Episode #299
Lynn Clarkson: Winning Back The US Organic Grain Market

Lynn Clarkson was interviewed by Dave Chapman in late summer 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. At long last, I am talking to Lynn Clarkson. Lynn, we’ve tried to do this several times, and we’ve struggled with technology, as you say. I just about had to fly out there to Illinois, which would be a pleasure. It would be a pleasure to go and see your place and spend some time together in the real world.

Dave Chapman 0:21
Lynn is the owner of Clarkson Grain and manages a Real Organic certified farm, Clarkson Farm, with his wife, Karen, and his daughter, Seneca. When Trish inspected your farm, she had a really nice conversation with you, and she called me and said, “Dave, you got to talk to Lynn. He’s got stories to tell that need to be heard, but that aren’t often heard.” Here we are.

Dave Chapman 0:58
Just for a little bit of context, because I want to dive in pretty fast, with Clarkson Grain, give us a context. How much organic grain do you sell? I know you don’t just sell organic grain; you also sell non-GMO and some conventional grain. You’re a broker.

Lynn Clarkson 1:18
In my world, we call it a merchandiser because we take title to the grain. Brokers frequently do not take title; they pass title from one party to another. We are a licensed Illinois grain dealer and warehouse. We’re licensed under federal standards, and we moved into organic in about 1990. We handle well over a million bushels of organic grain, and organic amounts to maybe 15% of our overall business.

Lynn Clarkson 1:54
As a grain company manager, I don’t normally take sides in people’s value challenges about their agriculture, but my own farm is 100% organic. I started transferring my own corn into organic certification in 2015 and finished in about 2020. The only thing that I would have that’s not organic today is something I bought recently that’s in transition.

Dave Chapman 2:23
Yeah, great. Of the organic grain that is grown and sold domestically in the U.S., what percentage of that does Clarkson Grain handle?

Lynn Clarkson 2:40
During the evolution of the past roughly 36 years, there have been times when we bought up to 25% of all the organic corn and soybeans in the country. As the market has become more sophisticated and we’ve gotten a lot more competitors, I would say we’re down into somewhere in the single digits in terms of percentage. It’s somewhat reduced because we do not buy anything produced outside the United States.

Lynn Clarkson 3:14
That’s because I feel that the regulatory system, whether it’s got the desire or not to regulate, does not have the tools necessary to regulate once you leave the U.S. domestic borders. It is an open invitation, well known around the world, to fraudsters to play and make significant amounts of money and undermine what you and I and many other people are trying to do here.

Lynn Clarkson 3:42
You don’t plug people into the vast quantities of corn where you always can fill the need because you can plug in conventional for organic.

Dave Chapman 3:52
Right now, this is like one of the great puzzles of the organic marketplace in America. I believe it’s about 70%? Let me ask you instead of tell you. What percent of organic soy sold in this country is imported?

Lynn Clarkson 4:15
I believe it’s slightly over 70%, and it’s been that way for a significant amount of time.

Dave Chapman 4:22
How about for corn certified as organic?

Lynn Clarkson 4:25
Corn, there were a number of years when it was above 50%, but in recent years, that’s gone down to about 35%, if I have my data correct.

Dave Chapman 4:37
Good. It’s still a conundrum because we’re supposed to be pretty good at growing soy and corn in America – so good that we export it to the whole world – and yet we can’t seem to compete with foreign competition in soy and, to some degree, in corn. Why is that?

Lynn Clarkson 5:05
Much of the competition is that we’re not competing with people playing by the same rules we’re playing by, and we’re not competing with people who have any concerns about going to jail or paying a fine if they’re caught engaged in fraud. That’s one of the key reasons.

Lynn Clarkson 6:56
The second is, if you take a look at soybeans and how people live in their communities as farmers, for years, the Germanic farm community has believed in the no-weed policy. The most beautiful field is the one that’s cleanest, and there’s a weed, then I’ve done something wrong. Or for a landlord to look and see a weed, he says, “Oh, my farmer is no good. There’s a weed there.”

Lynn Clarkson 5:50
The correlation really comes from a thought process that is dominated by maximum yield, not by thoughts of maximum return per acre or net return per acre. Much of my time is spent trying to get farmers to think in terms of net return per acre. If we go back to focusing on soybeans, the challenge with soybeans is weed control, and your blemishes are obvious, and farmers don’t like that.

Lynn Clarkson 6:21
Within a few miles of me today, there are, in soybean fields, crews of Latino weed walkers. There are flamers. There are cultivators. There are zappers, all working on the weed fight. A lot of people like to avoid that. They prefer corn because you can actually make more money with corn than you can with soybeans, and because corn shades the row quickly.

