By Wendee Hill
I agree that being organic is tough, and nothing is tougher (organically speaking) than maintaining an organic farm. At ACA, being organic is a struggle day by day and bug by bug: the epic struggle between man and nature, but on a small scale. It’s a question of having everything in balance, but with weather, plagues and accidents, balance can be hard to maintain.
We’re in many ways no different from traditional small farmers in Mexico. That is, no chemical fertilizers, insecticides or fungicides are used, and the old ways of working the soil prevail. (We even use a horse and plow sometimes!) But, the traditional ways, while healthy for the earth, do not repel all pathogens. Organic does not necessarily mean free from pathogens, and thus we take extra steps to ensure that our land is healthy and free of pollutants, whether they are walking, trotting, swimming, flying or crawling.
In recent decades, small Mexican farms have begun to disappear, as they did north of the border in an earlier era. The small farmers who remain in business are tempted by big companies to follow the trail of the old Dupont slogan “better living through chemistry.” They’ve been told they can get better yields with fertilizer, hybrid seed and bug sprays. But unlike U.S. and Canadian farmers, Mexican farmers find it difficult to get funding for this, or funding for things like plows and storage silos, either. It is often more profitable to sell the land or let it lie fallow than to try to farm it. We are trying to buck this trend and encourage small farmers to grow organic crops.
In Mexico, as north of the border, the loans and government grants go almost entirely to large-scale farming. This means the fertile areas of Jalisco and other states are losing their biological and botanical diversity in favor of large tracts of one-crop farms.
ACA is fighting this one farm at a time, starting with our farm, trying to set an example of how organic farming can work on a small scale. Every day more and more farmers are showing up at our doorstep to learn more about vermin-composting, using herbs for insect control, composting and in this hot season mulching.
Large scale producers like Driscoll’s are starting pilot projects to test how feasible it is to grow berries organically in Mexico. Such large growers can afford to do it in a big way, in controlled greenhouses with soilless growing mixes, automatic watering systems, and plants that never touch the ground. They do not have to depend on the vagaries of rain, wind and frost. They can afford to have a buffer area around their organic farms to protect them from accidental contamination. And they can afford to get official “organic” designation, which in Mexico is applied for and approved one crop at a time at a required fee. The Mexican government has no thought of designating a whole farm as “organic”—the concept of a small truck farm raising many varieties, while common north of the border, is uncommon here, where large scale agriculture in considered the wave of the future.
In the meantime, the small growers struggle—us included! We are grateful to all those who are helping us grow. We have a long-term lease on our farmland, and the land owner is cooperating with us so we can fix a potential pollution problem on the land adjacent to ours.
As more Mexicans demand organic produce, the day will come when small truck farms will prosper and proliferate here, and customers will line up at farm stands and garden markets to buy local farm produce like they do now north of the border. With good fortune, good health and our supporters, we’ll be there alongside many other small farmers.
Comments