edge of its land. However, when the crops were sprayed, so was his home. Not only did he have to labor in the chemical-laden fields, but he and his family had to live in them as well. A few years after Gonzalez had begun working for Pitts, his sixteen-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer. Two years later he died.
Gonzalez oversees the field labor at Windfall. They do the harvesting, then wash and pack all the vegetables for market. The produce goes from the field to the customer’s hands in less than twenty-four hours. The converted school bus Pitts loads with vegetables and takes to market runs on biodiesel made from waste oil he collects at restaurants in Manhattan when he goes in each week. The biodiesel also powers and heats the farm’s greenhouses. Pitts is not a numbers guy—he doesn’t keep tabs on how much fossil fuel he isn’t using, how much CO2 he’s not emitting, or how much water he’s not polluting by farming and distributing the way he does. But he’s righteous about it.
Pitts is opinionated about official USDA organic because, in his estimation, it’s simply not good enough. “It’s just a list of things you can and can’t add to your crops. I take a whole approach to farming. It’s not some checklist I tick off,” he says irritably. Since the USDA fully implemented organic standards in 2002—a process that began a dozen years earlier and went through several contentious rounds—many farmers, precisely the type that consumers imagine when they see the organic label, reject certification outright. Growers who practice organic methods—chemical-free farming and grazing, complex crop rotation to build and maintain soil health, fertilizing with green manure (cover crops that allow soil to regenerate), low or no fossil-fuel consumption, and labor practices that are more socially just—now call themselves “beyond organic,” “unconventional,” “real.”
Many of these farmers are also critical of the process of earning USDA certification because it’s costly and time-consuming. They must keep detailed records on the planting and tending of each individual crop—the chard, the snap peas, the carrots, the kale—something that’s clearly inappropriate for a farmer such as Pitts, but highly doable for a large-scale operation. “If you have five thousand workers and one million acres, you can allocate one worker to spend all day doing paperwork,” Pitts tells me hyperbolically. “But on a small farm you can’t spend your day filling out paperwork, because then you’re not growing the food.” He is loath to do the complicated documentation of all his various plantings, such as the frequent rotations and broadcasting. It also costs hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to ensure the paperwork is in order and to pay the certifier, a sum many small producers can’t afford.
Another Hudson Valley grower, Ron Khosla of Huguenot Farms, further elucidates problems with USDA certification. Earning and keeping the seal is supposed to work like this: The farmer maintains detailed logs of planting, fertilizing, and pest, weed, and disease management. Once each year a third-party certifying agency hired by the farmer and licensed by the USDA dispatches an inspector to assess the farm and review its records. Then the inspector submits the report for evaluation by the certifier, and if everything is up to snuff, the organic seal is granted.
But, as Khosla explains, inspectors are only required to do what’s called a “visual inspection” of the farm. Khosla—who founded a peer-based certification program called Certified Naturally Grown and formerly served as a consultant to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—tells me of instances of inspectors visiting farms, yet never setting foot in a field. He knows farmers who’ve had auditors conduct visual inspections by peering at crops through living-room windows. Astonishingly, official USDA rules require no soil samples or chemical-residue tests on produce. That means any such tests are entirely at the discretion of the certifier. Because certification companies must bear the cost of running these tests, plus time for the added paperwork, they have an incentive to avoid it. Consequently, visual inspections are all consumers can rely on.
Because inspectors typically have such heavy workloads, Khosla explains, they may not always make it to some of the farms that bear the organic seal. Khosla also tells me how a certification company he contacted brainstormed with him on how to cheat. “It was incredible!” The bottom line: “Certification companies don’t want to pressure farmers because they don’t want to lose the business,” Khosla imparts. “The for-profit certifiers and the nonprofits, too, they don’t want to lose their jobs.” Being too strict could increase the risk of farmers switching to the competition. This capacity for fraud is another reason growers such as Pitts dismiss official organic.
Back at the Pitts farm, perched in front of the main house is a hand-painted sign that reads WINDFALL FARMS. Underneath the name are letters that used to say ORGANICALLY GROWN VEGETABLES. Pitts tells me that while he was away at a conference in California in 2000, the USDA announced the first phase of implementing federal organics standards. As soon as he heard, he called Gonzalez to repaint the sign immediately. With a few tight insertions and alterations, it now reads UNCONVENTIONALLY GROWN VEGETABLES.
Pitts doesn’t have a mortgage because he inherited the place, as the farm’s name suggests. So, unlike many of his fellow small-scale cultivators, he doesn’t have the burden of debt. Yet he is still facing circumstances that are driving him off his land.
Most significant is Pitts’s hefty property-tax bill. He tells me the Montgomery Town Council rezoned a large area as commercial about fifteen years ago, including Windfall and several other farms. The council realized they could shift to a more lucrative commercial tax base by taking advantage of the transportation infrastructure, which includes a major freeway, railway lines, and a small airport. But by encouraging a change in land use away from agriculture, the town officials have created an impossible situation for most local small farmers. Among the new neighbors is a manufacturer of medical and surgical supplies called Cardinal Health, which, Pitts tells me, built a single warehouse covering twenty-three acres. These operations generate considerably more income from their fertile Hudson Valley land than does farming, yet Pitts must fork over as much in taxes as his corporate neighbors. “It’s like you’re renting your own farm forever and the rent just keeps going up,” he says. “The tax system is thwarting people who want to preserve farmland.” Consequently, he laments, “Farms are just gone from here.”
To beat the precipitous taxes Pitts, too, must leave. For the past several years he’s been looking for a new farm, and while some prospects have been exciting, they’ve all fallen through. Finding the right spot is a tall order. Pitts has spent a generation building up his soil, and accumulating local knowledge of such things as weeds and bugs and weather patterns. Now he must go and begin again somewhere else, hopefully not too far away. At this point he could stop or be stopped by circumstance. No meaningful subsidies or supports exist for farmers such as Pitts, even though the environmental value of what they’re doing is indisputable. If he used industrial methods and doused his fields with chemicals to grow commodities such as corn and soy, he’d be better able to tap into the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s knowledge base and resources. But as it is, he’s pretty much on his own.
As Pitts is showing me the squat, narrow greenhouses where he raises baby lettuces and tomatoes, the sky opens up, dropping long, full lines of summer rain. He joins several workers outside to secure things around the farm from the storm. A few of us shelter inside the sloping walls of one of the greenhouses. No one talks over the beating of the midafternoon rain. Looking up, I can see through the clear plastic roof as the drops hit, fleetingly puddle, then slip down the side.
The next morning the place is abuzz with activity; it’s Friday and a lot must get done before market tomorrow. I eat a breakfast of dandelion and mustard greens, Sungold tomatoes, and eggs we gathered yesterday while Pitts sits at the table wiping down the handwritten, laminated signs he uses to label his produce at the stand. Meanwhile workers bag lettuce in the basement’s refrigerated room. Gonzalez, who grew up tending his family’s orchard in Mexico, walks into the kitchen. “It’s too wet to hoe, and too wet to plant, but it’s good weeding weather, so perhaps we’ll do that,” Pitts says out loud. Gonzalez cuts Pitts off by gently casting his eyes down.
