ORLANDO, Fla. – Is your food safe?
It’s an age-old question and one brought to the forefront again this summer with headlines like these: EPA issues an emergency order for the first time in 40 years to ban a weedkiller than can harm fetuses. Or this one: A substance found in rocket fuel is also found in mac and cheese.
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So, can you really avoid toxins at the grocery store? Is paying more for organic food worth it or are you just throwing away your hard-earned cash?
The answer: it’s complicated. Buying organic food will reduce your exposure to synthetic chemicals, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture allows organic-certified food to be grown on hydroponic farms, which some people believe do not have all the benefits you’ve come to expect when buying organic.
“Only in the U.S. is hydroponic allowed to be sold as organic,” said Hugh Kent, who owns the King Grove Organic Blueberry Farm in Eustis. “You can’t do (hydroponic organic farming) in the EU, you can’t do it in South America, you can’t do it anywhere in the world but the U.S.”
Kent’s 200-acre farm has been in his family for more than 100 years. In order to get that coveted green USDA Organic seal, farmers like Kent must follow a long list of strict requirements, including not using most synthetic pesticides.
However, Kent says in the past few years, international agribusinesses have built massive hydroponic farms, looking to cash-in on the organic label without doing all the hard work.
“There’s a big industry growing hydroponic tomatoes in the Netherlands purely for export to the U.S. to be sold as organic. They can’t sell it in the Netherlands or anywhere else in Europe as organic, but they can send it over here and label it as organic,” Kent said.
It’s a topic he regularly speaks out about in podcasts and to farming groups.
“The way that (hydroponic farms work) is they take a piece of land and they compact it and laser level it, which of course makes it unsuitable for growing anything and then they cover it in plastic,” Kent said in a recent podcast on YouTube. “Then you don’t have to use herbicides and now you can call yourself, according to the USDA, a certified organic farm.”
Kent believes hydroponic farms, which produce food in plastic containers without nutrient rich soil, do not provide the same nutritional or environmental benefits that organic consumers have come to expect.
“In a teaspoon of (my soil), there are 8 billion microbes,” Kent said.
“I am here to make sure that when an organic consumer makes that choice, we are here to protect it,” said Jennifer Tucker, the deputy administrator of the National Organic Program at the USDA in Washington D.C.
While the USDA does allow hydroponic farms to be certified as organic, Tucker said they are also regularly inspected and tested for prohibited synthetic chemicals.
“We have a detailed set of protocols that certifiers have to follow. So if there’s a positive result from testing, and I really want to emphasize that that’s rare to find these residues on organic foods but it does happen, and so when it does happen, there is a set of protocols where these certifying agencies need to work with the farms to determine the source of the contamination and then prevent it in the future,” Tucker said. “If it has found to have been an intentional or even an accidental use, it can lead a farm to lose its organic certification because consumers do take this so seriously.”
Kent is hopeful the USDA will one day adopt the recommendations from its own National Organic Standards Board which supports banning hydroponic farms.
“I don’t have a criticism of them as a farming system per se. The criticism is that they shouldn’t be lumped in and hide behind the organic label,” Kent said. “Organics is something that was established by some very dedicated farmers over decades and this is now a growing system which is coming in and basically sleeping in the bed that somebody else made and confusing people.”
Right now, Kent says there’s no way to tell if organic food was grown on a hydroponic farm. It’s not labeled as hydroponic, just organic. However, Kent is part of a group called the Real Organic Project. That organization conducts its own inspections and certifications for traditional organic farms. It has now offered its own Real Organic Farm label to 1,100 farms that meet their requirements in addition to the USDA Organic requirements.
In a statement to News 6 regarding the use of hydroponic farms, the USDA says:
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