By Elizabeth Henderson
With so many labels and certifications – it can be really confusing. In addition to the ROP add-on label to organic, there is also a ROC label – Regenerative Organic Certified. (regenorganic.org/becoming-regenerative-organic-certified) At Abundance, you will find the ROC label on Dr. Bronner’s products, Applegate frozen meats, Frontier Coop herbs and spices, Maggies cottons, Lundberg Rice and Patagonia.
While ROP was the creation of grassroots farmers, much better-healed businesses like Rodale, Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s created ROC resulting in a lot more publicity that seems to be generating momentum with more farms and brands adopting it. While ROP certification is free to farms, ROC has a hefty fee with a charge for application, an annual fee, licensing fees as well as fees for the agency that does the annual inspection.
ROC certification covers soil health, animal welfare and social fairness. On their website, they proudly declare: “Our mission is to build soil health, ensure equity for farm workers, empower farmers, and improve animal welfare through a holistic farm-based, brand-driven certification. By adopting regenerative organic practices on more farms around the world, we can create long-term solutions to the climate crisis, factory farming, and fractured rural economies.”
Like the farmers of ROP, the ROC businesses want to guarantee qualities that the National Organic Program (NOP) may or may not include. Basic organic certification does guarantee freedom from chemical residues and that the certified farm has used 30% less energy by not using synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.(You may have noticed that organic farms are not screaming loudly that the war on Iran has raised the price or cut off their fertilizer supply.) At issue here is the difficulty of making changes and improvements in the USDA organic program. When we started organic certification in the 1980’s, farmers like me ran the program ourselves. As we learned more, we raised the standards almost every year. With USDA in charge, changes take years, testimony, meetings, and lobbying.
Most frustrating for farms and brands that compete in a very crowded marketplace, USDA’s NOP also refuses to make market claims that organic is an any way better than conventional.
The ROC soil standards require that farms have good rotations and use cover crops. If a farm raises livestock, ROC recognize several humane animal certifications as qualifying and bases the standards on the five freedoms for healthy animals. ROC labor standards are the least demanding, requiring only that farms use labor practices that are legal, and are moving towards paying living wages. ROC does ask that farms recognize their workers’ rights to freedom of association, and have some kind of grievance process in place.
Neither ROC nor ROP is willing to demand too much from farms in this fair labor area nor of processors for fair payments to farms. The program I help found – the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP – agriculturaljusticeproject.org/) – made much higher demands through our Certified Food Justice standards. But sadly, so few farms and businesses chose to certify with AJP that we are closing it down.
The very same forces that make it a struggle for Abundance to stay afloat make it extremely hard for farms to pay decent wages to their workers or even to the farmers themselves. The name of the game is concentration. You can read a lot about it here – inequality.org/article/break-up-big-ag-to-make-america-healthy
As I write this on April 1, I am seeing an announcement for yet another certification label – Certified Not Highly Processed. I kid you not! This is not an April Fool’s joke – but hopefully also not a label you will see at Abundance.
About the Author Elizabeth Henderson
A food coop member since the 1970’s wherever she lived, Elizabeth Henderson has been a shareholder in Abundance Food Co-op for decades. She founded the Community Supported Agriculture Project, which has its designated pick up location at Abundance from the months of June through November. The vegetables come from Ruth Blackwell’s Mud Creek Farm these days since Elizabeth retired as an organic farmer. Elizabeth continues to be active as a member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association Policy Committee, the Rochester Food Policy Council and the Urban Agriculture Working Group. She also helps out at the Magnolia Street community garden and mentors organic farmers and gardeners.