I recently had a chance to speak with Bob Scowcroft, long-time leader in the organic movement and co-founder of the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF). During a delightfully meandering conversation, we talked about his early organizing experience, how far the organic industry has come, how far it still has to go, and cultivating the heroes who will get it there. This post is part one of two.
UVM: What shaped your early career? What events lead up to you co-founding the Organic Farming Research Foundation in 1990?
Bob Scowcroft: I graduated college in 1973 (I had majored in following the Allman Brothers Band) and spent the next 5 years adventuring, traveling, and doing carpentry. After my last adventure to rural Alaska, I returned to Washington, D.C., where I volunteered to stuff envelopes and empty waste basket for an advocacy organization called the Alaska Coalition. With no real academic or resume experience in that field, it only took me 4 weeks to start making suggestions that led to a job offer as office manager. Later that year, I became one of the national organizers working for the Alaska Coalition on behalf of the Alaska Lands and Conservation Act. The gift of gab has gotten me a long way!
A colleague in the office was working on pesticide spray drift issues, and, unbeknownst to me, he made a $10,000 gift to Friends of the Earth (FOE) to hire me as their national organizer. So my (future wife) and I moved to California and I began working in the FOE San Francisco office. Soon, I was organizing natural food stores to work on federal regulatory policy to ban Agent Orange and end off-farm spray drift. By 1979, organic farmers were coming to me and saying that we (FOE) should be “for” organic farming, instead of putting all our energies into fighting pesticide use. In response to their advocacy, I, on FOE’s letterhead, wrote one letter in support of the California Organic Food Act (the first organic food law in the U.S.), which went into effect in 1980.
By 1981, organic farmers throughout the state, if not the country, were telling me that Friends of the Earth was the only environmental group that understood the core philosophy of building the soil to grow good food. That became my emphasis for my remaining 5 years at FOE. During that time, other organic farmer organizations, natural food businesses, and even a few consumer organizations began to reach out and include me in early coalition building activities. One of the first initiatives was the Organic Research Act of 1982, which evolved into the Low Input Sustainable Agriculture Act, and by 1988, the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SARE) was eventually funded.
This lead to me leaving FOE and eventually, in 1987, being hired as the very first full-time executive director of California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). It really was an amazing period of time. During those 5 years, where we played a role with Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet and Meryl Streep—this was during the time of Alar—to publicly place organic as a solution to pesticide contamination in our food. We also, with the states of Washington and Oregon, collaborated and rewrote all of our state organic laws, so we could synchronize trade, and if that wasn’t enough, we began to collaborate with our peer organic farmer led groups around the nation to write the national Organic Foods Production Act. Eventually, we did not have the resources to respond to the vast quantity of organic production, policy, and educational questions. Thus, the CCOF board and I founded the Organic Farming Research Foundation in 1990 as a 501(c)(3) sister organization. During those 5 years, we were among a number of organic certification groups that had the vision and desire to collaborate together and occupied the national landscape for anything related to organic. NOFA-VT was one of those groups.
UVM: How have you seen the organic industry change during your time in the movement?
Scowcroft: In the 1980s and 90s, with very few exceptions, things in the policy realm were organic grower-driven. It was the growers who stood up and said they were not going to accept fraudulent activities anymore. Back then, there were some small family farms that were cheating and we had no enforcement mechanism to deal with it. There were 20 or so certification agencies that ID’d fraud, organized into state and regional groups, and wrote the national law. It was a farmer-driven law based on addressing fraud and mislabeling, and we wanted to address this on a national scale. In the last decade or two, other constituencies, like environmental and consumer NGOs, have been drawn to and embraced the term organic. In addition, organic labels began to follow the more conventional business model—distributors, processors, retailers, co-ops, all working together with producers.
In 1988, organic sales were estimated at $89 million. Twenty-four years later, the Organic Trade Association projects organic sales at $31 billion!
A lot of labels—for example, “organic hero,” “elder historian”—get thrown my way. I don’t feel like I’m a hero, by any stretch of the imagination. In my mind, the real heroes are coming along in the next generation or two. It took us 30 years to get to 4% of the food economy – the term “hero” will be applied to the ones who will get us to 40%. That will require a whole new skill set, some of which we can’t even really imagine right now.
In my so-called retirement phase, I’m enamored with the vision that a number of academic institutions are implementing, offering an integrated sustainable agriculture system to students and community. The University of Vermont is among the leaders of that. I desperately wish there was such a thing as reincarnation and I was 26 years old and I could move to Vermont! Many leaders of food movement are in Vermont—Enid [Wonnacott, of NOFA-VT], UVM Extension, progressive businesses, Senator Leahy. Vermont has all the tools in place to identify and launch the heroes we were talking about earlier. You must be the model.
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If you enjoyed this interview, you might be interested in the oral history of Bob Scowcroft from the UC Santa Cruz library, which provides an in-depth narrative of his life experience. You can also watch his recent talk at Pie Ranch, where he provided a history of the organic movement.