Lynn Clarkson 6:52
By shading the row, they reduce the number of weeds we have to compete with, and even better for most of my fellow farmers is that the neighbors can’t see your weeds because they’re hidden by the corn, whereas soybeans are topping out. That is a key reason.

Lynn Clarkson 7:10
Right now, for food-grade soybeans, we are paying, depending on the variety, anywhere from a low of $20 a bushel to a high of probably $26 or $28 a bushel. Where I’m talking about right now is in the highest-yielding soybean county in the United States. It just bounces back and forth between here and other places, but the average yield in this county two years ago was probably 72 bushels per acre.

Lynn Clarkson 7:45
Now, if people under today’s market prices get 72 bushels per acre, the price would be about $10.50. They’re going to gross around $780-$800 an acre. The organic soybean grower may only bring us 50 bushels an acre to 60 bushels per acre in that range, but he’s getting on the average probably $24 a bushel. His gross is 24 times. It’s about $1,400. The cost of the two operations is essentially identical.

Lynn Clarkson 8:34
Some years, one will be slightly higher than the other; next year, it might reverse itself, but they’re almost the same. The cost of tillage and fighting weeds by hand is almost identical to the cost of the full range of pesticides, so the overall cost of operations is essentially the same. This is not super difficult math to follow if you’re in the business of rewarding the market with your product.

Lynn Clarkson 9:01
When people often say to me, who are conventional farmers, “Well, the market’s not working for me.” I say, “Have you considered perhaps you’re not working for the market? Because the market is asking you to raise something you don’t seem to want to raise, and I don’t understand that.”

Dave Chapman 9:16
Okay, Lynn. I’m stumped. I would have thought that all the farmers are pretty smart about adding and subtracting. These are not, as you say, complicated equations. You’re saying, as I understand it, that from a financial perspective, a farmer growing these crops would be kind of nuts not to grow them organically because the cost is the same, and the yield is 50% higher – the financial income is 50% higher for the organic crop.

Lynn Clarkson 11:34
Standardly, the gross would be twice as much as the market price. The market price standardly is about… If X is conventional, 2X is the standard price, with the exception of wheat, which is so easy to raise that there’s a surplus of wheat, and so wheat doesn’t quite get the same bump as corn and soybeans and alfalfa and other crops would get.

Lynn Clarkson 10:27
But that doesn’t seem to be the decision model for most farmers. No question. Really bright conventional farmers who know almost exactly to the penny what it costs to operate their farm, they’re impressive. I was visiting with one a couple of days ago, and I said, “Well, I know you came to talk about business, but I really want to have a general conversation about how you make your business decisions. You’re something I’m not.”

Lynn Clarkson 11:02
“What’s that?” “You’re a commodity player, and I’m not. I don’t know how you could be a happy farmer and still be tightly connected only to the commodity markets. I just don’t.” The only happy farmers I know from the 2025 crop and probably the 2026 crop are organic farmers or people who have somehow decoupled themselves from the commodity world and are selling directly to consumers and bypassing all the expensive middlemen.

Lynn Clarkson 11:39
How’s conventional farming working for you? This farmer farms on, I’m guessing, 30,000 acres. One of the mega farmers, but a very bright mega farmer who’s willing to think other thoughts. I said, “Well, have you considered organic?” The instant response was, “I have. Every time I do, I stumble on where I’m going to get the nitrogen to raise a lot of corn.”

Lynn Clarkson 12:08
I said, “Suppose I could answer that for you because there’s more organic manure and derivatives coming online, and I know about 100,000 tons of new supply that’s coming online late in 2027. Will you consider it?” He says, “Sure. Now I just need to find a market big enough that I can plug into.” All these balancing things happen.

Lynn Clarkson 12:32
But here’s a bright farmer. I think there’s probably about a guess of 60,000 or 70,000 organic acres in Illinois, and if he came in, he’s bringing a huge percentage of what’s there. Part of me is happy that he’s doing that. The other part of me says, “Whoops, this is going to tilt the supply-demand balance if we get several of these guys coming in.”

Lynn Clarkson 12:56
From a market standpoint, I’m not that troubled that people have reservations about becoming organic, but even the USDA, going back 20 years, had data indicating that if you wanted to make more money in farming, the organic world was a much better world for you, in addition to other social values that I think are critical.

