Organic, Inc. - Wisdom sown in organic field

[Oscar]

Organic, Inc. - Wisdom sown in organic field

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HARVEY SCHACHTER

Organic, Inc. By Samuel Fromartz Harcourt, 294 pages, $32.95

When Pennsylvania organic farmer Jim Crawford wanted to expand his business, he turned to the customers at the farmers markets he sells at in Washington, D.C., raising more than $250,000 (U.S.)

Not many businesses can appeal to consumers for such support, but his tie to customers was unusual because of their desire for food they saw as more healthful and fresh than they could get from supermarkets and their wish to help preserve small, independent farms.

There's a lesson in that: If you give customers something they prize, in a world that seems to ignore their wishes, they will go beyond being customers to serving as advocates -- and even in some cases reach into their bank account to help you grow.

In the past decade, organic food has grown in public consciousness. It's more than a means of avoiding harm from pesticides. It's a social and political statement about nutrition, good health and environmental consciousness. In some cases, as with Mr. Crawford, there's an added lure of buying directly from an independent farmer who planted and nursed the seeds nearby. But in other cases, organic means big business rather than small business, as Whole Foods spreads its alternative supermarkets across the continent and purveyors of soy milk and bagged organic lettuce similarly span North America.

Business writer Samuel Fromartz charts the growth of that industry -- and probes its inherent tensions -- in Organic, Inc., offering lessons to those who run both large and small businesses, particularly with a social thrust.

Leadership and management lessons can come from books devoted to specific issues, but they also can be picked up from reading about how businesses have overcome -- or failed to overcome -- challenges.

Organic foods would have seemed a poor bet a few decades ago for successful businesses, yet some idealists embraced the notion of pure foods, applied business techniques and prospered. Mr. Fromartz traces the industry from the small, British organic movement of the 1920s, through the 1970s back-to-the-land movement in North America, to today, where large organic food businesses can afford to divert some of their profits to a research and promotional institute for organic food.

The organic food industry has been growing 10 to 20 per cent a year but interestingly the number of new consumers buying such product has stalled in the past two years, he finds, perhaps running up against a price barrier or a natural limit to the number of devotees.

Organic farming is a movement, but it's also a business. Mr. Fromartz reports how Jim Cochran, a central figure in the creation of the organic strawberry industry on California's central coast, for a period kept broccoli off his sales list so competitors wouldn't realize how effective it is in crop rotation, inhibiting a potent fungal disease, verticillium wilt. Keeping their success formula a secret, he notes, is "a common strategy among farmers torn between a desire to spread organic methods and an urge to maintain a competitive edge."

The industry, like agriculture in general, has become bifurcated as large-scale organic farmers have become dominant. Earthbound Farms, which started on a 2½-acre garden plot, is now selling $360-million annually of bagged lettuce, driving down prices and making smaller producers uncompetitive.

As well, traditional food corporations, sensing an opportunity, have entered the field. Mr. Fromartz observes how Kellogg Co., which has its roots in John Harvey Kellogg's health spa, bought one of the better known health cereal brands today, Kashi, but keeps its name off the box to avoid tarnishing the brand, which in Sanskrit means "food for spiritual enlightenment."

In 2004, when organic farmers in New York State met, they were asked whether they were a movement or an industry. The small-scale farmers present all declared they were a movement but the reality is different, as the need to hold such a discussion indicated.

"The growth of organic food had come at an awful price, compromising standards, undercutting small firms, diluting healthy food, ignoring social justice -- polluting the very ideals embodied in the word organic," Mr. Fromartz writes. "The path that agrarian idealists had taken in the 1970s -- to farm in concert with nature and sell organic food outside the dominant food system -- became compromised by its success. Organic food had become too popular to remain in a backwoods niche, morphing into yet another food industry profit centre."

The book is nicely framed, as Mr. Fromartz follows his own growing interest in tasty, healthful foods to move from his kitchen table to the farms and boardrooms that bring him -- and us -- our foods. It's comprehensive, filled with interesting information on the industry, but balanced and always easy to read. The focus, however, is American, and so important issues, such as regulation for Canadians, aren't covered, although the U.S. legislative experience is eye opening, as traditional agricultural interests fight to twist organic legislation to their ends.

In Addition: A book on a box seems odd, but Marc Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 376 pages, $28.50) is a fascinating account of how entrepreneur Malcolm McLean changed our world by developing the shipping container, which could be stacked efficiently in huge numbers on ocean vessels and then be carried from a few massive deepwater ports on trucks or railroad cars. It enables today's globalization of goods, and Mr. Levinson is deft in describing the resulting changes in the industry -- the battles over traditional stevedore jobs, the ascendancy of new ports, the growth of transportation giants -- and the impact on the larger society, including the pivotal role played by these shipping containers in the Vietnam War.

Just In: Competition expert Michael Porter of Harvard University teams with Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg of the University of Virginia to examine health care as measured by health outcomes per dollar expended in Redefining Health Care (Harvard Business School Press, 506 pages, $44.95).

harvey@harveyschachter.com