Two certification experts spoke at a Napa Valley Grapegrowers event in late July at COPIA in downtown Napa, following an on stage conversation with Steve Matthiasson of Napa and Jason Haas of Paso.

See the charts and photos FREE on SUBSTACK.

“You were just hearing from some really seasoned organic and now regenerative organic farmers. We’re going to take it like a little step back because there’s a lot of folks who are in different places along the spectrum of what we would consider a transition,” said Beckett Parr as she began her talk. [Alanis Lindquist from ROA spoke during the second half of the session.]

CCOF history in a nutshell - photo (see substack for photo).

First Principles | Biological Balance

“When organic was conceived certification in the early 70s, late 1960s, it was really about a holistic system of management, and you heard from the two growers talk about earlier today how really the goal of an organic system is to wean yourself off of inputs, hopefully entirely, right, and come into biological balance,” Beckett Parr said.

For those who pooh pooh organic certification (God knows why) Beckett Parr reminded the audience, “Organic is the most regulated, scrutinized, and transparent farming system in the world, and Steve Matthiasson [who spoke earlier in the proceedings] is not incorrect in saying that there is a lot of paperwork involved and it is highly scrutinized.

But it also means that it presents an opportunity to communicate to consumers about why you’re doing what you’re doing, how you’re doing what you’re doing, in a transparent and fair way, so there’s a lot of different benefits of organic.

I think you heard some of those from the growers earlier today.

There’s environmental benefits, there’s social benefits, and there’s also economic benefits.

And you heard some questions from the audience about how much does it cost and how much more am I going to make…it’s very crop specific.

SEE PHOTO

“So just a little bit of an organic timeline…organic is an age-old concept coming out of indigenous farming and indigenous food systems the world over.

“But as a certification, it was really codified beginning in the 1960s, early 1970s.

“The organization that I work for, CCOF, which was founded as California Certified Organic Farmers was founded by a passionate group of farmers here in California in 1973, and it was an all volunteer organization.

“Farmers developed standards together around their kitchen tables, and then they went out and said to their neighbors, ‘Do you want to transition into this thing that we’re calling organic?"‘ And it was volunteer for about a decade, all the way up into the early 1980s.

“And something that I think is really interesting is that this type of organizing was happening across the country. There were different farming organizations, farmer-led, being like, ‘Okay, we’re going to develop standards together for this thing called organic, and then we’re going to certify each other.’

“So farmers actually went out to each other’s fields and said, “Do you make the cut or do you not make the cut?…

“It took a couple decades for that to be codified into law. The California Organic Law was passed in 1990, and the federal law wasn’t passed until 2002. And so, in the early stages of organic, there were different definitions here in California and other places as certifications arose, and then as it became codified into state and federal law, it became unified. And that’s when the unification happened. We did give a bit of sovereignty over to the federal government. So now it’s the USDA organic law, and the way that the regulatory framework works is that there’s federal laws and standards.

Federal Oversight

It’s run through the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, through their Agricultural Marketing Service, and they house what’s called the National Organic Program, the NOP. It oversees accreditation standards and investigation for the entire country, and today there’s over 80 certification bodies. CCOF is one of them. [NOP audits and certifies the 80 certifiers].

We [at CCOF] certify about 15% of the U.S. market.

I’d like to think that’s because we’re fabulous at what we do. I think it’s also based on the fact that we were born in California, and we have the largest agricultural market in the country.

So CCOF spans all 50 states, and we also operate in Mexico and Canada. We are accredited by the National Organic Program. That means they audit us, we audit you, they audit us.

It is a lot of paper, and then we go out and we inspect and we certify organic farmers, handlers, retail operations, as well as livestock.

We were founded in 1973. We are a member-governed nonprofit organization. That means our membership base elects our board of directors. We have 15 members on our board of directors who are all farmers, processors, handlers, or livestock operators, and it is really the lifeblood of our organization to be accountable to our membership through that function. Today we have over 5,000 members. That means 5,000 individual operations.

Some of those are half-acre urban farms. Some of those are 60,000-acre farms in the Central Valley. We certify Whole Foods, which is one member but 500 stores. So think about the scale of operation that we’re talking about. It’s also extremely complex from a governance perspective to try to meet the needs of all of those different folks in all of those different production categories.

