a growing number of farms to certify their products as organic. In Colorado, more than 250 farms are certified organic with about 10 of those farms in Boulder County.

There are also many smaller farming operations, however, that legally sell their organic products at local farmers’ markets without certification.

This has both farmers and consumers asking what exactly is “organic” and how is one certified?

According to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, “organic” means agriculture products that are produced without the use of synthetic pesticides, synthetically compounded fertilizers or synthetic growth hormones, and certified by the department as complying with all USDA organic standards and regulations. In effect, to legally advertise a product as “organic,” most farmers must have certification.

The law does allow an exemption for farmers who do less than $5,000 of organic business a year.

Their operations are usually too small to bear the cost and time of organic certification. These are the farmers who frequently sell their organic products at farmers’ markets such as in Boulder and Longmont. Under the law, they are asked to follow the USDA organic standards in order to advertise their product as organic, but not as certified.

For all other Colorado farmers looking to get into the organic business, they must go through an application, inspection and certification process, said Don Gallegos with the Colorado Department of Agriculture. The fees for certification run from about $800 to $2,500 a year and involve a lot of record keeping, Gallegos said. Since 2002, the state has enforced the USDA organic standards, which allows Colorado’s organic products to easily be sold nationwide.

Ilan Salzberg, an organic vegetable farmer in Lafayette, said he has likes and dislikes of the certification process. Salzberg and Wyatt Barnes own and operate Red Wagon Organic Farm, which covers about 20 acres. The farm has been certified organic since the early 1990s, and Salzberg has maintained the certification since he took over in 2000.

“Everyone can define organic in a different way,” Salzberg said. “In some ways I think the certification standards are excessive. You must have all the paperwork showing you started with certified organic seeds that were grown with certified organic peat moss from cows that ate certified organic grains.”

But in other areas, Salzberg said he thinks the standards are too lenient. In some cases, the law allows farmers to use certain organic chemicals, for example.

“Even if they are allowed, I still don’t want some of these chemicals on my products,” Salzberg said. In the end, Salzberg said he complies with the certification standards because it is the easiest way to reach the consumers.

“I could sit and explain to my customers in detail how my products are organic, but it’s a lot easier to say they are certified organic.”

Salzberg usually sells most of his products at local farmers’ markets, and on occasion he has done business with some of the local natural foods stores. Because of the higher production costs, organic retail prices can range from 50 to 100 percent higher, he said. This is one of the few drawbacks of organic foods, and the main reason that they still only account for less than

two percent of total grocery sales.

Salzberg said the Denver/Boulder area provides a good source of consumers who care about eating organic foods, and they see the higher quality as justifying the higher prices. Salzberg and other local organic farmers declined to release sales figures, but they all said the organic business continues to grow.

At Pachamama Organic Farm in Longmont, Ewell and Lauren Culbertson have owned and operated about 11 acres of certified organic farmland during the past eight years. Ewell Culbertson said his organic certification fees rose from $350 to $1,200 when the federal standards replaced the state’s standards in 2002.

Culbertson said the extra costs of organic farming are worth it because he believes in the health and environmental benefits. He said the most expensive part is buying the organic-based fertilizers and pesticides, which can cost four to five times as much as the more common chemical alternatives.

“Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are really cheap. That’s why so many farmers use them,” Culbertson said. “It’s no big mystery on how to farm organically, but farmers can grow more food on less land, for less money with the chemicals. Like anything else, farming is a business,”

Culbertson said. “But now people are starting to figure out there’s a health and environmental difference (between organic and non-organic) and that’s why there’s a resurgence of organic farming.”

The resurgence also is helping organic foods into more mainstream grocery stores, according the USDA. From 1991 to 1995, 70 percent of organic grocery sales were from specialty natural product stores, such as the Whole Foods Market or Wild Oats Markets. But by 2000, organic sales were split 50-50 between these specialty stores and regular supermarkets, such as Safeway and King Soopers.

The recent case of mad cow disease found on a U.S. beef farm in the state of Washington has helped spur organic and natural beef sales. In Colorado, most of the organic certified land (514,000 acres, or 88 percent) is used to raise organically fed livestock.

Mel Coleman, chairman of Coleman Natural Meats in Golden, said he has seen an increase in his natural meat sales since the U.S. mad cow news.

“At the retail level, some of our customers have reported sales increasing more than 10 percent,” Coleman said. He added that business had been increasing even before the mad cow case, but the incident is helping consumers become more knowledgeable about different types of meats.

Coleman’s animals are classified as natural meats because they are fed a 100 percent vegetarian diet and do not contain any hormones or antibiotics. The main thing precluding these animals from being organic is that their feed is not organic.

Coleman said his company has dabbled in the organic market from time to time, but there has always been a stronger market for the natural meats. Compared with regular meat prices, natural meats cost about 35 percent higher, Coleman said. Organic meats add about another 23 percent price increase over the natural meats.