Episode #257
Bob Scowcroft: A Carrot Caper Birthed The Organic Label

Long before “organic” became a household word, Bob Scowcroft was in the trenches helping to build the standards and integrity that would become the national organic label. Here Bob recounts the legendary “carrot caper” – a brazen case of fraudulent Mexican carrots re-bagged as organic, the whistleblower who risked her career, and the lawsuit that forced the state to take action. He also revisits the Alar apple crisis, Meryl Streep’s explosive Donahue moment, and the grassroots collaboration that eventually led Senator Leahy to champion the Organic Foods Production Act. A rare firsthand look at the messy, passionate origins of the organic movement.

Our Bob Scowcroft interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Bob Scowcroft in California, Spring 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with Bob Scowcroft. Bob has been somebody I met long ago before Real Organic Project, when we were starting Keep the Soil in Organic and Bob became an early supporter of our mission, and we’ll talk about that, Bob. But Bob have a long history with organic. I know we’re going to have so much to talk about. We’ll have to cut some parts out, but how did you get here?

Bob Scowcroft 0:17
How did I get here? I would say that there’s really two parts of my adulthood journey. The first part was off every grid imaginable, and traveler and adventurer. The end of that run, I landed in Washington, DC, and volunteered at a group called the Alaska Coalition to work to save, save Alaska. It was BLM land at that time, and they wanted to redefine the 100 million acres in the parks and wild rivers and wilderness.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:17
I sat next to a gentleman named Erik Jansson who worked for Friends of the Earth. He was very militant, anti-Agent Orange, really, but anyway other pesticides, other fungicides. He just would go after them day in and day out. You listen when you’re sharing a door on saw horses in the back of the Friends of the Earth office. I’m on Alaska, and he’s on pesticides.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:48
After quite a period of time, I’d started to think about what he was talking about, and I didn’t like the idea of 9,000 chemicals. The Alaska legislation failed, and near the end of that journey, unbeknownst to me, Erik gave, also unbeknownst to me, Erik gave David Brower a $10,000 check and said, “This is the best organizer I’ve ever met. �

Bob Scowcroft 2:14
He was on it with the Alaska Coalition. He understood phone banks. He understood direct mail. Had a good communications friendliness over the phone, and he should become Friends of the Earth national organizer. I was surprised I hadn’t asked. FOE didn’t have an open position.

Bob Scowcroft 2:36
Brower was somewhat suspended at the time because he had spent too much money, and he took the $10,000 check, cashed it, put it in the FOE bank, and told all the rest of the staff they had a new national organizer. Surprise, that was me.

Bob Scowcroft 2:53
People were rather upset, though I was friends with them, but they got the money, and I said, “Okay, well, I want to be the national organizer in San Francisco, because I’m going back there with my girlfriend.” I have this project called the store network. I want to organize environmental businesses into different sectors, into an environmental chamber of commerce, grassroots, small businesses.

Bob Scowcroft 3:22
I had started with Alaska already, and I had about 20 Alaska outfitter Alaska-centric, not on location, but rather interest outfitters that cared deeply about saving the state’s wild lands. I had that store network, and they’d do raffles and write letters, but I came out to California and I said, “Well, it’s time to turn to help Erik and his issues on spray drift and size of nozzle.” I had no clue that spray nozzles were so important for drift, I learned. I thought, why not reach out to some natural food stores to write letters on behalf of Friends of the Earth?

Bob Scowcroft 4:09
I started to do that, and a gentleman from the CCOF chapter in Marin area, Sy Weisman, wrote me and said, “You would have to believe in reincarnation to stop and ban 9000 chemicals. Why don’t you just get rid of them all and start supporting organic farming and organic farmers?” He said, “We’d like you to come visit our chapter and actually see organic farms and meet organic farmers.” That was cool. I always like to be out in the outdoors and visit farms.

Bob Scowcroft 4:46
I went to a chapter meeting, and that’s all it took. Stuart Fishman, who was with Rainbow Grocery at the time, and Sy convinced me that I really needed to be in favor of organic, and the long, strange trip began from there.

Dave Chapman 5:06
It’s very interesting that you came in through the door of the environmental movement. I actually don’t hear that much, and it’s always been amazing to me that there isn’t a more intimate connection between the organic movement and the environmental movement. I think there is in Europe, but I think that that, for reasons that evade me, there seems to be a greater distance here.

Bob Scowcroft 5:32
I have a lot of thoughts on that, and I happen to be writing about that on my own manuscript right now. Almost immediately, I was invited to add Friends of the Earth name to an initiative that Sy and others had started to make the California Health and Safety Code the definition of organic permanent. It had a sunset clause in it that said it goes out of business if nobody uses it on their labels. They wanted to say, hey, it’s being used on labels, and it needs to be permanent for this state.

Bob Scowcroft 6:13
They went around to the environmental groups and all said, we don’t even—what? Organic? No, that’s Birkenstocks and hippies and no, we got enough trouble underway with Reagan anyways. Came to me, and I said, well, that makes total sense, and I’ll have this–

Bob Scowcroft 6:31
I got a little store network, and I’ll get Brower, and I’ll put my name on a letter to support it. Very much to my surprise, David Brower said, no. No, Friends of the Earth cannot support organic legislation. We, too, are in enough trouble and this is, this is just too controversial, and might probably means marijuana. Let’s just keep distance from it.

Bob Scowcroft 6:58
You wanted to sell into California, you had to put that health and safety code on your product.

Bob Scowcroft 7:31
Joan wrote a four page letter back, deeply, both academic and introspective, and said she’s not sure and probably not under the practices she knows at the moment that organic would be more nutritious. Let’s put that aside. Having a permanent organic label could someday create an alternative market to this agro industrial complex. For that reason alone, this is an environmental issue, and Friends of the Earth should support this.

Dave Chapman 8:06
Do you remember what year this was?

Bob Scowcroft 8:07
This was ’81. No, sorry, late ‘79 and early ’80. With that in hand, I wrote it. It went forward. This local assemblyman who’d just been elected here, a guy named Sam Farr who picked up from Vic Fazio who picked up the initiative.

Bob Scowcroft 8:08
Remarkably, really, what it came down to was just removing the sunset clause and 26569.11 became the regulation of the state right, which, by and large, meant if you wanted to sell into California, you had to put that health and safety code on your product.

Bob Scowcroft 8:37
So other gonna call it organic. In order to call it organic, you had to say, grown under the Health and Safety Code.

Bob Scowcroft 8:49
In order to call it organic, you had to say, “grown under the Health and Safety Code.”

Dave Chapman 9:00
Is that true for the people in California who are producing also?

Bob Scowcroft 9:04
Well, that was the law for people in California, but the very few processors, juicers, what few products came into the state, also had to say that. If they wanted to call their rice cakes, their cereal, their canned tomato pastes organic, they had to say, “grown under the Health and Safety Code.”�

Dave Chapman 9:30
I know there’s a spirited debate among friends about what state had the first organic standards, and Maine and California dispute that. I think there’s no dispute that California were the first government standards to define organic.�

Bob Scowcroft 9:47
I think Oregon and Maine had the first regulations, and California had the first law. There’s a big difference between a regulation promulgated in a department and a voted upon law of the land.�

Dave Chapman 10:02
What was the impact on California organic agriculture to have that law?�

Bob Scowcroft 10:09
It allowed the distributors and wholesalers to begin to offer products out of state. If you wanted to sell organic into Las Vegas, you said, “Hey, look, mine’s under the state law, Health and Safety Code, labeled accordingly.”�

Dave Chapman 10:26
We have standards and there are legal consequences for breaking those standards. �

Bob Scowcroft 10:31
Well, that came next down the road, but yes. There wasn’t any enforcement in the law, but they articulated a simplistic manner within which to claim, “Hey, that’s not organic,” and we complain. The local health department, a key component of that, because the California State Department of Agriculture said, “I want nothing to do with it. No way. We are not going to oversee it.”�

Bob Scowcroft 11:06
By and large, most of the organic farmers at that time said, “Back at you. We don’t want to have anything to do with CDFA. You guys are out there promoting this chemical and that chemical and not helping us and hindering us every time we complain about spray drift. It’s not a problem. What’s your issue?”�

Bob Scowcroft 11:28
It took quite a while for the organic farmers and the state to come to the point where it was now more of a business, and there was a very offensive violation of the Health and Safety Code, and that law with enforcement needed to be rewritten, and a complaint system and financial, if not criminal, components, would be added to it, and that was in ’88 and ’89.�

Dave Chapman 12:10
Tell me for yourself. You had just brokered, been part of a conversation to bring together Friends of the Earth, a large environmental organization, and organic in California, or organic as a concept, that there should be mutual support there, which is so obvious, but it wasn’t obvious at the time.�

Bob Scowcroft 12:40
No environmental group that I knew of in ’89—well, maybe CSPI, Center for Science and Public Interest, would dispute that a little bit because they had added Roger Blobaum on staff.�

Bob Scowcroft 12:55
But no national environmental group that I know of had an agriculture desk at all. They had environment and very active, and a few of them were concerned about DDT and methyl bromide, but none of them had made the connection for any alternative production systems that could be presented as a solution to these problems; just ban this, ban that.�

Dave Chapman 13:29
At that time, organic, which in America had grown really out of this counterculture movement. It was a bunch of hippies.�

Bob Scowcroft 13:41
We wore Birkenstocks too.�

Dave Chapman 13:42
We wore Birkenstocks, right. I’m sure that there were some fundamentalist Christians also participating, but the mass of the movement was this counterculture. When did Rodale bring the concept of organic and start the magazine? That was in the ‘50s, but it didn’t really explode until Vietnam and the response to Vietnam.�

Bob Scowcroft 14:18
I mean, it was Rodale who sent their western ad buyer, Floyd, to go organize California farmers to start a group in ’73. It was Rodale because they wanted to start New Farm magazine and have that as a farming organic thread, organic gardening, since the late ‘40s or early ‘50s. They wanted a farm magazine. They said, “Well, if we want one, we got to start it ourselves.�

Bob Scowcroft 14:52
That was the historic founding of it. You had like the Lundbergs from the ‘40s and ‘50s. You had the Amish.�

Dave Chapman 15:02
The Lundbergs were already doing organic farming in the ‘40s and ‘50s? �

Bob Scowcroft 15:06
One of the brothers. I still remember a wild party in my college rental where we were all excited. We had Lundberg organic rice in 1970. No law, no nothing. They just called it organic in how they farm. But the hipsters brought a back to the land movement to it, but the spirituality probably came as much from Whole Earth Catalog, some of the other original publications that offered tools that eventually became a system.�

Bob Scowcroft 15:48
I don’t think, I mean for me personally, having the green light to sign on to that one piece of legislation was like, not to over quote a Grateful Dead song, but the bus came by and I just got on it. Okay, now, I guess I’m an organic spokesperson for this one law. I’ve never farmed. I, at the time, couldn’t tell you exactly about soil fertility or pest management. I heard the words, but I had a group of retailers that were hungry for information, natural food stores, that were selling organic, they weren’t sure if it was or not. They had relationships with local farmers they were sure about.�

Bob Scowcroft 16:34
Here was this national environmental group with the Archdruid himself, David Brower, saying, yeah, organic’s now part of our portfolio. I got invited to the second EcoFarm to speak with Bob Rodale and Wes Jackson and Garth Youngberg. At the time, I knew Rodale was a rather towering figure, but Wes was just another writer attempting to get a book published.�

Dave Chapman 16:59
This was Bob Rodale. �

Bob Scowcroft 17:01
Bob Rodale. Thank you. Wes had a manuscript in front of Brower called New Roots for Agriculture, and he wanted to get that published under FOE. Garth had just written the organic task force report.�

Dave Chapman 17:14
This was 1980, 1981. That was the second out in ’80.�

Bob Scowcroft 17:20
Second or third. EcoFarm, I was the keynote to talk about organic as a solution, and we as an environmental group would lead the way.�

Dave Chapman 17:38
That’s so interesting. At that point, your focus was organic as an alternative system to chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers. There is another way. It wasn’t, I’m hearing, so focused on soil fertility and all of that Albert Howard Eve Balfour stuff. It was really coming from an environmental perspective of we’re poisoning ourselves. What can we do to stop this? More of a more of a Silent Spring perspective.�

Bob Scowcroft 18:02
Intensely alternative system. I didn’t know the planks of it, the pieces of it, but I knew that something needed to be entirely different in order to get off this treadmill. EcoFarm, particularly Rodale, led to an invitation to speak at the first Cornucopia conference in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and to talk about this store network.�

Bob Scowcroft 18:28
Just about everybody was enamored with the idea of organizing small businesses to be pro-environment and come out and talk about it. How did you do it? What do you see the resources? I said, basically, I see myself as a networker. I’m never a farmer; that became very repetitious over the years, but I know good ones when I see them and hear them, and I know small businesses trying to differentiate themselves in a town of supermarkets. I can provide the material, the information, the network. I think one of the things I’m rather proud of is the gift of gab and the superficial sound bite. Somehow I’m able to give two sentences to a reporter or a TV interview that encapsulates what they want to get out of their 60-second piece.�

Bob Scowcroft 19:38
From there, Cornucopia Conference led to another vehicle coming by that I jumped on. That was the way they did breakout groups in, I think, ’81 or ’82. They said, “Okay, Lehigh Valley, we want to be local. Use 700 people to break out in different ways. Lehigh is this one here, West Coast is here. New England is here.” West Coast had five people. Lehigh had 600 and something, a sort of classic Rodale moment.�

Bob Scowcroft 20:16
My group was Sego Jackson from Tilth and Garth Youngberg, who just came along, Lynn Coody from Oregon Tilth and me, and another person with Garth. The five of us, what are we going to do to change things? I said, “Well, the task force, how about legislation? How about we get organic research? Because you called for it. It’s there. It’s very easy to transfer it.” Lynn said, “Well, oh no, there was one other person in the circle. God, I forgot about him.” Peter DeFazio was there, sent from Weaver’s office. Jim Weaver was Congressman from Oregon, and he was interested in organic.�

Dave Chapman 20:59
Peter was not yet in Congress. �

Bob Scowcroft 21:01
He was just a lower level aid, actually. He said, “Well, hey, we can introduce something.” Lynn and Garth said, “We can write a draft.” I said, “Well, I got now 300 stores that would put up a poster saying we want the Organic Research Act.”�

Dave Chapman 21:23
Those 300 stores were all in California or the whole country. This is really interesting. At this point, did you feel very much that you were part of a movement? Were you excited as a group? Did you go, something is happening here?�

Bob Scowcroft 21:44
I come from the anti-war streets. This was, no doubt, a movement. It was counter to just about everything that industrial, supermarket, control of the food system, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, any chemical, any time. I was saying nah, none of it. I want something entirely different. There was definitely in my mind—�

Dave Chapman 22:11
There was a like-minded group, and you felt you were building something together.�

Bob Scowcroft 22:14
I’m at home. It felt really wonderful. All good people. There it was. Now we had a piece of legislation. Now we introduced it. All of a sudden, I was walking the hill for Friends of the Earth.�

Bob Scowcroft 22:31
Parallel to that, I was going to the natural foods Expo, which I had stumbled into, again, around 1980, ’81, convinced the owner of it, Doug Greene, to give me a card table in front of the entrance to just hand out pro organic and anti pesticide brochures. I was pretty overwhelmed. I was the only one there with a non profit table, and he liked it. They liked it. He said, well you should be inside and have it. We don’t really have a protocol here, but we’ll call you a non profit booth. Let’s see what happens.�

Dave Chapman 23:13
Was Expo a big deal at that point already? �

Bob Scowcroft 23:18
It’s the only deal. �

Dave Chapman 23:18
It was the only deal, but a lot of people were coming to it?�

Bob Scowcroft 23:21
Relatively speaking, yeah. There was definitely a thread of survival to all of this. That $10,000 check, the handshake agreement was when it was gone, I was gone. No problem. I never had a real job before like that. I excelled at selling Earth shoes for a couple of months, but even after a couple of months, that was that.�

Bob Scowcroft 23:47
The agreement was, if I brought in brand new money that was identifiable, clearly from my work, that that would be added to my so-called restricted account. They said, well, that’s cool. You’re doing good stuff. Your name’s out there. If every brochure we handed out had a coupon on it, every once in a while, you’re on a $35 membership with Friends of the Earth. Add it, Peggy. Add it to the pool.�

Bob Scowcroft 24:17
When the first year was up, they said, god, you’ve actually brought in a bunch of members and got our name out there really well. We wrote a little proposal for you and got some money for you to do a poster. Okay, another year. That was the first Expo, and I went down there. I got $7,000 a year. They took the other $3,000 for overhead, every expense, but I went down there and came back with about $3,500 in three days of fives and 20s, couple of $100 checks, seven more memberships, and I said, half year, you know? Yeah, we’ll get rid of that. You’re here. This is good.�

Bob Scowcroft 25:04
As a matter of fact, we have all these chapters out there that don’t really talk to each other and are not coordinators. Since you’re a national organizer, you’re also going to work with our 20 chapters and add those to your portfolio so they all start talking to each other, know what the organization is working on, and can offer any expertise that we could use in the grassroots.�

Bob Scowcroft 25:27
Now I had 20 individuals, each with three to 40 people in Moab, Utah, or in Philadelphia as a Friends of the Earth chapter. That was fun, but very different.�

Dave Chapman 25:43
I don’t know if it was natural or if it was acquired, but you had a skill set of organizing.�

Bob Scowcroft 25:51
Yeah, from day one. Well, I’m not going to go to the commune here, but I would organize things there as well, and cleanups and parties. I never desired to be the director or the face of anti war work or other activities during the communal years, but I always desired to be part of it.�

Bob Scowcroft 26:29
I think in retrospect, I listened really well, and I learned really well, and I was able to either replicate what I had learned when asked a question by someone else, or if I couldn’t answer that question, I knew who could and could deliver that connection right away. That served me really well over a long time.�

Bob Scowcroft 26:57
One side story, I’m not sure, I still have to think, I won’t say her name, although you could actually find it if you were due diligence. The store network really became a cool thing. A woman who I knew, who was connected to the Sierra Club, started a business network throughout the Sierras as a means within which to save the Sierra lands and stop the clear cutting. She brought in the businesses—casino, a progressive timber company, small stores, and a business for the Sierras.�

Bob Scowcroft 27:36
She got a $600,000 McCarthy Genius Award for doing that. She said, “Well, you were,” and I was like, “Hey, what’s happening here?” We both chuckled and said, “Well, you were an in a—” “Yeah, I watched and learned.” It’s totally different, so on and so forth. It is. It was, is. I just chuckle about it these days, because for a while, my buddies, we’d all go to each other saying, “Did you make it this year? Did you make it this year?” and laugh at each other and rock on.�

Dave Chapman 28:14
Okay, so you went to Expo West and something happened there. Were they talking about organic at that point at Expo West?�

Bob Scowcroft 28:24
A couple of key people were. ‘84 there was a carrot controversy, and, led by Stuart Fishman, Rainbow Grocery and just a couple of other stores, said, this guy’s expletive fraudulent. Why are you people buying it? Why are you distributors distributing it? This is not right. People said there’s no law, there’s no enforcement, there’s no protocol, and my customers demand carrots, and yeah, I feel squiggly about it, but I don’t know.�

Bob Scowcroft 28:51
The natural foods merchandiser had a writer who then wrote up the story and said, hey, controversy about these carrots. People then backed off, and there was never any resolution of it, but the fact that a light had been shined on the possibility that something claiming to be organic under this health and safety code might not be caught more people’s attention.�

Bob Scowcroft 29:17
Three years later, of course, we had the national carrot caper crisis that set a whole new level of attention and awareness.�

Dave Chapman 29:27
What was the national carrot caper? �

Bob Scowcroft 29:30
National carrot caper, leaping forward we had now we had presence in—hold that thought for a second. I want to point out one other really interesting event. In the early ‘80s, of course, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse made national news again and again as a remarkable restaurant serving local organic farmers’ food and winning awards.�

Bob Scowcroft 29:57
Alice and her creative brilliance oversaw a woman named Sibella Kraus’s idea and then planned to hold a tasting of summer produce at the Oakland Museum. People are like, what? A museum having fresh produce to taste in tables? The museum, Oakland, was very, very innovative, far more so than San Francisco. I said, yeah, this is this part of our hood and our restaurants and taste. We should, we should introduce this. This is a great opportunity to be really different.�

Bob Scowcroft 30:38
The first year was closed to the local population. Alice just invited and 110 chefs came around the country who had a chance to meet with each other, tasted this produce that they, by and large, couldn’t get in their communities. The New England chefs were like, yeah, we got this there too. There was perfect chef attitude on one level, but on another, it was really a celebration of the freshest produce and food that had ever been tasted in these 30 farmers’ tables.�

Bob Scowcroft 31:15
Then they had six speakers, and I was one of the six—Jim Hightower, me, and Don Villarejo did the first on labor, farm worker organizing; Jim just being Jim Hightower in Texas and me on the store network. That, as a listener, introduced me to farm workers, Villarejo, the active integration that should happen among farmers and labor that I hadn’t thought about.�

Dave Chapman 31:49
What year was this? �

Bob Scowcroft 31:51
That was also in ’82, I think. From there, now, going fast forward, you had tens, if not hundreds, of chefs that looked around their communities for making connections with local farmers. Bringing it in fresh and taste was a component of their higher end meals.�

Bob Scowcroft 32:16
You had activists who had been introduced to siloed constituencies that just hadn’t thought about that much. We either didn’t have the time, or we were so focused on stopping pesticides or growing organic, so on and so forth.�

Dave Chapman 32:37
Those 30 farms that were giving tastings, were most of those organic?�

Bob Scowcroft 32:43
I think 24 of the 30. Alice is pretty intense about that at the time.�

Dave Chapman 32:49
It’s interesting to me because from a distance, it looks like all these things were just spontaneously happening around the country, which they were, and around the world. But you see that certain events are very provocative, that they really—I mean, what a brilliant thing to bring chefs together from around the country, have them taste this and have a conversation where they all go, “We should do this too.”�

Bob Scowcroft 33:15
I didn’t know much about– I had met Enid, MOFGA. I knew of these groups, even through Friends of the Earth, but it seemed so remote. It seemed very localized. It seemed very– I don’t have the exact, a little bit of an attitude. California, you guys are so big and you’re blowing us. We’re not all that happy with you folks.�

Dave Chapman 33:46
Oh, they had an attitude about California. �

Bob Scowcroft 33:49
Absolutely. �

Dave Chapman 33:50
Enid Wonnacott, you were talking about. No, she was my good friend. But when you would get together with them, I’m fascinated by this, because I can tell you my attitude towards California, but you were experiencing at that point a little bit of othering from the rest of the country about California.�

Bob Scowcroft 34:13
Yeah. I mean, you could throw in– there’s a whole tale of how the Oregon Tilth and Washington Tilth and CCOF got together, the Western Alliance of Certification Organizations to begin the standardization process. When wrote the state, we now being CCOF wrote the state law, then we called ourselves WACO. It was the perfect acronym.�

Bob Scowcroft 34:34
As we got out and about to other certifier groups or family farm or organic farm advocacy groups, there was almost an obligatory “You guys,” never said, gals, “you guys kill us sometimes of the year. You’re so big, you have so much product, and the distributors are growing and linking up without here and some of our distributors can’t compete with your distributors.”�

Bob Scowcroft 35:04
I know; it’s just we’re big. Some of our farms are now 100 acres. Of course, later on, some of our farms are 1000 acres.�

Dave Chapman 35:13
Right, of vegetables. �

Bob Scowcroft 35:16
Later on, some of our farms are 30,000. At CCOF, in any case, size and scale was not in our– we had no limits. We wanted people to go organic.�

Bob Scowcroft 35:38
I’ll leap it back into the carrot caper. In ‘87 I was just hired as CCOF’s ED. I’d spent about a year, almost two years, in emergency family mode to get a job that had health insurance that covered our son’s special needs.�

Bob Scowcroft 35:59
Just for the record, whether it’s in there or not, but I was a secretary up at UC putting yellow forms into blue folders for two years, just about speaking in tongue by the time I was done.�

Dave Chapman 36:14
In order to have benefits to cover your family. �

Bob Scowcroft 36:20
You had to do it. But then the CCOF job came open, and I applied and got it. God, what a run. About a year into that–�

Dave Chapman 36:32
Excuse me. Were you the, were you the first executive director? Before that, it was mostly volunteer? How did it work before that?�

Bob Scowcroft 36:42
It was claimed to be founded in ‘73 and there were a couple of chapters that Rodale really helped facilitate. In ’75, they rewrote bylaws, decided to be a statewide group of chapters that Barney Bricmont, a volunteer in Santa Cruz, would oversee.�

Bob Scowcroft 37:06
Barney ran it for 12 years from his kitchen table with a budget of about $6,000 or $7,000 a year. It was all volunteer and in ‘85 they hired Mark Lipson and Phil McGee and Brandon to do all part or less than part time to bring this together and get same forms in each chapter and the same simple materials list.�

Bob Scowcroft 37:35
It just wasn’t happening. I met Barney at EcoFarm, and I said, Barney someday I want to be at CCOF, and he said, Bob, this is never going to happen. This is anarchist like farmers or chapter regionalists or sub regionalists, and they disagree on this. They all send in their forms but it’s just not going to happen.�

Bob Scowcroft 38:02
Warren Weber then ran for president of CCOF in ‘85 and said he would take a three year term, and when he left, CCOF would be a professional nonprofit organization who would have professional staff who would coordinate, facilitate the same inspection, data monitoring, transparency across the board for all organic farmers that wish to join CCOF. He didn’t have to. There’s nothing mandatory, but he wanted to leave it with a professional staff.�

Dave Chapman 38:37
And it’s changed under his tenure?�

Bob Scowcroft 38:38
First, he got Mark and Phil to be part time his first year there. Then he kept the bylaws this and that, and then they did a hiring announcement and I applied.�

Dave Chapman 38:52
You started that in ’87.�

Bob Scowcroft 38:55
Yeah, I think the so-called first date was Jan 1, ’88 but I started sneaking over there in ’87 and I was just so high, so happy. I’d known Barney. I’d been to EcoFarm now for seven years through my FOE work. I even went during my secretary stuff, because I needed that space for dancing and hugging and good vibes.�

Bob Scowcroft 39:23
Everything was as I had hoped it would be with one exception. That was Mark pulled me aside. This is advice for anybody who ever applies for a job, even to this day: look at the books, check the financials.�

Dave Chapman 39:46
Oh by the way, we’re broke�

Bob Scowcroft 39:48
Capital B-R-O-K-E. Well, we got money for January and February’s rent. We sort of have been paid. It’s not both on Phil. I mean, we’re okay, in good shape now, but then I’m farming with Molina, but we’re broke.�

Bob Scowcroft 40:08
The system of certification and renewals doesn’t really engage until March or April, and we don’t have anything past January. By the way, in addition to being broke, we only filed one tax return to the state of California in 1985. We have been in existence since ’73, it’s about to be ’88 and upon due diligence, if you have a three-year window from the first time you appear on either state or federal IRS nonprofit landscape, you have till April to file 15 years. Maybe this, maybe that.�

Bob Scowcroft 41:03
Son of a bitch, okay, what do I do and how do I do it? There’s longer tales on how we pulled it all off, thanks to one incredibly helpful IRS agent, thanks to a special appeal, thanks to an attorney in town that got us up and rolling. The comedic component of that is the Grateful Dead gave us $10,000.�

Dave Chapman 41:36
Oh, God bless them. �

Bob Scowcroft 41:39
Thanks through a connection of Mark’s, and they gave that through EcoFarm. We got $9,000 to pay everybody off, pay the attorney, and file three years’ worth of state and federal tax returns. Then we got fined, and I protested that fine, and we got that back, too.�

Dave Chapman 42:01
At that point in ‘88 how many, how many farms were being certified by CCOF? There was a certification program.�

Bob Scowcroft 42:10
Absolutely, 170 about when I got there. We’re rolling along. Warren has left. A new president named Bill Brammer comes on in March.�

Dave Chapman 42:20
I interviewed Warren. �

Bob Scowcroft 42:21
Yeah, Warren’s a gem. �

Dave Chapman 42:23
Yeah, he’s great. �

Bob Scowcroft 42:25
I’m out of touch with him right now, but I hope to get back to him soon. Somewhere in that spring and summer, among everything going on, we had word that the market was flooded with organic carrots, and there was only one organic carrot grower that was large enough to cover most of the market—Danny Duncan and Cal-O, Cal-Organic, now really very large, and he had a brilliant quilt approach to farming.�

Bob Scowcroft 43:01
He pretty much always had 40, 60 acres through 1,000 with maybe 30 or 40 different vegetables and cover crops and two-year soil rest, one of the non-technical farm words, but he always had carrots moving through that and sold a lot of them and got a really good price. He was in a two-month window of not having any carrots. They were planted, but they weren’t ready yet.�

Bob Scowcroft 43:32
Here they all came in, and people said, “This can’t be.” One distributor said, “I’m going to go check it out.” She went down there and said, “I want to write a story about all your carrots and how great you are.” The guy, foolishly, I suppose, gave her a tour of his packing house, and she interviewed him and took photos of the Mexican carrots coming in and being unloaded and unbagged and put, rebagged into an organic bag.�

Bob Scowcroft 44:04
He said, “No, they’re organic from— we would just need to— so on and so forth.” She came back to me and Bill Brammer and said, “Okay, this guy is fraudulently upfront cheating. What do we do?” We went to the board and said this is real risk. We could just really prove, and the conventional industry was starting to get concerned about organic, that there’s bogus product out there. We got the photos. We could lose it all as they come back and say, “See?”�

Bob Scowcroft 44:38
Bill, to his great credit, said, “Yeah, that could happen. We could also prove that we won’t stand for any shit on any fraudulent activity, and we stand by our seal for every grower that is paying their dues for us to do that. We’re going to file a complaint.” Some of the board were nervous, and some of the farmers were, “This is risky,” but eventually, pretty much everybody agreed that, why are you getting certified if you’re going to just let it go?�

Bob Scowcroft 45:12
The board voted to hire an attorney. The board voted for Bill to be the farmer voice and for me to be the public face and spokesperson. By then, I had quite a bit of experience with the press.�

Bob Scowcroft 45:24
I went to a reporter that I’d gotten pretty close to at the San Jose Mercury News, worked with him on the med fly spray issues, and I said, “Mitchell, I got your cover front page story here. There’s this, there’s that. I even have photos. This is going on.” He did some work and said, “Yeah, you got one,” and gave him the photos.�

Bob Scowcroft 45:48
The night before they ran the story, the editor of the Mercury said, “How come you haven’t identified the person who took the photos? You need to know it, Mitchell. You can’t just say leaked by an anonymous person.” I went to the woman who took them and said, “Okay, we’re in a quandary. This is it. Will you allow me to give your name and phone number to Mitchell as the source, and he will, by our handshake, say it’s been delivered by and we’ve granted anonymous stuff, but we know who it is, and we have the photos.”�

Bob Scowcroft 46:26
She was pretty not wanting to do that, but 10 at night, she called back and said, “What am I in this industry for myself? Yeah, go ahead and give it to him.” I called them then, those days. They ran it the next morning, and that went national.�

Bob Scowcroft 46:45
Eventually, I gave over 100 interviews on the carrot caper. The state would not enforce it until we sued them. We threatened to sue them, and they went down there, and the guy hand wrote a paper saying, “No, he’s all right,” the local guy who knew nothing about organic. He showed me this and he showed me that. He should not have given it to Mitchell, the reporter who said the state claims it’s all right, he should have given it to the State Department. The local inspector blew his job.�

Bob Scowcroft 47:19
The state was fundamentally embarrassed, and sent a state re-inspection down there and caught him and fined him. Eventually, it was discovered that he had previous felonies on fraudulent activities as a USDA employee a decade before, and that story had long legs to it. To some extent, it still does to this day, but CCOF did a great job, and everybody stood up for the seal and the certification and for the truth behind organic.�

Bob Scowcroft 47:56
Mind you, this was happening when another friend from NRDC called me and said, “Hey, we got this report on 20 chemicals, and we are going to release it, and it’s pretty damaging, and it’s all peer review, and we gave it to Ed Bradley at CBS 60 Minutes, and he’s going to do this report. We want to prepare for response. You’re the guy we know the best from previous work together, and we want to say that sustainable agriculture is the way to go.”�

Bob Scowcroft 48:39
I said, “No, not at this point. You got to say organic is the way to go. Certified Organic is the way to go.” “Oh, no. We don’t have anybody that knows anything about that. We’re not prepared to defend organic. That puts us in a different light, and we’re not sure. We’re going to do this, but we’ll send you an advanced copy of the report and our press releases, and keep an eye on 60 Minutes two weeks from now.” It was called Alar.�

Bob Scowcroft 49:15
We had that catching some attention in our office, but not nuclear, and we were still dealing with the state and fraudulent activity. Now we have Alar and national concerns about chemicals, and that became a panic, apple boxes, 70 bucks a box, and so on and so forth. NRDC still wouldn’t say it, but Wendy Gordon and her co-founder, Meryl Streep, said they wanted to talk more about sustainable and even organic. I briefed them on what CCOF was all about. Still it was pretty low-key, particularly in hindsight, it was pretty low-key.�

Bob Scowcroft 50:01
Meryl went on the Donahue show and said, “Well, your students, tell me about Alar and so on. What about you? What food do you give your kids?” She just smiled and looked at him and said, “I’ve been feeding them certified organic produce most of their lives. We get it in the neighborhood in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and it’s really the only way to feed your kids.” We had one phone at the time, and I think we broke the AT&T phone with what happened after her presentation. We got over 300 requests of farmers to join CCOF from around the country, but we would only take Californians.�

Bob Scowcroft 50:41
That’s so interesting. The Alar report was a big deal, but it was Meryl Streep’s response to the Alar report that blew it up.�

Bob Scowcroft 51:04
Yes, orders of magnitude. You had a little component about somebody had injected a couple of grapes with cyanide about two weeks after Alar. What happened was they quickly put a, “yeah, that was an idiot, or somebody wanted to do this, or a competitor. But what that became was food safety.�

Bob Scowcroft 51:14
You had God, global food coming into the US. I didn’t know that. Chilean grapes. I didn’t know that. How safe is my food? There’s 19 other chemicals that I received out of that because they were still pounding their report.�

Dave Chapman 51:34
That changed the world that moment.�

Bob Scowcroft 52:03
Mine, it did. �

Dave Chapman 52:02
It changed yours, but it changed a lot of people’s world. I think that Ronnie and Arnie Koss started Earth’s Best Baby Food, and they ran out of money at some point. They had to sell the company, and it went to become something quite different. They said, “Yeah, we were just like, one year too early. If Alar had happened a year earlier, we’d still have the company.”�

Bob Scowcroft 52:07
Yeah They sold it to [unclear 0:52:14]Bucharest capital which is at Menlo Park. It went on several permutations.�

Dave Chapman 52:17
Yeah, to many, many big owners. it’s just quite a different company. I’m sure you know them. They’re special people.�

Bob Scowcroft 52:30
I’ve met them over time, but I wouldn’t say I know them. �

Dave Chapman 52:33
Well, they’re fantastic, yeah. �

Bob Scowcroft 52:36
This is a wild couple of years because then carrots, Western alliance, we decided, we being the three states, we wanted to encourage interstate commerce. CCOF had a one year transition, and the other state, Oregon and Washington had three. We decided to have three years for everybody with background testing.�

Bob Scowcroft 53:05
It’s conceivable. You could bring in a parcel that had been fallow for five years, double check it, and then throw it into organic production. Oregon Tilth took the lead on the materials list, and we shared really well. As we moved forward, then Ohio’s OCIA said, we have extra standards, but we want to certify California Certified Organic with our additional standards and this dicey period of time, and Russell and MOFGA in particular, we have a regulation here first. We like what we’re doing here, but we’re starting to see California, maybe we should have a national meeting to figure out what’s going on.�

Dave Chapman 53:47
Right, and Russell Libby from MOFGA. �

Bob Scowcroft 53:50
Poet, Fantastic person. �

Dave Chapman 53:52
Yeah, fantastic person.�

Bob Scowcroft 53:54
What happened was Roger Blobaum, who started up at Center for Science in the Public Interest, decided they were having an anti-pesticide and pro-organic. They were going to take on organic since nobody else had on the Hill.�

Bob Scowcroft 54:09
Roger helped host 20 or 30 certification representatives to meet in DC to address the question that this, at the time, junior staffer out of this Vermont senator’s office, Kathleen and Leahy: Do we really want this? Leahy had asked, I think pretty much Enid’s request or Vermont NOFA’s request, who’s doing organic regulations and certification out there, and how similar are they? Leahy assigned Kathleen to write a paper and report about it and see if there was a core agreement of verification that could be captured into a national law.�

Dave Chapman 54:58
Did it appear that there was a core agreement? Because I would have thought there was.�

Bob Scowcroft 55:06
I want to say absolutely yes, but the nattering nabobs of perfection and purity would probably not say the same thing.�

Dave Chapman 55:49
That there were differences. �

Bob Scowcroft 56:11
Yeah, and our standards are better than. �

Dave Chapman 56:22
I understand. �

Bob Scowcroft 56:27
But they weren’t necessarily going to agree to all the common ground, unless and until their particular fill in the blank section, paragraph, product. I mean, we couldn’t certify livestock in California.�

Dave Chapman 56:30
Because? �

Bob Scowcroft 56:30
I had a hilarious moment. I had a moment when the animal meat inspection service, armed inspector, came into the CCOF office and said, “Who’s in charge here? We saw a poster for certified organic beef in Mendocino and that’s illegal. We’re the only ones that give out labels. It’s called prime and whatever the other meat labels are. This is a felony, and you are, you’re running an organization that is doing felony work. I’m considering arresting you. What do you say to that?”�

Bob Scowcroft 56:43
Judy didn’t think it was funny when I came home and told her I had a movement, Arlo Guthrie type movement. We were very close to the NBC local affiliate, and I said, “Karen, call—I can’t remember his name—KSBW and tell him to get over here right away. I want to be filmed being arrested by a federal meat inspector for certifying organic beef, grass fed beef.”�

Bob Scowcroft 57:10
He got really pissed. Karen’s like, “Should I call?” Yeah, call him. He’s a good guy. He knows a story when he sees it, and this will be a good one.�

Dave Chapman 57:20
This was in front of the meat inspector. �

Bob Scowcroft 57:22
Yeah, he was getting red in the face and really upset. Where that came from, I’m not a very courageous person in that kind of—it was just a spontaneous moment. This one really, Arlo Guthrie got busted for throwing trash and then made a career out of it. I’m going to get busted for verifying my team, verifying righteous beef product for those that eat meat.�

Bob Scowcroft 57:54
Karen dialed and called him, and he just didn’t know what to do. Finally, with some bad language, I’ll get you one way or another. Got in his car and drove to Mendocino and went to that ranch and told them they would be arrested for felony use of illegal labels on their beef. He went to two stores who had their label and new marketing campaign about their organic grass fed beef and threatened them as well. That threw them out of the program. They just thought, no, we’re not going to call it organic under these situations and circumstances. It pisses me off to this day.�

Dave Chapman 58:36
You had to wait for the for the federal law to be able to change that.�

Bob Scowcroft 58:41
Well, 36 years for meat labeling standards, but yeah, the federal law needed to be codified. That was just one of many examples of different agencies and different individuals in those agencies taking, quote, initiative, unquote, on their own.�

Bob Scowcroft 59:02
Kathleen wrote her paper and report and said, “Yeah, it’s pretty close. There’s some of these issues, some of that and transition time, soil testing, pesticide testing, what to do if it drifts.” She came up with really good ones.�

Bob Scowcroft 59:16
Kathleen likes to tell the story that she’d finished this report. We both tell the same story at the same time. Mark’s going to DC. He’s going, “Go look up Kathleen, see what she’s got. Let’s see what she has to say, but don’t say anything about national law, rules until you know, we confer, at least with WACO and some of the other groups that we’re talking to.”�

Bob Scowcroft 59:46
Then you cut to the chase with Kathleen with a big smile, saying, Mark Lipson walked into my office and said, “We need a national law.” There might have been some initiative there on somebody’s part. She says that kicked it off. She went back to the senator, saying, “Yeah, we need one.”�

Dave Chapman 1:00:06
And do you know what year that was? �

Bob Scowcroft 1:00:08
’89. �

Dave Chapman 1:00:09
That was ’89, so she went right to work. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:00:11
Yes.�

Dave Chapman 1:00:13
And it took a year to create a law and then get it passed. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:00:23
Yeah, wasn’t that hard? I remember they had one hearing in the Senate under Harkin. I think he was the chair of the Ag Committee and—no, was Leahy the chair then? I’m not sure, it might have been under Leahy.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:00:48
What was really cool was now about eight or ten of us were there. Michael Sly was there, and some of the others, Fred probably sitting in the small hearing room, and they had testimony, and there were two senators nodding, okay. Then Senator Cranston came in, and both Leahy, and he’s number two at the time, literally said, “Senator Cranston, nice to see you. What are you doing here?”�

Bob Scowcroft 1:01:15
He said, “Well, I saw this on my calendar and my staff alerted me to this, saw this, and I’ve been on an organic farm at UC Santa Cruz in California thanks to Bob and CCOF and their hearings for this law. I’m very impressed with what the university is doing, what CCOF is doing. I thought I’d come in and listen to testimony and let you know that I support this.”�

Bob Scowcroft 1:01:39
Number two in the Senate, what are you going to do after that? It was very powerful, very important, and it ended up being the only hearing held.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:01:49
Peter ran the show on the House side. Stenholm said he would never allow an organic law to pass through the Ag Committee that wouldn’t hold hearings. He didn’t, he wouldn’t, and Peter amended the farm bill on the floor, and it won 196 to 188.�

Dave Chapman 1:02:14
So it never came through committee. It just went straight to the farm.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:02:17
No, straight to the floor, straight to an amendment. I have the tape of C-span of that, which was really cool to watch to this day. I have more and piles. Your timing is good, because I’ve been thinking about this and pulling out all that, some of the papers that I showed but how every vote went.�

Dave Chapman 1:02:42
So there was opposition?�

Bob Scowcroft 1:02:46
Well, totally in the conventional, the Stenholms of the world, and the big produce corn growers, soy. There was already an understanding, or at least a sense of concern that this might be a problem here. This might be an alternative, a competitive system against everything we’ve built up. That somewhat, inarticulate is the word I want. They didn’t pound tables saying that, but this is a chance to stop it right now.�

Dave Chapman 1:03:27
It was not very big yet.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:03:32
Yeah. I mean, there were certain regions now that had some attentions that some of the natural food stores were growing. The co-ops were not working well, but the for-profit components that came out of some of them did well. The conventional trade was very concerned about this system. The apple growers were apoplectic. The Apple Commission sued Meryl Streep personally. The Washington State Apple Growers Association sued Meryl Streep and Mothers & Others personally.�

Dave Chapman 1:04:17
They also sued 60 Minutes, I believe. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:04:19
60 Minutes as well, not us, thank goodness. Now you had an initiative that was going to actually define this term, that would have penalties if you broke this term’s protocol. It was national in scope.�

Dave Chapman 1:04:46
Bob, tell me, from your perspective, what was the impact of having the Organic Food Production Act pass. A lot has happened since then. Obviously, organic has gotten much, much bigger. I will say, at the time, I was not a fan. I thought the USDA will screw this up, as they have. They were not on our side. They were not on our side, but I decided about five times since then, well, I was wrong, then I decided I was right, then I decided I was wrong, but obviously this was very powerful, and a lot of good came of it.�

Dave Chapman 1:05:29
Can you tell me why it was powerful? Do you have a sense of what—�

Bob Scowcroft 1:05:33
The movement ended.�

Dave Chapman 1:05:34
movement e The movement ended.�
nded,

Bob Scowcroft 1:05:40
That was very powerful in that an alternative business community grew. I believe it would have ended anyway, through fraud and greed. Not that both of those have gone away entirely, but we had, in my mind, almost no choice but to come together from our oases and our retreats in our communities, to stand up on a national level and say, “This is what we do. This is what’s so different as compared to what they do.” It’s based on, by and large, soil. It’s the soil that keeps our farms alive, and if managed appropriately, will provide a livelihood.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:06:50
There are many circles around that centerpiece of pest management and water. My goodness, farmers markets. When I got to Friends of the Earth, farmers markets were illegal in California.�

Dave Chapman 1:07:08
Illegal? �

Bob Scowcroft 1:07:10
Yeah. I have another pile of letters from the guy that went to Jerry Brown saying, this is really messed up. I can’t have 10 farmers come to the local town square because it’s illegal. He fought and got legislation to allow the first farmers markets in the state. The Neanderthals were worried about people picking up an apple, walking around a downtown park and putting it in a bag, and taking away sanitary standards and so on and forth.�

Dave Chapman 1:07:47
What you just said is very powerful to me. You said this is what this law meant. At the same time you said something else that’s very powerful, which is the movement ended. I experienced that in Vermont.�

Dave Chapman 1:08:02
I’d been an organic farmer for a long time by then, and the first thing that was so obvious is the annual meeting that Vermont organic farmers had where we would vote on any changes to the standards. We all went to it. Everybody came. We brought our little bagged lunch, and we spent this one day of the year talking to each other, and we voted, and sometimes they were contested votes, sometimes they were not happy, but we did it together, and we knew that we had this responsibility.�

Dave Chapman 1:08:37
After that, it wasn’t up to us what the standards were, and we stopped meeting like that. We still had annual meetings, but everybody didn’t come. We started to realize, well, I don’t really need to go, because we’re not deciding anything. We don’t have any authority in this. In retrospect, I go, well, that is just as you say, that was for me, too, a transition. Not that I gave up on the movement, but I was struggling to make a business that would work. I was struggling to take care of my family, provide a home, all of those things.�

Dave Chapman 1:09:19
Is that inevitable? Is it just one or the other, is that the deal?�

Bob Scowcroft 1:09:24
I think I said, from, not exactly say the age, but I’m in my 70s. I knew a movement. It was anti war, it was peace, it was against the whole freaking regime. That was the movement. It was very powerful, eventually we played a smaller role and we did stop the war. That movement ended. Now what? Some of the bands went back to the land. we did this, we did that, and we evolved into something else.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:10:00
Those of us found an evolutionary track towards environmental activists when we brought our anti war experiences to environmental. We had James Watt for Christ’s sake. We had Reagan. You’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all. We had experienced in the channeling of passion. We did it with some new people, some young people, some peers. We did it in the form of organic advocacy. Eventually that became, I think, overall, another victory. That movement became an entire alternative system against the status quo.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:10:50
The challenge since then is that you articulated the group of 50. Is it exclusive? Does everybody know each other? Is it hard to get the 51st person there to come say, I want to be part of the club? Well, you weren’t here in the last eight years. Hard to tell. In my mind, the objective of building the sense of community around now, not just the word organic, I think that’s a centerpiece, but I think the sense of community could be on, I’m not sure it’s movement per se, but I think it’s the DEI inclusionary importance of our organic movement, our labor awareness and training and growth and embrace as part of an organic community.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:11:56
I think we’re going to be experimenting with cooperation more in this particular political environment these days. At my age, it’s for my kids and my grandkids to worry about concentration, which is a worry today and will get, I think, worse, before it collapses on itself. I want community. I want to make sure that there’s a potluck. There’s what do you think about this? The joy of a grandchild now becoming part of full belly, the generations continuing to move forward.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:12:43
Yes, that movement that we jumped into, I think, is over, but it doesn’t mean by any means that our work should stop. We just have to learn from it and continue the journey, and find the areas where we can make a difference. That was a bit of a babble.�

Dave Chapman 1:13:07
No, no, no, no. It’s such an important conversation. It’s not, it’s not some intellectual sideshow. There’s real question. I consider the work of the Real Organic to reinvigorate the movement too, because I don’t think the work is over. I don’t think it’s over.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:13:25
I’m trying to keep my distance from just about everybody for family life and personal challenges. EcoFarm is my regeneration every year. Farm Aid was my regeneration every year, in part because I met advocacy groups I had never heard of. I didn’t know contract poultry; it had nothing to do with organic, never, until I went to Farm Aid. I miss Farm Aid, but Carolyn and Glenda are gone now too. It is what it is.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:13:59
EcoFarm every year, I guess, the joy of four days of break. What are kids thinking? What are elders thinking? Dancing, new ideas, the arrival of the Native American community to organic is new and invigorating, and their practices and the, not intentional, but maybe in some cases, lack of inclusion and lack of reaching out to the different approaches to agriculture that Native Americans have around their sovereign tribes. We know very little about that, and we’ve done a rather poor job collectively of learning, embracing, and engaging. Two years ago, there were six Native American panels at EcoFarm. It was fantastic. It’s about time.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:14:58
To me, it’s the community thread that needs more work. It’s the young researchers that need social engagement, and the social engagers need more research, cross-pollination. I’m pretty enamored with that and keeping an eye on that, and re-organic. I’ve tried to keep distance just out of I can’t get into the– hydroponic is not organic. It’s the only time I’ve submitted testimony to all this stuff for decades. This is bullshit, you guys. Get over it. Don’t allow them to use it. It’s still there.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:15:49
I think what I’ve observed and listened is that you all keep that campaign front and center. I feel that there’s less anger, maybe as a political decision, around hydroponic and more joy around a thousand farmers joining up and embracing the next gen of tough but collaboration on family farms and organic agriculture. I think you’ve led the pack wonderfully and appropriately. It’s very impressive. I said, sure, come on over, throw me in the podcast and catch a few hours for just everything.�

Dave Chapman 1:16:42
When you responded some years ago to our very first petition, we didn’t know what we were doing. We were not organizers. We were farmers. We put out a couple petitions, and you signed one of them. I said, Bob Scowcroft, I’ve heard that name. I had heard the name, but I didn’t know you. I know that was a somewhat complicated decision. I know that there was an emotional risk to putting your name in there.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:17:20
I’m not sure the word emotional. It’s maybe more of a strategic moment of do I really want to jump into this mosh pit after a lifetime of other mosh pits? but looked at it and thought, well I feel pretty strongly about it. I finally figured out how it all came about and it is the worst case of giving our good o-word name to the anonymous bureaucracy called USDA, really, really, the worst example of everything that could have gone wrong. I got to sign off on it.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:18:20
What I hope, or at least what I mentally hope to do when we would cross paths, is to say chill out a little bit on the anger and focus on the joy and the dancing and the celebration and the freaking damn good food you get from the farmers that are looking around with each other.�

Dave Chapman 1:18:40
And get fed well.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:18:43
That’s one of my–meeting those chefs back in the day, in many cases, never has stopped. I’d go to a town, and say, yeah, remember we met there? I’d like to come by and I want you to know outright I paved my own way, and I don’t want any—I’ve got to be straight about this. Would you take this dessert? Okay, sure, and there’s another, loosen the belt and go for it again.�

Dave Chapman 1:19:09
Bob, obviously, there’s a lot more to be talked about, and I’m not going to destroy your day here, but there are a few things that I would like to reflect on.�

Dave Chapman 1:19:26
When we started talking, you talked about the agro industrial complex and your vision of creating an alternative to that of a community-based agriculture. I know that you must have looked at this, and certainly I have looked at it and wondered if we’ve taken a wrong turn in the organic world, where we clearly have an agro-industrial complex that’s part of it now, and a big part of it.�

Dave Chapman 1:20:01
We have what was called a movement, and that was how– what’s her name who wrote for UNFI?�

Bob Scowcroft 1:20:14
Melody Meyer.�

Dave Chapman 1:20:16
She wrote in one piece back around Jacksonville, that this was basically a conflict between the industry and the movement. I thought, well, I think that’s right. I think that is what’s going on. �

Dave Chapman 1:20:36
I’ll just say that I believe this is complex. I don’t think it’s simple good guys and bad guys, but I think that if I look at the hydroponic production, just as one example, of an industrial incursion and a transformation of organic in the process, I go, well, it’s still better than growing those same things hydroponically and spraying them. There is a reduction of pesticides if they’re going through certification. But we agree we wouldn’t call that organic.�

Dave Chapman 1:21:22
I’m just curious what your thoughts are about this inherent conflict. On the one hand, there’s concentration and we see concentration of power, a concentration of every stage of the industry. When you started, there were all those small stores, and most of them are gone now. Our shopping has moved more and more to larger chains, which are bought by even larger chains. I’ve experienced it in my business.�

Dave Chapman 1:22:03
Most of the chains that we’ve sold to, and we’re wholesalers, we sell into chains, and most of them have been bought by somebody else. Two or three of them are bought by Ahold USA, which is a Dutch multinational—Stop & Shop, Hannaford, and FreshDirect, and Shaw’s was bought by Albertsons. Of course, Whole Foods was bought by Amazon.�

Dave Chapman 1:22:31
With that transformation, who they want to buy from changes. There was a point about 2016 where all of those chains were buying local. It was a conscious program, and it was working. They were very proud of it, and they had all the farmers’ pictures on the wall, but they really were buying local. They were bending over to figure out how do we make this work because our customers want to buy food from local agriculture to the degree that’s possible.�

Dave Chapman 1:23:04
It’s all gone now. Most of the local buying for all those chains has stopped, and they’re sourcing from somebody who can provide them year-round with what they want with no fuss and muss and deliver it to every store they have. Of course, the distributors have followed suit.�

Dave Chapman 1:20:42
This is the change in our world. This is the change in certified organic right now. What are your thoughts about all this? I know it’s a huge and unfocused question, but I think you have thoughts.�

Dave Chapman 1:23:26
Well, it comes from my own environmental origin story. Any product that has little or no suspected carcinogens in it is better. Then you look at the different delivery systems and the marketing terminology behind it, and conflict arises, I think. I don’t think—I know.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
It caught my attention when you said in 2016 which, if you’re of a certain age, it’s so long ago; in another age, it’s yesterday. My guess, though, I think the data might even start to bear it out, is that those last remaining multinational supermarket-y chains are close to panic now. The margins are so small and they’re getting their ass kicked by Amazon and Grubhub food delivery systems and the Walmarts and Targets and Costco to some extent. In other words, supermarkets themselves have some potential to be dinosaurs.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
The Chronicle writes stories of restaurants that were saved by, during COVID in particular, but still to this day, a generation trained on, okay, my hamburger and french fries are on the way to the house.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
The word that you haven’t raised yet is the consumer side of all of this. Organic has not done a very good job in direct consumer interaction, I think. Supermarkets, they buy ads. They used to buy ads. You got your Wednesday ad in the newspaper, on the specials at the Safeways of the world. They don’t really buy them anymore. It’s all the portals or Facebook or Amazon or Prime, and you get your food depending upon your technological skills, your pocketbook, and the time you want to invest in getting it.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
I think not being a student of the overall marketplace these days—I used to get a lot of newsletters. I learned a lot more and have cut almost all of them, all from paper and most from electronic. My sense is that the fundamental mindset of the consumers has changed to efficiencies, ease, price, and the personal delivery services, the last mile. Organic, unintentionally, hasn’t really participated in that overall development, I think.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
Intriguing to me is the emergence now of food hubs, food clubs tied around farmers markets, libraries.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
Our elementary school was just talking this morning. There was a photo essay in our Santa Cruz paper of the farmers market in the elementary school, where programs would allow, when the parents come pick up their kids, in certain parts of their food needs, they have an underwritten all-organic food basket for $5. The costs are borne by the Community Foundation, by grants, by county food programs.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
Some of the parents, the Afghan parents and the Salvadorian parents there, have little booths as a micro side hustle. How many elementary school kids get Afghan food fresh right out of the pond, pupusas off the grill, or pupusas, depending upon my debate with my daughter back and forth? This is a hell of an innovation that includes community engagement, includes education, it includes fresh produce.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:23:40
There’s a used book library. Kids can take their books and give books back. It’s live music, and it’s at the elementary school four times a year. Where is the organic activists in that equation? I think there should be and better be a place for them in that, but right now, it’s the farmers market that’s assisting putting together the food box or one farmer, including that as a CSA, either contribution or documentation.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:29:30
Under the current fascist regime that might be called inclusivity and diversity, and they probably wouldn’t like it happening in parts of the country. Movements can arise from that activity where parents can meet each other in a social hour, pick up some information in other parts of the food system, in a very convenient manner. I actually have seen those activities, both here and I read about them elsewhere.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:30:04
I think, yeah, this is something to be optimistic about, and I’m not going to let clinical depression take me over the whole time.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:30:14
COMFOOD is, a lot of people say, oh God, it’s just thousands of posts; it’s 9,000 people. I’m a real fan of COMFOOD. There’s a nugget almost every day, and it’s a good place to just keep an eye, particularly if you close your eyes, oh, wait, that’s an idea.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:30:38
It’s really cool what’s happening in Appalachia with that idea. These food hubs are going in a manner that’s reflective of what their own community wants and needs. The volunteers are showing up or contributing some ideas. At least at this point, there’s no national definition of a food hub, so they’re becoming indigenous to the place and the people’s needs that want to bring those together. Pretty cool.�

Dave Chapman 1:31:12
So, if I understand what you were saying–�

Bob Scowcroft 1:31:18
No problem. I don’t often make total sense. �

Dave Chapman 1:31:22
But if I understand it, you’re looking towards more of a small farm revolution. One of the people I’ve interviewed—I interview a lot of people—one person I interviewed is JM Fortier. He’s a great student of Eliot Coleman’s, but JM has taken things in his own direction, and he’s really focused on small farms in the community, feeding the community.�

Dave Chapman 1:31:57
I think that he’s been astonishingly successful in Quebec. He told me that when he got to the county he lives in, he was, I think, one of two organic farms, and now there are 40. They include charcuteries, cafes, and microbreweries. It’s a whole food system that they’re developing that’s hyper-localized.�

Dave Chapman 1:32:26
Is that part of what you’re talking about?�

Bob Scowcroft 1:32:31
Well, there’s a recipe, and each ingredient is a component of the systems change. What you just described to me is an incredibly charismatic, visionary individual. Not every community has those; very few right now.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:32:57
But the quest for a group of people to exchange their visions and ideas in a collaborative manner is happening in a lot of places now. Food banks or corporate entities in and of themselves, in some cases, second harvest, and the tens of millions and more that they need and want, it’s just in a way, industrialized process of delivering food to address hunger. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:33:31
Will Allen, when he founded it in Chicago, said, “Well, no, we’re going to address our own hunger. We’re going to start growing our own gardens. We’re not going to be dependent on just handouts.” Ultimately, that didn’t work for them, but the offshoots of that are working in the next gen.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:33:55
I think the excitement is the messy image of it, but a lot of people are throwing a lot of spaghetti against a lot of walls right now because a lot of it is not working. They, for economic reasons, for location, for their own dietary reasons, for the lack of organized conversations around it, are going out and doing it themselves, or they’re trying. I think that’s something that we should be thinking about and identifying and writing about.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:34:38
The place I see most of those ideas being expressed is on COMFOOD.�

Dave Chapman 1:34:51
One of the things that I see is that a lot of farmers are leaving organic certification. I see it undeniably, because we are an add-on label, and if somebody drops their certification, they have to drop us, or we have to drop them. It’s a lot every year. I never hear about this from the USDA or the National Organic Program that people are leaving, but people are leaving. Of course, some of them go out of business because it just doesn’t work.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:35:19
That’s never changed in my whole 40 years. People are always leaving, and the net is always more. We never want to see anyone leave, but I think the reasons are everyone under the sun. I’m not as, quote, concerned about it as probably others are and probably get criticized for not. I want more people to farm more organic, more often. But the societal and economic and regional challenges are such that it’s never going to work for everybody.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:35:58
We haven’t even talked about climate change. We haven’t talked about water. There’s external–�

Dave Chapman 1:36:04
When we’re talking about farming, we’re talking just about everything.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:36:13
All of it, and there’s external crises that, for the most part, come across a farmer’s screen—immigration, documentation, racism. I guess I’m just rattling off my current rage. It’s amazing that organic farmers keep farming, what she and he have to deal with. It’s a great honor to be able to advocate on their behalf, I guess.�

Dave Chapman 1:36:52
Do you think that that basic issue that has become, for me, rather central of consolidation? At first, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on with the USDA, why organic was so plagued. I mean, obviously there was greed and corruption; that is part of life.�

Dave Chapman 1:37:15
But I’ve come to believe that we would have resolved the hydroponic issue and organic in 2014 because nobody knew at that point that Driscoll’s was part of that hydroponic conversation. I met with OTA, and it was like, let’s end this. Then we all discovered Driscoll’s, and that was the end of the conversation.�

Dave Chapman 1:37:48
I’m not picking on Driscoll’s. They’re a brilliant large company. They do what they do remarkably well. They’re very smart, they’re very clever. They’re no meaner than anybody else in the world, but they play by the rules of a large company, which is they use their influence to protect themselves and to reduce competition. They’re very effective at it, so any small local grower has very little chance—I don’t care how good their berries are—of being able to break into the market for their short season and get them on the shelf.�

Dave Chapman 1:38:21
There are all these alternative ways: farmers’ market, restaurants, lots of things, but where most people go to get their food is a supermarket. That farmer no longer has that as an option. He or she did in 2016 but they don’t now.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:41:22
I have blinders to the People’s Republic of Santa Cruz. Around here, you always wait for Swanton to come on first, because Swanton and Jim and really, the protocol he invented, by trial and error, made for some of the greatest strawberries, fresh strawberries you’ll ever eat. The gentleman with the blueberries, I think in Florida, is similar—you just stop in your tracks.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:39:03
I actually went to the market yesterday and it was the first blueberries from this woman. I just bought some from the store and said, “You’re coming—” “Yeah, this is our first berry next week.” The difference was stunning, her blueberries—�

Dave Chapman 1:39:13
Between those that can grow.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:41:22
–and what I bought in the store. The emphasis on taste. It’s a little risky to say that farmers either don’t or can’t market to any scale compared to Godzilla and Mothra out there. That too is missing.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:39:28
The trade, either organized under a particular acronym or individually, is really, I don’t see any consumer-focused facing organic education out there anymore. I call it GNA, generally nod in agreement. Yeah, she’s organic. Okay, that’s that. You don’t know what that means with her struggles with her walnuts or ice cream, organic sheep. Becky King’s remarkable organic sheep operation, cheese operation, and nobody really has put money in or emphasized it, other than some of the food hubs now.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:41:22
They have events and organic farm tours here now, and they’re almost all sold out. People want to learn more, but it’s their choice to pay the $35 or to make the time to do it. It’s not institutionalized that much. CCOF doesn’t do much about it as far as I can tell. I don’t know about many of the other verification groups either.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:41:22
As I said, I’m beginning to think that or I’ve heard secondhandedly, at least, that the global supermarket chains are really, really nervous about the impact of COVID on food buying habits and the quick turn that people took to other means. I’m blown away when I go into Target to pick up the three cleaning materials we get from Target. I always walk through their fresh produce stands. They have apples and bananas and a good bit labeled organic in there.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:41:58
Costco is probably the largest seller of all; Costco is very different than the other ones. They pay the highest wages. When DEI came out, they told the felon, screw you. We’re totally into DEI, we’re staying with it, and we’re growing it. This differentiates us. We embrace all cultures and the food that they eat in Costco, and we pay the best of the workers to do that.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:42:23
Well, there’s a marketing approach.�

Dave Chapman 1:42:25
Yes, I agree. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:42:27
Where does the family farmer fit into that? Very, very difficult, unless they cooperate and consolidate in a Veritable Vegetable-like operation. VV is one of the few left that will— and Dale Coke has started.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:42:43
Dale’s very interesting in how he’s made his way through the changes in the community and now has his own co-packing operation, his own cold storage, and even has his own trucks, I think, all around his original acreage. He maneuvered his way through it very successfully. He’s a very small farmer in the eyes of California; pretty damn large, probably to some of the family farmers around the country.�

Dave Chapman 1:43:14
All right. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:43:19
There you go. �

Dave Chapman 1:43:19
Well, it’s a conundrum; it will remain one, but we will see what happens. I am not expecting the supermarkets, the multinationals to wither and die ala Karl Marx, but we will see. Indeed, we are in such uncertain times. We don’t know what’s going to happen about anything at this point. We don’t.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:43:48
Exactly. You know, over in the 41st right in the edge of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Aptos, both Lucky’s and Albertsons disappeared. I think the Safeway on the west side–I can’t even remember. Was it on hold? Albertsons, I think, is the mothership that bought several of those other chains, and now they have one or two.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:44:14
New Leaf took the Lucky’s space, and it’s like a freaking organic candy store to go in there. I’m like, Judy, let’s just go there and walk around. This is unbelievable. Displays, their marketing, their names, their product names, the delis, stunning. They now have four or five around here. Of course, they were bought by the Stan Amy’s company in Oregon. I think there’s five. He kept them–God, dang memory is an issue when you get in your 70s. Be aware.�

Dave Chapman 1:44:57
Yes, I know. I am in my 70s; I know. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:45:00
There you go. But they’ve created a fun place to go to—beautiful food, couple extra nickels on the margins for profitability, and well-trained multicultural staff to serve you and stop what they’re doing and walk three aisles down to show you exactly what you’re looking for. That’s their response, and they’re now doing—we went down to deal with our Xfinity phone system, and there’s a hole in the big old Ross—maybe it was a second Ross clothing store.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:45:45
I think they’ve taken the sign down, but there’s construction underway, and New Leaf is replicating their 41st Avenue store down at the Route 1 and Ocean Street corner. It’s wild.�

Dave Chapman 1:45:58
All right, Bob.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:46:01
Helpful? �

Dave Chapman 1:46:03
It’s all good. It’s all good. Thank you. I like to give people a chance to say something in response to the question I didn’t ask that you wish I had asked, or whatever is on your mind before we close.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:46:18
Maybe if you come out to EcoFarm or something, it’s a whole podcast, I think, in and of itself, which is in part why Organic Farming Research Foundation came about. That’s the—conundrum isn’t even the word. It’s the institutional, endowed, academic, peer-reviewed publication system that we have in the United States that has been an incredible barrier to organic research and information. It’s been a ridiculous struggle to get organic extension agents.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:47:10
I’m so proud OFRF did the first study of all the—well, we did, searching for the O word, for the CRIS system and how many organic papers they had, and that was in the very early days of OFRF. We looked at 30,000—we had a night crew that came in using 70 words and typing them in to turn up these research papers that the CRIS system posted. We found 31 appropriate peer-reviewed organic research papers out of 30,000. There’s probably hundreds more now.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:47:45
Then Jane Sooby did an analysis of all the land grants around the country and their acreage. Only one university had certified organic acreage for research to happen on. Others claim to have organic research programs on their land, but they had done Carbaryl research the year before and had a number of scientists looking at fertilizer research two years later. It was not dedicated.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:48:16
You had a structural system utterly unprepared to conduct or to commit to permanent dedication of the playground that’s called organic systems research. We wrote OREI, we got 3 million a year, then with Brise’s great work, we were up to 50 million a year, and now there’s a hell of a good chance that all of that will be gone.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:48:50
The universities, once they take that dedicated acreage out, have to wait three more freaking years to put it back in again. Young grad students that want to do this have little monies on the Fed side to support their work, with very rare exceptions and very few philanthropic organizations and very, very few organic certifier organizations that are looking 20 years down the road.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:49:24
I’d love to see you all create an endowed fund for organic research yourselves.�

Dave Chapman 1:49:28
Yes, I would love that too. At the moment, the endowment would be very small.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:49:35
OFRF never pulled off the endowment, at least during my run. You know, we got a couple $100,000, I think.�

Dave Chapman 1:49:42
Just for people who don’t know, OFRF is the Organic Farming Research Foundation. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:49:48
Correct, sorry. �

Dave Chapman 1:49:49
That’s just because not everybody–�

Bob Scowcroft 1:49:51
But it’s good. I’m better. I’m losing my training skills. So yeah, I wanted to just–�

Dave Chapman 1:49:58
Maybe next week we’ll farm. If I don’t have COVID again, and you don’t have COVID, we’ll sit down and we’ll talk about OFRF, because I meant to today, but I knew there’d be too much.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:50:09
Yeah, you caught me with all these things that I just pulled out of the bins in the shed and in the garage and in the file cabinets. I think those are—it’s just another incredible hurdle that the system can’t address. It’s just structurally—I don’t want to use apples and oranges, because that’s too close.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:50:41
There’s the tenured professor problem, there’s the Dean’s challenge, there’s the departmental ag department isn’t as sexy as the tech department. There’s any number of, I hope, momentary reasons that have delayed this so much. What little openings that we had for national, organic peer review research funded through the land grant system and the university system, it’s pretty dark at the moment; not closed entirely, but pretty dark.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:51:29
It’s again up to the farmers to demand it, call for it, and point out the lack of it.�

Dave Chapman 1:51:40
All right. �

Bob Scowcroft 1:51:41
There you go. �

Dave Chapman 1:51:41
All right, Bob, thank you so much.�

Bob Scowcroft 1:51:43
You’re so welcome. I enjoyed it. It was a great conversation.