Ann Clark

Organic Education

The University of Guelph is the first Canadian university to offer a major in organic agriculture. In response to growing interest in organic principles and products as well as the commercial potential of organic farming, the university initiated the major in 2004 as a distinct course of study within the B.Sc. (Agr.) degree. Dr. E. Ann Clark, an Associate Professor in Plant Agriculture at Guelph, has been involved from the earliest stages in the development and design of the program. Her research into ecological sustainability in farming, specifically concentrating on pasture and grazing management, the role of livestock on farms, and the environmental risks presented by genetically modified crops, has informed her teaching and her understanding of what an education in this field should include.

From the beginning the goal was not simply to teach students how to farm organically. Courses are team-taught by both a social scientist and a biophysical scientist. The intention is to train students to understand sound organic farming practices and at the same time think about the larger context of food production and consumption in society generally, particularly emphasizing the problems we might face and the solutions we might need when the era of cheap energy comes to an end. Therefore the program draws on the expertise of educators from various disciplines. Graduates may end up being organic farmers, but it is also quite possible that they will end up as social policy analysts working for the provincial government. “That is one thing that is very unique about this major”, says Dr. Clark. “We intentionally designed it so that many different people will be taught organic principles because we anticipate a future where there will be a real demand for those kinds of people who can think holistically, people who can design systems to capture economic synergies or ecological synergies, and people who understand the principles of problem-avoidance by design, which is really how I teach organic practice.”

Recently Dr. Clark discussed with Canadian Interviews the origins and current status of this unique set of courses at Guelph. With economic considerations paramount, the university Senate this spring moved to cut all majors suffering from low enrollment, all minors, as well as low-enrollment courses. As a new program, the major in organic agriculture was not operating at full capacity and faced cancellation, yet it was the only program to survive this recent round of cuts. Students rallied to defend and eventually preserved the program, but interestingly it has only been granted a one-year reprieve. If enrollment is not increased substantially by April next year, the program could potentially disappear. The fate of it may well provide a signal as to how seriously people in Canada are taking the environmental and social dilemmas that are looming.

CI: The University of Guelph is the first Canadian university to offer a major specifically in organic agriculture. It is only five years old, but the major was almost cancelled this past April by the university. Two questions: what factors drove the development of the program originally, and what are the chief reasons why it is threatened now?

AC: The origin of it was back in the late nineties. A pair of diploma students, and other students, started lobbying for a course, just one course, in organic agriculture. This is very much the tradition of organics at Guelph. The Guelph Organic Conference, for example, right now is approaching its thirtieth year, and that conference started with a group of undergraduate students who were annoyed with the faculty – this was thirty years ago – annoyed with the faculty for not taking seriously their interest in organic agriculture. The students, rather than sitting back and whining about it, started getting organized. They went out to farms and worked on the weekends, or they would bring farmers in to talk to them, essentially self-educating on organics. The very first Organic Conference originated directly from that student initiative. It is now expanded to what I think is the largest one in Canada. It really says a lot for the bootstrap approach that characterizes much of organics in North America today. So the students petitioned for that first course. I got a rather terse email from the Dean at that time – I was on sabbatical – asking if I would teach this course when I got back. I said sure, not knowing a single thing about organic farming. When I came back, I happened to be giving the keynote at the Guelph Organic Conference that year, so I made it known that we were going to be having a course in organic agriculture.

CI: What year roughly did that first course start up?

AC: That would have been, I think, 2000, if I remember right. We got a lot of money donated by the organic sector, and in particular Organic Advocates, a group that sponsors the annual ‘Feast of Fields’ event, which is happening this September. We got the money. We went out and surveyed some organic farmers over three years. We collected a database because there literally was no database from which to teach what farmers are doing in Ontario. We learned a great deal, and we started teaching this course. After two years, we had a new Dean arrive, Dean Craig Pearson, who is Australian. I had heard out at the beef barn that this guy was a nature nut. I thought, ‘I’ve got to see this – a Dean of the OAC [Ontario Agricultural College] who’s a nature nut!’ For the first and last time in my life, I sent in a request to meet with the Dean of the OAC. I think it was the second or third sentence out of his mouth: he said he wanted a major. At this point, we had only been teaching the course one or two years. It was a very new course. He was very supportive, very helpful; it would never even have dawned on me to think about a major if it wasn’t for him. He, to our great benefit, assigned Stew Hilts, who at that time was the Chair in Land Resource Science, to sort of shepherd us through all the various levels of bureaucracy that are involved in these things. It took us two years – endless meetings, lots of conflict resolution. Eventually we did get it approved, and we started teaching a major in organic agriculture in 2004.

