Anyone who has gone on a road trip to a new destination can attest that a good map is critical to get where you need to go. After five years of surveying and talking with organic farmers, the Organic Farming Research Foundation has released its roadmap, providing a north star to guide research and policy initiatives into the New Year.
The report, the National Organic Research Agenda, outlines challenges currently faced by organic producers and offers actionable recommendations to inform future investments to ensure that organic farming continues to flourish in the U.S.
Drawing from responses of over 1,100 U.S. organic farmers, ranchers and transitioning-to-organic operations — combined with 16 listening sessions across the country — the foundation’s findings confirmed what organic producers are accomplishing now, along with challenges and concerns.
The Packer’s Kristin Leigh Lore met with Organic Farming Research Foundation Executive Director Brise Tencer to discuss the NORA report, the future of organic research and what’s she’s excited about in the New Year.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Q&A with Brise Tencer, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation
The Packer: How did you develop the National Organic Research Agenda report?
Tencer: The report is based on a farmer survey we conducted at OFRF. We sent a survey out to every certified organic operation in the country and sent an identical survey to transitioning organic growers to compare data.
One thing that was challenging for us is that the survey was conducted during the pandemic. It impacted our response rate a little bit. The pandemic had a lot of impact on farmers and created supply chain challenges. There was a lot going on.
We received input from about 1,100 organic farmers. I think we could have probably done even better if we did not have those external challenges. There’s around 15,000 organic farms and ranches in the country, so it was a reasonable response rate and we received high-quality information from producers.
We also held 16 virtual focus groups with farmers around the country to get more qualitative feedback and to better understand their responses with examples.
How does direct feedback from organic farmers influence your research agenda?
Overall, the National Organic Research Agenda report is intended to be the guiding light for our organization. We also use the report to inform the research community, universities, policymakers and other service providers for the farming sector.
For me, the report is the most robust tool we have to understand the needs of the organic sector. Something that I say often is, “The farmers have spoken; they’ve told us what they need.”
Our job at the Organic Farming Research Foundation is to figure out how we’re going to respond to this feedback. We have a strategic plan, but in some ways, this feedback directly from farmers is our strategic plan.
We hold ourselves accountable every time we fund a new research project, develop a new farmer educational resource, support advocacy with policymakers. We go back to the report and ask, “How does this activity advance a challenge that farmers have shared with us?”
Any feedback from farmers that surprised you?
There were some surprises. There wasn’t just one. There were also some responses that reinforced what we already knew.
For example, we already know that research in organic systems is under-invested, overall. Some of the basic agronomic challenges that organic growers are struggling with are ones where there’s a lot more information available for their conventional counterparts. This wasn’t surprising, but seeing some of the specific examples of what farmers were talking about was interesting.
Soil health emerged as a major theme in the survey. The last time we did the survey, it didn’t rank quite as high — that was interesting to me. The community, the USDA and universities have been investing a lot in this area over recent years. My assumption is that there’s a connection; we’ve been investing more in research in soil health, healthy management, and now growers have more information available if they’re using organic systems.
To me, the most salient finding from the survey was that organic and transitioning to organic producers are already leaders in soil and climate stewardship.
Particularly for certified and the transitioning to organic producers, they’re using practices that are widely talked about as regenerative or soil-enhancing practices, such as cover cropping. [Organic producers are adopting these practices at] a higher rate than the average used by conventional producers. That was really exciting to see, because right now there’s a lot of talk about what is regenerative, what is organic, how do all these different practice systems fit in. To me, it really highlights that organic producers are really leading the way in regenerative practices already.
Cover cropping and green manure stood out, which are used on-farm by 88% of our survey respondents, which is a huge milestone. For comparison, the national average for nonorganic producers is about 10% using cover cropping, according to the recent agricultural census. It’s a significant difference.
This speaks to the fact that we don’t need research focused on demonstrating whether organic production can match conventional, but more research on how to help farmers adopt practices and scale them up.
What insights from the National Organic Research Agenda do you think the produce industry should know more about?
We did an analysis [of responses] to discover if farmers that identify as Black, Indigenous or a person of color have different challenges.
We know that these groups don’t represent as big of a percent of the overall organic farming sector as we’d like to see. And we really wanted to do a deep dive into learning if they are experiencing unique challenges.
What we saw on our survey was that BIPOC producers generally identified the exact same set of production challenges as the white respondents but, generally, they were experiencing most of these challenges more strongly. We particularly saw a huge difference in their experience in terms of managing production cost.
We know that this country has a strong legacy of structural inequity, that that has made it harder for some of those BIPOC producers to bear the cost of farming and get access to some of the educational resources that other producers might have more readily available.
What type of information or resources are organic farmers seeking right now?
OFRF gained new knowledge about farmers sharing. How farmers want to receive information in terms of educational resources is that organic producers are going to different sources than conventional counterparts to find technical knowledge on how to farm organically.
We asked, in terms of their preferred sources of information, where do farmers go. Who do they talk to if they if they want to learn something more?
We learned that, number one, they’re talking to other certified organic farmers and to other farmers generally, even if not certified organic. They’re using online resources. They’re also talking with certifiers and crop consultants, but you don’t see as high of a use of general extension agents with their technical service providers.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be investing in those areas. But it may mean that it’s not always the case that your extension agent will have as much expertise as a farmer wants. They might not know how to manage a disease or pest nutrient management challenge with organic systems.
There’s a real opportunity to both leverage the sources that organic producers already using, which are farmer-to-farmer networks and mentorship, but also to keep making sure that those existing, more structural resources have in-depth knowledge of organic systems.
What are you most excited about looking for in 2023?
At OFRF, we work to respond to what we we’ve heard from farmers. We’re always committed to funding as many on-farm research projects as we can. We know that the needs are diverse. As such, we are looking at how to provide financial support to farmers to do on-farm trials themselves. I think growers are really wanting to be able to test stuff on their own operation.
It’s an exciting time for the organic sector overall. We’ve seen consumer demand for organic increasing. We’ve seen — particularly on the West Coast — more and more growers start splitting part of their operation into organic.
There’s this sense that organic is growing and that it’s the way of the future, but the infrastructure to support organic production has been a little slow, and so it’s fun to see this wave of structural change to support the sector increasing. Certainly, the USDA funds are a key part of that, but I think we’re seeing some exciting things, a bunch of new resources and activity to support the infrastructure, and I think [there are] some good models in California in particular that we’re hoping will continue to be adopted in other parts of the country.