So here’s our pop quiz: What do you know about certified organic agriculture? And if you’re already certified organic, you are not allowed to answer this question. So anybody else in the room, do you know what do you know about certified organic agriculture? You heard some things this morning. You can draw on their experience.

No herbicides.

No GMOs.

No, yes. Non-genetically modified organisms are prohibited. No synthetic herbicides.

Biodiversity.

Biodiversity

There are conservation and biodiversity standards written into the organic law, so you do have to maintain. For example, in your organic system plan, you have to maintain or conserve wildlife. So it takes into consideration: Do you have a stream that’s running through your vineyard? How are you managing that biologically? How are you accounting for the biota that’s coming onto your farmland through that? Other things that are in organic certification.

You have to be doing performing these practices for a certain period of time before you can be certified.

Yes. Does anybody know how much time it takes to farm organically before you can be certified?

It is three years.

So from the last time you applied something to your operation that’s not allowed in organic production to certification has to be three years.

Something I like to mention for vineyard operators: when you are putting stakes in the ground inside of an inside of an organic vineyard, you are not allowed to use treated wood. So, for those of you who have treated wood, this is something to consider in your organic transition.

If I’m starting to transition, I’m now writing down everything that I’m doing over that three years and making sure that everything is an allowable substance. So…three-year transition, no synthetic herbicides, no GMOs, biological conservation.

Labor is not part of it. It was part of the original impetus. There were a lot of things that came into organic as part of the original founders’ consensus, but it did not make it into the federal regulations.

So labor is not part of the organic standards. But when you are using biological inputs, your workers are safer, right? Like we would much rather have somebody spraying a stylet oil than some synthetic input that would be more toxic to human health.

Can you clarify what certified mentioned certified planting material? What exactly does that mean?

There is a materials list, so when you are considering going organic, there are three major places you can look to see if your inputs are allowed or not allowed.

1 There’s OMRI, which is the Organic Materials Review Institute.

2 There’s the CDFA here in California, California Department of Food and Agriculture maintains a list.

3 Washington State Department of Agriculture maintains a list as well, and you can check with us if you decide to get certified by CCF.

We have our own list as well. Once you’re in the process of applying with us, we have our own member portal where you can check to see if something’s allowed or not, and upload or download the certificates of what you’re using.

The Organic Material Review Institute–fun fact–founded at CCOF, incubated, and then ran off and became its own business.

We’ve done that with a couple of them over the last 50 years, but that was a very successful one that we probably should have figured out how to keep. But if it says OMRI on it, it is allowed.

Organic is also third party verified. We are the third party verifying your pesticides, so no synthetic pesticides. There are many allowable organic pesticides at this point. So if you’re on the input substitution route, there are equivalents. There are biologically derived pesticides and non-synthetics.

There’s also a lot of really interesting organismal pesticides [biopesticides] at this point. It’s a whole new field, not just like releasing insects into your vineyard, but also how do we deal with microbiota and cultivate specific types of microbiota to be controlling things in the environment.

Fertilizers, pesticides–these are things you want to be taking into consideration with certified organic agriculture.

So, for those of you all who are buying land or renting land, you can get an affidavit of land use history from the previous owner or lessee, and if they haven’t applied materials that are prohibited, you are allowed to transition quicker into certified organic production. You want to be thinking about planting rootstock and fertility.

“Pest management…We talked about materials on the national list. So again, there’s several places where you can look for available and approved inputs, and those are all maintained by the national list.

Both organic and regenerative organic require significant record keeping.

So that means, what are you applying? When are you applying it? How much are you applying? It means, what are you harvesting? How much are you harvesting? Where is it going? There are record keeping logs that we have that are available as templates on the internet.

If you don’t use paper, there’s a lot of really interesting applications, and you can come and talk to me later. We have farmers that keep all of their receipts in shoe boxes, and we have multi-billion-dollar corporations that have their own databases that they have 5,000 people who work in their fields that they’re all using. So everything in between is happening in our certified organic community.

Buffers

There is no set buffer because all biological and ecological processes are a little bit different.

What we’re going to take into consideration is who are your neighbors, what are they growing? Is there a hedgerow? Which direction is the wind? And so it’s something that you would write out when you’re applying for organic certification. You fill out this thing called the organic system plan, and it asks you, what does your ecology look like around you? What do the parcels look like around you? And how are you going to manage for drift if you are up against folks who are managing conventionally? And so we would be asking you to help co-design something that’s going to keep you safe.