Now, I had been invited to do a plenary talk at the IFOAM conference (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) in Victoria in 2002. My assignment was ‘Teaching the Future’. How are we going to teach the future about organic agriculture? I, and my co-author, Jacinda Fairholme, did a paper. I surveyed twenty-five schools. She surveyed ten experiential programs, like the CRAFT program (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training). Essentially we developed an understanding of how organics was being taught in other schools, all of the schools that I could think of that were likely to be teaching organics, and discovered to our surprise that none of them had a major in organic agriculture. There is a minor in ecological agriculture at McGill, and that has been going for a long time under the stewardship of John Henning. There are specializations in a couple places like Assiniboine College in Manitoba, which is a distance-education school. … Beyond that, there really wasn’t anything in Canada, and in the U.S. even less! I was really quite surprised. Of those twenty-five schools, I think it was fifteen that had at least one course in organic, but in every case it was sort of brought in from the outside either by student demand, or a group of returning peace corps volunteers, or some wing-nut faculty member or graduate student. It was never part of the mainstream. It was always on the outside, often an elective or not even a credit course. That was the way it was addressed. We were really the first in North America to put this together as a standard, mainstream, from-the-inside credit program.

It worked out well, but the problem, getting to your second question, is why is it now threatened? The main problem is that it is a young major. It is only five years old. It’s completely novel, so there is no momentum, no other cadres, no older students that went through, and no other students that could be mentors. ... It is a brand new thing. In the current economic situation, the University of Guelph, like all universities, has been trying to cut costs. There was a movement, starting late last fall and continuing through until April of this year, to cut all low-enrollment majors, all minors, and low-enrollment courses. They arbitrarily defined low enrollment as forty students in a major over four years, so that would be an uptake of ten a year. All minors were to be cut irrespective of enrollment. Any course that had fewer than ten students in it was to be cut. That was how they came up with that plan. There were nine majors, all minors, and forty courses slated to be cut.

The students were outraged to hear about this, particularly the students in the Women’s Studies major and in the Organic major - or interested in the Organic major, even if they weren’t in it! They mounted a protest. They went through channels. They did it all fair and correctly and legitimately. The long and the short of it is that there was a Senate meeting, and the only survivor from all of that was the organic major, and that is only for one year. We have a one-year reprieve in which to get enrolment up, and to bring new teachers in because I do a lot of the teaching and I’m retiring in two years. And there is a hiring freeze underway at the moment, so they aren’t going to be able to hire anybody to replace me. And they want money! They want us to raise lots of money to sustain teaching and to sustain a new initiative that we put in last fall called the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming, or the GCUOF. The GCUOF has a hired coordinator, Martha Gay Scroggins, and a number of other expenses that we need to meet in order for that to be sustained. The task has fallen back to us. People may assume that it’s a university and the university should absorb these costs, and I think historically they might very well have. Today there isn’t any spare money. In fact, they are dramatically cutting, and the OAC seems to be getting a disproportionate share of the cuts. There just isn’t any money to give. The task has fallen to us to develop fundraising strategies and to bring people to a stronger understanding of the fact that what we’re doing – we’re calling it ‘Eating Sustainably’ – affects everybody. We’re hoping that we can get sufficient support from the broader community to keep this going.

CI: Perhaps you could elaborate on ‘Eating Sustainably’.

