At the Women in Agriculture Conference held in Edmond, Oklahoma, Stevie White spoke with Harriet Behar of the Organic Farmers Association about how to get started with organic certification.
Behar said that, as with all things, the first step is to find your market. “Next, you have to make sure that everyone is on board with changing their system of production to one that includes organic management,” she said.
One such change is that organic farming is not an input substitution. “Although we have approved organic and synthetic inputs, we look at organic farming more as a management style that uses things like crop rotation and beneficial insect habitat, rather than just looking at what the organic herbicide exchange would be, because there really aren’t any,” she said.
She said that organic production can be accomplished on an acre by acre basis meaning that the entire farm doesn’t have to be organic. The acres that are would need to have a 30-foot buffer area protecting them from the nonorganic practices around them and also the produce would need to be stored apart from the non organic produce.
Behar said that the producer’s viewpoint of how to do things is the most challenging thing to change when converting to an organic operation, but the rewards are great. She said, “There are a lot of things we do in organic farming that are climate smart like using cover crops, and even in a large scale, inter-seeding into corn with a legume to give nitrogen to both. We do weed smothering, and prevent soil erosion. Then that organic corn gets a premium of at least double what the conventional corn will bring,” she said.
She said that organic farming has fit well with family scale operations because of the higher premiums for their smaller quantities of production. She warned that organic farming is more labor intensive, but the producer has less cost of inputs than one using traditional methods.
Behar invites curious producers to use the contact information below so she can answer any additional questions.
