We didn't need a lot from the government. The legitimate industry was working quite well, we contended, and was improving. What we needed was some sort of national, legal standard that would require anyone who wanted to use the label to at least meet some kind of minimum standard.

So what we needed, we thought, were three simple things. First, a consistent, base, national standard that anyone wanting to use the organic label would have to meet. Second, an accreditation scheme (similar to the accreditation system used by educational institutions) that would evaluate all certifiers to make certain that they followed reliable certification procedures that consumers could depend on. Third, enforcement of the legal standard. That's it.

This was to be a minimum involvement on the part of the federal government. Even the Senate Report accompanying the legislation we got, recognized that the "organic industry, as well as consumer and environmental advocacy organizations" wanted to "limit severely the Federal Government's discretionary authority and involvement in this industry . . ." The Report acknowledged that the organic industry had argued that "rather than reinvent the wheel" the government "should take advantage of the network of private organic certification organizations that exist in nearly every state." The Report indicated that Congress agreed with this sentiment and therefore "proposed a partnership between government and private organizations in standard setting and certification." (Report # 101-357, p. 291)

Most of us, I suspect, thought that this should be a pretty simple undertaking on the part of government. Some of us even went so far as to suggest that all we really needed was a national definition and went so far as to get Senator Fowler to introduce such a definition in the Farm Conservation and Water Protection Act and Senator Lugar made a similar effort through the Conservation Enhancement and Improvement Act.

In any case many of us believed that given the three simple things we asked for, we would end up with a very small staff, consisting of maybe two or three people, a simple, but thorough accreditation system, and maybe a ten page rule that made the organic standard espoused in the Organic Foods Production Act explicit.

What we got seems to be something quite different. We now have a an almost incomprehensible 600 page rule, that took 7 years to produce which proposes a complete takeover of the certification function, and a burgeoning bureaucracy that will surely become a staff of 50 to 75 people within the next two or three decades.

How could this happen? How could such a simple request turn into such a complicated and expensive undertaking? To some extent we are all to blame. We all saw clues that it was happening and we ignored them. We all saw some small advantages that we personally felt we might gain by letting the process play itself out, so we failed to say "stop". Many of us even lobbied for the funding to keep the process going.

But how it happened is no longer the important issue (except as a lesson in history). The real task now is to figure out how we could have gone so far astray, and how to get back to our original purpose.

On my farm when any process has gotten out of hand and is clearly no longer working, I take time out, shut everything down, and rethink things from the beginning. Since I observed things veering off from my intended purpose all along, it usually doesn't take very long to figure out where things went wrong and how to get things back on track and moving productively in the right direction. Maybe I'm naive here, but I have this compelling instinct in the middle of my gut that the same strategy could work here.

Might it be that the NOSB could most productively use its time when we meet again on March 16th to undergo a similar exercise: stop, refocus, get back to basics? I have this terrible, haunting feeling that if we just review and redo what we have we will not end up with an efficient and effective national program that serves the needs of growers and consumers---surely the initial, and still valid, intent of everything we've tried to do.