AC: It is a really important point. When we started this five years ago, it was the ‘organic program’. It still is the organic program, but in those intervening five years a lot has changed. Now we hear people asking, ‘well, which is more important, local or organic?’ … We’re envisioning eating sustainably to mean really four different things that are all related to each other. They all contribute to the ecological footprint of the agri-food system: organic, as a production practice, I think is ecologically sound management whether you call it organic or not; local, so stuff doesn’t move very far; seasonal, because we need to get used to eating seasonally again rather than expecting to have tomatoes or strawberries every day of the year; and post-farm gate processing. I was astounded to read a paper by David Pimentel. It is posted on the website for the Organic Center in Washington state. He claims that nineteen percent of the total annual energy budget for the whole United States is for the agri-food system. Nineteen percent, but of those nineteen, only seven are on the farm. Twelve are post farm-gate, and that means processing, packaging, refrigeration, transportation, driving to the grocery store to buy your groceries, the plastic bags, all of that stuff.

If we really want to plan – and we do here at Guelph – for what some have called the post-carbon or resource-constrained future, it is way more than just farming organically. We need to bring in these other elements. Truthfully I really think they are going to come in on their own. The reason that we have gotten accustomed to eating the way we have – mangoes, kiwi fruit, salmon – is that we can. We like it. It’s cheap. We can do it. Energy is cheap. It’s all predicated on artificially cheap fossil fuel energy. As some have said, we are just living beyond our means. As the price of that fuel rises, as we run out of it, in the simplest terms, it’s going to shrink the economically competitive travel distance of foodstuffs – of t-shirts, tennis shoes, everything! The way I say this is that you don’t have a million head on feed in Lethbridge to feed Lethbridge. You have a million head on feed in Lethbridge and Swift Current and feed lot alley there because you’re fully expecting that your economies of scale there will make you competitive with producers in Malaysia or Wyoming, or wherever else you want to ship it. … But the only way that you can be competitive that way is if the cost of shipping is a very small fraction of your total cost. As that cost rises, and it becomes more and more expensive to ship things, particularly wet things like produce and meat, travel distance will shrink. I am certainly not the first person to say that. I think this is increasingly recognized now. So, as it shrinks, we are going to have to be able to produce a great deal more of the food that we eat here, of necessity. Right now something like eighty percent of the food that we eat is imported. It’s not grown here. It could be grown here. It may not be grown here in February, but it could be grown here. This falls into the idea of seasonality. We need to rejoice in eating sweet peas right off the vine for six weeks, and then wait for the next year to do it again! We need to relish the anticipation of sweet corn, or new potatoes, or whatever, and then wait for it next year. We’ve gotten lazy. We’ve gotten demanding. We expect this stuff all the time. I’m old enough – I’m fifty-eight years old – I’m old enough to know of a time when it wasn’t like that, when bananas were a novelty. And I’m from California!

Your original question, why is the program threatened – it was threatened because of low enrollment. When the students realized this, a lot of students signed up, but we still only have fifteen students in this major, and we need forty by next April to stay in business. We’re very much encouraging people who are interested in organics not to take this for granted, that this will be here when they want it. If they don’t put up or shut up now, we are going to lose out.

CI: What specifically are the faculty, staff, and students currently engaged in the program planning on doing, or what have you thought of doing, to reach out and try to encourage potential students, specifically young people who may be interested but are really not sure about taking the program?

AC: Certainly the students themselves are very keen to be involved. They’re going to become something like what we will call ‘organic ambassadors’. The idea is that they want to go out and speak to high school students, tell them about what we are doing, and give the example of themselves to these high school students, answering whatever questions they may have and so on. I’m really encouraged by the energy and engagement and enthusiasm of these students to do this, and this includes students some of whom are not in the organic major. They are maybe third or fourth year students, engineering students for example. …

In addition to student ambassadors, the other thing is revamping the website. Students and parents and everybody seem to get a lot of their information nowadays on the web. We want to make our website more attractive, make it more relevant to what we’re actually doing now because we originally started it five years ago and a lot of things have changed. We’re also putting in articles in publications. I have one that will come out in the most recent COG magazine (Canadian Organic Growers). That should be coming out soon. … We had a number of, dozens really, letters of support to the President [of the university], to the Senate, from all kinds of groups: the Canadian Wheat Board, National Farmers’ Union, the Green Party, all these different groups were very supportive. We want to harness that support in a tangible way to get the word out.