What would be an acceptable answer to manage drift?

That’s very technical question. Is it like a hillside? Is it like what does the ecology look like around you? Is there are there buffer trees in between you? So if you want, if it’s very specific, you and I can get down later, and I will connect you to somebody who’ll be like, here’s an example of somebody in your neighborhood.

What about herbicide drift from neighbors?

Herbicide drift does happen, and there is legal precedent here in California for organic farmers to be protected from herbicide drift.

A few years ago, Jacobs Farm del Cabo, their big tomato operation, they also grow packaged herbs. They experienced pesticide drift from their Brussels sprout neighbors down on the Santa Cruz coast, and they sued them and won here in state court. It went all the way to the Supreme Court in California, and the settlement was about a million dollars, which was great for them because they lost the whole crop. But the better thing about it was that it created legal precedent for people here in California who are growing here to have compensation from their neighbors if they have drift.

We advise folks to make sure you have really good signage.

Make sure you’re in conversation with your neighbors. Make sure you’re keeping track of when they’re spraying. Just noting it down…Oh, they’re out there with boom sprayer again. ‘Okay, I’m going to write it down.’

As part of organic certification, there are testing protocols. We do testing on 5% of our members every year, and then we do drop-in testing based on complaints and investigations. So we have a whole complaints and investigation team of six people.

The Basic Timeline

You have to submit an organic system plan, answer some significant questions before inspection, and then it takes about a month and a half to two months that you get an inspection scheduled. So it’s a few months. If you’re interested in doing it, especially for you all, start in the fall so you’ll be ready in the spring.

I have some information about consumer behavior, but I’m going to stop talking and hand it over to our next speaker to make sure that we have time for questions. But I do have a bunch of information about you know who’s buying what and how they understand the organic label that I think would be helpful for your audience.

Alania Lindquist, ROA

I work at the Regenerative Organic Alliance. We are a nonprofit organization that was founded in 2018 by a consortium of educators, policymakers, farmers, brands, and individuals who felt that we could do better in agriculture, and felt that there were some some shortcomings in the way agriculture was practiced, even organic agriculture that wasn’t addressing some of the big issues that we were seeing.

My role at the ROA is that I’m the farm brand liaison, and I work with our growers and with our brands, and help them connect with each other so that we can build a regenerative organic movement and help address some of the supply chains needed to make that that happen.

What is Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC)?

So, Jessie was fantastic in explaining what organic is, and organic is the foundational requirement for regenerative organic certification.

So, everything that’s required to be organic needs to be maintained to become ROC, and we add on three pillars that address soil health and animal welfare, and farmer and worker fairness.

So it’s a farm-level certification that is third-party verified by certifying bodies like CCOF, and those crops can then carry that certification to processed products, and companies and brands can buy those those crops and carry the claim on pack.

And I have some examples here of the variety of certified and branded products that we work with.

ROC History and Adoption

Our initial certification, a farm level certification, happened in 2020, and Jason Haas [who spoke earlier at the event] was part of that pilot.

We are now certified in over 47 countries on over 22 million acres.

We certify 583 different kinds of crops on over 540 farms and ranches in the global north, and then we work with over 55,000 smallholder farmers in the global south. We have 374 licensed brands, so brands that are buying those crops and turning them into a product. And you can see that we have over 330,200 products in the marketplace right now, and we have 15 approved certified bodies that we work with.

I just wanted to shout out some of our ROC vineyards around the world.

We have 44 regenerative organic certified vineyards that we certify globally–25 of them are here in California, and 28 of those vineyards are making a branded product.

So it carries carries the license through to the product level. So shout out to you guys.

Jessie shared some of the organic and agroecological principles that came into founding the organic movement. The regenerative organic certification adds pillars onto that organic certification that focus on practices and outcomes, and actively improving the ecosystem, and also requires continuous improvement and building on the soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness practices that both Steve and Jason highlighted in the work that they’re doing.

Some of the soil health practices that are recognized under the Regenerative Organic standard are working with cover cropping, diverse and permanent cover crops, reducing or eliminating tillage, composting, mulching, and roller crimping, eliminating pesticides and herbicides, and use soil monitoring.

“Regenerative organic farming begins with a simple but transformative idea: soil is a living system.”

That certainly is an aspect of the certification.

