NEWS

Organic farmers told they can help save the world

David Castellon
dcastell@visaliatimesdelta.com
Amigo Bob Cantisano, bottom middle, sits with nearly 900 other organic farmers and others in the industry to hear the opening remarks for the 36th Annual Ecological Farming Conference at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove. Cantisano organized the first conference in 1980 for 45 people, and registrants for the four-day event that began Wednesday number nearly 2,000.

PACIFIC GROVE — At an agricultural conference, you certainly would expect to hear about techniques and technology to improve crop yields, the marketing goods and other aspects of the industry.

But for about 900 farmers and others gathered Wednesday night for the official opening of the 36th annual Ecological Farming Conference at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, many of the opening comments had less to do with improving business and more about improving the world.

And for one speaker, his address to the organic farmers and others in the industry focused on how changing the way farmers grow may help save this planet’s oceans and Earth, itself.

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“The largest contributor to [carbon dioxide] admissions is industrial agriculture,” said John Roulac, founder and chief executive officer of Nutiva, one of the world’s top-growing organic food manufacturers of products that include chia and hemp.

He’s also an ecological advocate who has written about the problems of carbon dioxide ending up in oceans and killing off plankton at substantial rates.

“People think it’s cars” that are the top contributors to carbon dioxide in the air, but greenhouse gasses released in the manufacturing synthetic fertilizers for farming are bigger problems, Roulac said.

Add to that farms with nothing growing part of the year, he explained, so plants aren’t capturing that carbon in the air and using it to build their root systems and instill nutrients into the ground — a process called “carbon sequestration.”

Organic farming techniques tend to promote sequestration, as organic farms tend to grow more crops on their land over the course of a year, so there are fewer periods of bare farmland.

Roulac said no-organic or “conventional” farmers can adopt similar techniques or other methods — such as planting grass between rows of trees in orchards — to promote sequestration. And if enough farmers do this, he said, it could significantly slow damage caused by carbon dioxide to plankton — which provides about two thirds of Earth’s oxygen and sustains sea life.

And less carbon dioxide in the air also would help reduce global warming, he noted.

“We have the means to do it,” Roulac told the crowd, a message he planned to repeat in a seminar he’s running today the four-day organic farming conference, the oldest and largest conference of its kind on the West Coast.

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The conference ends Saturday.

It may seem a stretch to tell farmers they could help save the world, but organic farmers have believed they’ve been doing that pretty much as long as the organic movement has existed, said Amigo Bob Cantisano, who organized the first conference in 1980 in the meeting room of the fire station in the Northern California city of Winters.

Back then, only 45 people attended to hear a single speaker, as Cantisano — then working as a supplier for organic farmers — was looking for a way to get his customers connected and to share their knowledge of what then wasn’t a very well-known industry.

“It was invisible” to all but a small number of consumers and to the rest of the agricultural industry, but those who chose to grow and raise organic food were driven by their desires to help the environment, said Cantisano, as self-described “hippie” who looks every bit the part with his gray hair woven into long dreadlocks and wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and shorts despite the chilly wind blowing off nearby Pebble Beach.

“I started in the ’70s, and the majority of society, I don’t think, thought there was anything wrong with their food.”

But in the late ’80s, concerns about the safety of a pesticide used on apples, gained national attention, and celebrities including Meryl Streep got involved, Cantisano recounted.

“All of a sudden it was a huge issue,” he said. “Grocery [store] chains called organic farmers because mothers wanted to feed their kids organics.”

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And once the number of organic farmers rose to meet that increased demand, larger manufactures were next to seek out organic farmers to supply them with crops to make organic foods ranging from breads to milk, said Cantisano, adding that millennial who have become parents now are the driving force in the demand for organics.

As a result, organic crops, which comprised just .01 percent of California’s agricultural sales in the early 1980s, now comprise about 2 percent, Cantisano noted.

And not surprisingly, California is the leading organic farming movements, with sales of organic crops and livestock in the state totaling $2.2 billion in 2014 — nearly twice the sales of the the next largest producer, Washington state — the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports.

Certainly, 2 percent isn’t a big ratio compared to conventional farming, but the demand for organics isn’t showing signs of slowing down. Some here at the conference noted that though many farmers aren’t ready to discard their chemicals and shift fully to organic farming, many are adopting some organic methods and using more ecologically friendly chemicals.

And some of these methods could be particularly helpful because of California’s drought.

Robert Milner, said he saw organic farming get increasingly popular before he left his job as an agricultural inspector in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley — along with a side business certifying farms as organic — and he’s seen the growth in the Central Coast in his current job as an inspector biologist for the Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office.

“Consumer demand is driving it,” he said, adding that some farmers are embracing the ecological benefits while others are seeing that organic farming can be profitable.

Banks also are seeing this and are tending to be more willing to loan money to organic farmers than they have in the past, Cantisano noted.

For his part, Cantisano said he sees the steady growth of the conference, which has nearly 2,000 people registered, as a reflection on how his industry has grown.

During his opening speech, Cantisano — who no longer is an organizer of the event but serves as a sort of elder statesman — asked the audience how many were attending for the fist time, and about two-thirds of the nearly 900 people in the packed meeting hall stood up or raised their hands.

“We were a spec in the ocean, and now we are a wave,” compared to 36 years ago, he told the crowd.

And to the newcomers — whom he called “the next wave” — Cantisano said, “You’re the ones who are going to carry us into the 21st century.”

In 1980, very few wanted to hear the concerns of organic farmers and consumers about the effects they believed conventional farming had on the ecology and public health.

“We were speaking to ourselves,” Cantisano said. “Maybe society wasn’t ready to listen.

“Now it’s ready to listen.”