CI: Let me pick up on something that you said earlier on ‘sustainability’. I read recently the text of a talk that you gave, and it was called ‘What is Sustainable Farming?’ Obviously we hear the word ‘sustainable’ a lot now as it relates to farming, fishing, forestry, energy production, etc. You made the point in that talk that it might be diminishing the vibrancy of the original conception of organic growing by just focusing on sustainability. I am wondering if you might just contrast those two terms, organic and sustainable, and how they are used, to help people understand what the original vision of organic was in the beginning and what sustainability is taken to mean now.

AC: Right. Well, certainly one of the biggest tragedies to my way of thinking is that the original term ‘organic’, as it was envisioned back in the twenties by the founders - Sir Albert Howard, Sir Robert McCarrison, Lady Eve Balfour, and people like that – it was not an end unto itself. It was a means to an end. It was a way of getting a larger objective achieved. The concern back then, which I find hysterical today, was the industrialization of agriculture! This is back in the nineteen twenties. The concern was that industrial agriculture was taking over the countryside, damaging people’s health, damaging rural community integrity, detracting from the trades and guilds and craftsmanship of people, destroying forests and streams. Does this sound familiar? Therefore organic production practices were brought into play as a way of shielding or buttressing these communities and these people and this environment from the onslaught of industrial agriculture. Many of the key proponents of this were not in fact farmers or even working in agriculture, but they were in public health, and physicians and dentists. You may have heard of Weston Price and the Weston Price Foundation. He was a dentist. It was people dealing with the downstream ramifications of industrial agriculture in the twenties and thirties and forties that really were the main movers behind organic agriculture. It came across the pond through the Rodales, the Rodale family, and the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania. It spread out from there. But it was a means to an end. I think that is the key thing. It was driven by values: respect for your neighbours, concern about your children’s health, desire for healthy rural communities, healthy forests and streams, things of that sort. The problem is that those values that drove ‘organic’ as it was back in the twenties and thirties and forties have essentially been sheared off what we now call ‘organic’, or what some have called the ‘new’ organic or ‘big’ organic. That was done intentionally so that you could make it scale-neutral, so that you could scale up organic. What we have today in the term ‘organic’ is just a set of production and processing practices; completely lost are the values that underlie that. The tragedy of it all is that it has allowed the co-option of ‘organic’ by the very forces of industrialization that ‘organic’ was designed to protect people from. That is exactly what has happened.

CI: In that way, organic production has become an end in itself, to provide organic food on the shelves …

AC: It has become a vehicle for enrichment, for concentration of power essentially. I just today saw a very interesting chart … showing the consolidation in the seed trade, where particular entities have bought up very large fractions of the seed trade and they now own it. That’s essentially what has happened with organic. … That’s the kind of thing that happens when you remove the values and you end up with a set of practices that are scale-neutral. Earthbound Farms, for example, is a huge, huge producer of leafy greens, spinach, and packaged salad greens. Everybody has nothing but respect for the ecologically sustainable practices that Earthbound Farms uses. There is nobody that says they are not farming in an ecologically sound way. There are other concerns, social concerns or economic concerns, about what they’re doing. The ‘bigness’ of it has not been a problem for them because of the way that the standards, the way that the regulations, have been defined. Defining organic to be nothing more than a set of production practices greatly allows the globalization, consolidation, and concentration that are characteristic of conventional farming, furniture making, retailing and everything else.

CI: In Canada we have a recently minted set of national standards for the organic industry in this country. One would imagine that the original thought was to help organic producers distinguish themselves from the people who may say that they are growing organically when they are not, yet it has had this maybe unintended consequence of really opening up the industry to the biggest players by standardizing it. What is the risk to organic practices when it becomes standardized in that mass way? Is there some watering-down of the standards? Do you think that the standards will be maintained that people have come to expect when they’re buying organic food?