Biodiversity, again, as we heard, having pollinator habitat strips and diverse cover crops to bring in some of those beneficial insects, integrating livestock into the operation, reducing chemical use that can harm beneficial insects or any insects really, and using you know the local species that are already found and creating habitats for them, like owls and bat boxes, to help with some rodent and insect controls, and creating environments that where where those species can thrive as well.

So, integrating livestock, while it is not required for the regenerative organic certification, a lot of vineyards, especially, have livestock integrated into their operations. Sheep are probably the most popular. But I’ve seen poultry, cattle, llamas, and goats.

There’s various benefits to bringing livestock into your operation, including weed management and targeted grazing for certain weeds, pest control, reducing the mechanical mowing passes or herbicide use that you would use to otherwise control cover crops, and of course the improved fertility from from the urine and feces of those animals can help increase the biodiversity and microbiotics of the soil.

Water resilience was another point that Jason and Steve touched upon. In California, using less water is an important aspect of agriculture here, and so increasing the water holding capacity of the soil by using the soil health practices and maintaining that water throughout the season is going to be very helpful for your operation.

And soil that’s not covered does not have the same water holding capacity that a soil that has cover crops planted in them.

Social Fairness

Social fairness–this is a really important aspect of our certification. And thank you, Steve and Jason, for touching upon this.

This is a very unique aspect of our certification, and one that often causes a lot of confusion or concern.

We recognize that people involved in agriculture as important as how you’re treating the land, and so we do part of our standard that’s audited at the farm level is a social fairness pillar, and we look at how workers are being treated, that they have the opportunity to have good working hours, that they’re getting paid a living wage, and freedom of association and grievance mechanisms in place.

And Jason, I really appreciate you sharing how that’s changed your operation and how the communication has really improved your business.

This highlights a question that was asked about cost and some of the return on investment, and I don’t have specific metrics about the dollar increase at the farm level because it’s all going to be context specific.

Resilience as ROI

I thought it was really interesting to look at some of the practices that are required by our standard and some of the outcomes that we’ve seen coming from those practices, and so looking at the return on investment as a long-term resiliency outcome, having vineyards that have more water retention, better operating efficiencies, better ecosystem services, higher quality fruit, and then also through the certification, that brand differentiation, those are all return on investments that you’re making at the farm level to offset maybe some of the higher costs of practicing agriculture this way.

Consumer Response

SPINS data chart on Substack

Here’s what we’re seeing in the marketplace. So this slide here is shared with us from SPINS, which collects data at the retail level at the checkout. Whether it’s through Amazon, Whole Foods, or Safeway.

This previous year we saw 22 percent year-over-year growth in the sales of regenerative organic certified labeled products, and not only did we see increased sales in products that were labeled regenerative organic, but it actually increased the sales of other sustainable and ecological labels as well.

So you can see that organic sales, when paired with regenerative organic label as well, actually went up, including non-GMO and Fair Trade.

This is our most recent sales data on regenerative organic wine sales, and I think what’s really interesting to note at the bottom here, and I took this quote from an article that I read, is organic wine sales are at $13 billion dollars to date, and it’s expected to triple in the next six years.

I think that’s a really important metric for everybody to consider is that overall wine consumption is going down, but this projection is showing that people are more concerned about what’s in the bottle and the labels that are on the bottle as well.

And here’s some more metrics that speak to that as well. Again, what consumers are looking for, and somebody [Steve Matthiasson] quoted millennials, Gen Zers, and even younger people want to know what they’re paying for. They’re not averse to paying more.

They’re not averse to buying something that’s better quality, but they want to know that that means something.

And so when they’re looking at certifications and labels that are on the food and beverages and clothing that they’re purchasing, these certifications do matter to them. And I think we’re only going to see this increase in the future.

Some of the metrics that I have on the bottom here highlight that. There’s a plethora of information online, from webinars to courses and podcasts, and of course we have live experts in the room today. Jason and Steve, and I also want to call out Pam Strayer, who’s the editor of Slow Wine USA, who has really been sharing so much knowledge with me. So thank you so much.

There’s many ways that you can include regenerative practices in your operations. Becoming Regenerative Organic Certified is one way of showing and sharing the work that you do. But even if our standard is not for you, I encourage you to start looking at this work. We are here to be in community with you and to cheer you on and support your work. So thank you all so much.

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