Dave Chapman 13:19
We’ll talk about those social values because I think they’re critical, too. I’m just fascinated by the financial ideas you’re throwing out here. There’s that movie and book, “Moneyball,” and it’s the same idea. It’s a baseball team, and they decided, instead of doing what everybody does because you want to have the best pitcher in the world and the best hitter in the world, to figure out what they really need to make a winning team.

Dave Chapman 13:44
It wasn’t necessarily pitching and hitting. They had to fill the holes that they had and use the money that they had because if they got the best pitcher, they’d spend all of their money on the best pitcher. It’s a sobering thing.

Dave Chapman 14:04
You’re describing the same thing for a grain farmer: if they stopped worrying about having a perfectly clean field and what they would say at the coffee shop, and instead said, “I think we can make a better living here,” and then there’s all that other stuff that we’ll talk about.

Dave Chapman 14:23
Like, “I don’t have to get the glyphosate flu every spring, and I don’t have to worry about maybe my kids are going to get really sick” – all of that, which maybe they don’t even want to talk about, but everybody knows that there’s a price that they’re paying for using all those chemicals.

Dave Chapman 14:46
Just for financial reasons, this is interesting to me. You’re saying that the market is there. I hear you. That we have to transition slowly so we don’t swamp the market, but we’re still importing 70% of the certified organic soybeans used in the country. That’s a lot of market.

Lynn Clarkson 15:07
As you might imagine, I’ve been around the organic world long enough to meet many of the players. I know people that sit at the decision tables of some of the largest companies in the country, and sometimes we have conversations. I remember having a conversation with one of them that started out by my saying, “What are you people doing?

Lynn Clarkson 15:33
One of my merchandisers is in a bar with your merchandiser in Germany, and your merchandiser is having an organic commercial orgasm because he just purchased a million bushels of organic corn from a supplier in Ukraine for $6 a bushel. When you and I both know the price should be $12, so I’m extremely suspicious that you just bought yourself a million bushels of conventional grain with an organic label. Does that bother you?”

Lynn Clarkson 16:05
“Well, what else are we going to do? We need more.” Your answer to needing more is to inject a fraudulent product, because I know I can’t run a clean program out of that country, and I don’t think you can either, even with the best of our efforts. So what are you doing? Your company has spent years developing a good reputation. You could lose it with one article in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.

Lynn Clarkson 16:34
What are you taking this for? “Well, we talk about it at every board meeting.” I said, “Yeah, but you don’t do anything about it. You just talk about it.” “Well, what could we do?” “You could start a transition program and tell people the truth that you can’t get all the organic you want, so you’re helping farmers transition.

Lynn Clarkson 16:54
“Then three years down the road, you would have it. You’d have some grateful farmers who would thank you for having plugged them into an effective market.” But to the best of my knowledge, that has never happened. From the standpoint of buyers who want easy solutions to supply, the foreign supply is their opportunity because it is so loose.

Lynn Clarkson 17:17
There’s their opportunity to buy something in huge quantities, cheap, because in that model you never run out. You just keep shoveling your conventional stuff in and, in the beginning, it satisfies the need of a U.S. middleman, and I’ve never seen one go to jail for making those arrangements, because by the time he sees the paperwork, it has that paper stamp on it that’s organic.

Lynn Clarkson 17:48
You can just see the famous ones that, which I’m sure you know about, and most of your listeners do, is the ship that started out in the Black Sea as conventional and suffered an immaculate conception change as it crossed the ocean and became organic. Then it shows up close to Sacramento, Stockton, I think, at the Port of Stockton.

Lynn Clarkson 18:15
Farmers are alerting people that it’s fraudulent. Other people are alerted. But what happens to the grain? It gets sold in the organic poultry markets in California and used to feed chickens and turkeys that are presented as organic to the consumer, but would not meet the standards if people had regulated the game properly.

Lynn Clarkson 18:45
This works to the advantage of people that like to sell a fraudulent product at a profit. How they explain that to themselves, I don’t know, but I see that going on frequently. So frequently that I think there’s a significant percentage of what comes into the market as profit.

Lynn Clarkson 19:06
Now, I appreciate the strength in organic enforcement. I appreciate the efforts behind it. I appreciate organic’s thinking, too. But if you don’t have the regulatory tools, which include a judicial system that works, which includes a uniform commercial code, the event standards, which includes open newspapers that will blow the whistle if they see something going wrong because government won’t do that, and a system of deciding what truth is and penalizing people that avoid it.