AC: I think the primary motivation for the Canadian government to establish national standards - keeping in mind that organic standards in Canada originated a long time ago from individual groups of farmers who would put together a set of standards and apply them so that they could get a higher price for their product – the rationale or motivation for the national government to get involved, in both the U.S. and Canada, was export. It was so that you could sell a certified product to willing buyers in other countries. Europe is very keen to buy a lot of what we produce, as is the U.S., as is Japan. Those are our three major buyers. So it was really a way of facilitating export earnings that motivated what they were doing.

Now I did say that practices are scale-neutral – and they are – but the way that this gets watered down is that very large entities that have an organic branch or sector can lobby to weaken standards, to change standards, to allow them to do things that would not be allowed under organic standards. There is a constant barrage of efforts underway in the U.S., and it will happen here as well, to weaken the standards, to allow things that were not called ‘organic’ last year to be called ‘organic’ this year. Enough pressure is applied. Enough documentation is presented. Enough arms are twisted. Things happen. … Their motivation, as big entities, is profit. That’s their job. That’s what they’re in the business for, whereas historically and even today, many smaller organic producers are still driven by those original values. They still think it’s important that they treat their animals well, and that their children have good teeth, and that the environment is protected, and they value watching the meadowlarks flying through their fields. They are driven by a different set of motivations outside the standards, which you might call ‘organic-plus’.

CI: Do you find that most of the students that come to the program here at Guelph are interested in participating in small-scale organic farming, or are some of them looking to get an education that might eventually help them act as consultants for some larger agricultural firm?

AC: Well, there are only fifteen students in the major, and I think eleven or twelve of them are farmers. Perhaps ten out of the fifteen are organic farmers, the children of organic farmers. They come here already halfway there so you’re not starting from zero in teaching them. The kids that aren’t farmers who come into this are at somewhat of a disadvantage. I’m not from a farm myself. I’m from San Francisco.

I guess the other thing that maybe I should make clear at this point is that the purpose of a degree in organic agriculture is not necessarily farming. The major was designed with many different outcomes possible. Every course is team-taught by both a social scientist and a biophysical scientist. You’re learning about rural community and social equity and building social capital and things of that sort at the same time that you’re learning about composting and homeopathy and Dexter cattle. It’s a very holistic approach. We fully expect and acknowledge and encourage a range of outcomes. You might get a degree in organic agriculture and become a social policy analyst with the government. You might become a retailer or a seed trader. There are all kinds of outcomes that would suit someone who is not now a farmer, and maybe someone who is now a farmer and might also want to become a social policy analyst. It doesn’t really preclude that. That is one thing that is very unique about this major. We intentionally designed it so that many different people will be taught organic principles because we anticipate a future where there will be a real demand for those kinds of people, people who can think holistically, people who can design systems to capture economic synergies or ecological synergies, and people who understand the principles of problem-avoidance by design, which is really how I teach organic practice.

I think the other thing to say is that there is just nothing that organic farmers do that conventional farmers can’t do. They can all do it. It is really just good ecologically sound practice. Historically many – and even today – many conventional farmers farm organically. They don’t call it ‘organic’, and they may still apply Round-Up now and then, or they may still do things that would be disallowed under organic standards, but they still use crop rotation, compost manure, and some of them farm by the phases of the moon! Even today, some organic farmers do that, the biodynamic farmers. There is a lot more similar than there is dissimilar. What concerns me about ‘sustainability’ – and actually I don’t like the word, and I don’t like it for what we’re doing – but the problem with ‘sustainability’ is that it can mean whatever you want it to mean. It has no defined meaning. Organic has a defined meaning. Even if I don’t like the meaning, it is a defined meaning. I can look at it, you can look at it, and we can say something is or isn’t organic because it has a defined meaning. … You can call anything ‘sustainable’. I have heard it said that corn for ethanol is sustainable. I don’t think it is. But I don’t have a basis for arguing it because there is no defined meaning.

Date of Interview: 06/19/2009
Location: University of Guelph, Guelph, ON
Link: www.plant.uoguelph.ca/faculty/eclark