A USDA task force set out to determine in September 2015 whether fruit and vegetables are organic if they’re grown in a medium other than soil. More than 10 months later, they issued a report that is “anything but conclusive,” writes Civil Eats.
The issue has been brewing for some time, as large, year-round greenhouse operations increase sales in places like the Northeast, competing directly with farmers who grow produce in their fields. Organic farmers in Vermont protested the organic certification of these indoor operations where plants are grown without soil last fall.
In 2010, the National Organic Standards Board, an advisory committee to the USDA National Organic Program (NOP), recommended that the organic standards should be written to require soil, not systems that use water and synthetic nutrients, for certified organic farming. But in the absence of such a regulation, which must be written by the USDA, the NOP has allowed produce grown in water with added nutrients to be certified as organic.
The current task force agreed with the 2010 recommendations that addressed “a traditional method of hydroponics that is sterile and inert…However, there are other container growing systems that may resemble traditional hydroponic systems, but are fundamentally and completely different,” the task force report stated. “Such systems require and contain rich, diverse and complete soil-plant ecology that symbiotically work with plants to biologically process animal, plant and mineral inputs.”
“The NOSB will ultimately have to recommend its clear intention for the role of soil,” the report says. “No matter what one thinks about which path is best, we can all accept that many in the organic community are opposed to the inclusion of hydroponic as organic. Failure to address that concern will inevitably undermine public and farmer support for the USDA Organic label.”
Attached to the report is a letter addressed to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack signed by organic farmers and organizations representing 2.2 million people requesting a suspension of produce grown in water as certified organic.
The rationale rests on the idea that soil is best at “maintaining or improving the organic matter,” yet the task force didn’t rule out hydroponics either, and suggested certifying plants that were first grown in soil but transplanted into water, such as ornamental plants and herbs, was a “common standard used in most European organic certification.”