Lynn Clarkson 19:42
Am I going to find that in Ukraine, India, Brazil, Argentina, or Togo? I’m not. They’re all little side games that hustles can be played with stuff coming into Canada, getting converted into meal and oil, and no longer carrying any flag of its country of origin. It now becomes a product of Canada, and that moves in. A consumer or a middleman who’s trying to pay attention isn’t even going to know that it originated in a country that had no regulatory control.

Lynn Clarkson 20:15
How do we as a nation support our rules where we don’t have any of those tools? I think we do a nice job here in the United States, but I prefer to buy something raised here where we do have decent regulatory control. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn good.

Dave Chapman 20:37
There have obviously been some big scandals in this country, but they were big because they got caught, like Randy Constant. They got caught, and they got shut down, and they went to jail, or, in Randy’s case, before he went to jail, he committed suicide. You’ve been around the world, Lynn, and you’ve seen…

Dave Chapman 21:01
You’ve been to the countries you mentioned. You’ve sat down with the merchants and with the growers, and what you found was almost a casual cynicism, like, “Why wouldn’t I cheat the Americans?”

Lynn Clarkson 21:24
Let’s hesitate on Randy Constant because I knew Randy. Before he was organic, he was calling on me, trying to sell me the organic stuff he was going to be producing. The government caught up with him in about 2015, and they only charged him with crimes from, I think, 2012 to 2015, or 2010 to 2015, and they amounted to about $140 million for it.

Lynn Clarkson 21:48
In reality, Randy was cheating from the day he started. He probably racked up a couple of hundred million, and if Randy had been an Argentine, or a Ukrainian, or a Turk, he would still be doing the same thing today. He got caught because he was here in the United States. He even slipped out of the first challenge he had, which was being accused of fraud by a feed miller in Nevada, who took him to court.

Lynn Clarkson 22:20
Randy’s defense was, “Well, it was organic when it left me. Either you or the railroad must have contaminated it.” And surprise, surprise, Randy won. That was about 10 years before he finally got nabbed for doing that. Pick a big ag country in South America. If you’re wandering around there, it’s almost a badge of honor to cheat the gringos.

Lynn Clarkson 22:52
It levels the playing field. “Well, they can shove me around doing this, and what harm does it do?” That’s the question you’ll get over a beer. Like, “I’m not going to kill anybody.” Well, maybe not. Maybe you are. Then, if you want to know what’s going on, you find out very quickly that this is a multi-million-dollar business to people, and they protect it like it’s a multi-million-dollar business.

Lynn Clarkson 23:19
If you are known as somebody who blew the whistle on somebody cheating, you could count on a child being kidnapped, a wife being kidnapped, you being kidnapped, or bodily harm. This is serious, serious business. It is not amateur hour for criminal behavior. We have this wonderful market that’s worth, I don’t know, $72 billion to $80 billion.

Lynn Clarkson 23:50
You’ve got a host of people around the world who often pop up at Natural Products Expo West, and they look quite civil. They’d be happy to have a drink with you in the bar and talk about things, and then they go home and they just have sort of a bottomless pit of organic grain, soybeans, and corn.

Dave Chapman 24:15
Huge problem, scary people, organized crime. This is a big deal. I know you believe this, but I just want to call out that it is a good thing that there’s such a huge, growing market for organic. People want to find an alternative to a system that they don’t want to support.

Dave Chapman 24:39
It’s our job, for I think the farmers and the people who actually know what’s going on, to protect them and say, “We want to defend your belief in doing the right thing and make sure that you’re not getting ripped off.” That’s why I’m interviewing you. You know a lot more about this than I do, Lynn. I know about some things, but I don’t know about this, and I’m really appreciative of what I’m learning.

Dave Chapman 25:07
I also want to point out that we are not talking about some kind of chauvinistic nationalism. We’re talking about cheating that’s actually happening. It isn’t like, “Oh, well, if it’s from someplace else, it must be corrupt.” You’ve been there, you’ve seen the corruption, and you made the decision that for your company you would not buy imported grain; you were going to buy U.S. grain because you could trust the supply chain.

Lynn Clarkson 25:37
We had enough experience working outside the United States, and we became aware of our own limitations in controlling the identity of the crop that we were buying. Typically, they go through handlers, packagers, and other staff, and intentional mistakes get made along the way.

Lynn Clarkson 26:02
When it came to the conclusion that I couldn’t run a good program, it was time for us to back out and acknowledge the limits of our ability to do that. Now, I know people that tell me, “I’ve got such and such a friend. We went to school together. I love him. He lives in the Ukraine. He’s got a great farm. I’d like to buy from him. I know it’s good stuff.” I’m not saying he’s not.

Lynn Clarkson 26:27
He could be fine, but if the country he lives in doesn’t have a regulatory world that means business, then I don’t want to deal with him. I’m quite willing not to deal with people from these countries, not because the people themselves are bad, but because there’s no regulation that I can rely on in that country.

Lynn Clarkson 26:54
I’ve seen the USDA take pretty good regulatory action in some countries where certifiers lose their jobs and a few farmers get kicked out. Well, go back and take a look at what happened after that. All those people are back in business under a different corporate name, or they’ve got a surrogate who’s running the company or doing something for them.

Lynn Clarkson 27:18
It’s the same problem: we don’t have local regulation. We’ve created a worldwide system that says, “Everybody come in, and we’re all subject to the same terms.” We’re not. We have the same base rule, but enforcement makes the difference. In the United States, we actually have enforcement that works pretty well – not perfect, but pretty well.

Lynn Clarkson 27:40
In these other countries, you don’t. That is a huge difference. Buyers who need a lot of grain and oilseeds are keenly aware of it. They’re just as aware of it as the producer in a foreign country.

Dave Chapman 27:54
I had an interview you’d probably be interested in with a woman named Sally Fox, and she was a cotton person. She was a pioneer, and she was really part of building up an organic cotton industry in this country, and not just among farmers, but also among mills and processors. Then the brands were buying it, and it was going. We really saw organic cotton growing.

Dave Chapman 28:18
Cotton was the most sprayed crop in America – really heavily sprayed. The fields just reeked. Vincent Stanley talked about it. He’s from Patagonia. He talked about going out, and they would take bus tours to try and convince their own team that they need to go organic. They go out to these conventional fields, and nobody even wanted to get off the bus. It was pretty bad out there.

Dave Chapman 28:44
Then all the processors said, “Hey, we can get it a lot cheaper in India and Pakistan,” at a price that Sally said wasn’t organic. We all knew it wasn’t organic. You couldn’t do it for a 20% premium to get organic cotton. It costs more than that. As a result, the industry collapsed in the U.S., and it went there. Then ultimately, the buyers were shamed because there was so much fraud.

Dave Chapman 29:13
They were like, “Oh, we’ve got to go back.” Then they came back, and it started to build up again in the U.S. You know what happened then, Lynn? It crashed again because they said, “You know what? We just want to buy regenerative cotton now.”

Lynn Clarkson 29:30
Regenerative is one of those words that was developed by a marketing team over beers to try and counter organic and confuse the consumer, and it doesn’t mean anything. Anyway, it doesn’t mean anything to me, whereas organic does. You mentioned India. I was in India a number of years ago, and I went to see the government minister in charge of organic agriculture.

Lynn Clarkson 29:57
He said, “Come in, come in. Would you like some tea?” “Sure. Could you tell me how many certified organic acres you have in this country?” I’m guessing that was 2010, maybe 2012. He says, “Well, last year we had 400,000, and this year,” he says, “6 million.” I said, “That is one hell of a conversion rate. How did that happen?”

Lynn Clarkson 30:30
He said, “Well, you’ve heard of the Green Revolution.” “Yes, sir, I have.” He said, “Well, the Green Revolution was exciting for India, and we thought it was the answer to many of our problems. So we decided to prime the pump.” I said, “Well, what do you mean, prime the pump?”

Lynn Clarkson 30:50
“Well, we agreed to pay for something like 80% to 90% of all the nitrogen and pesticides used on farms. At the time, nitrogen didn’t cost very much, and so we could tolerate it. But now that nitrogen costs several times as much as it did when we started in the Green Revolution. We, the government, would like to get out of this. So we have a keen interest in encouraging organic farming.”

Lynn Clarkson 31:18
We no longer have to pick up the tab for billions of dollars in fertilizer, no. Now the government’s got a keen interest in land being certified organic and crops being sold around the world as organic, and so the government is pushing on it.”

Lynn Clarkson 31:36
I was not in a single processing plant. I was in about 25 different processing plants. Out of the 25, only one would have met U.S. standards for hygiene and functionality, because it’s a hot climate, there are no doors, no windows, no walls. It’s wide open. You got flies, insects, and rodents coming from every direction all the time. None of it satisfied me.

Lynn Clarkson 32:05
When you look to see what’s done on cleanout when you’re moving to oil products, it’s a pain to go clean out an oil pipeline. What’s the perfect answer to it? Never clean it out. One day I got organic oil going through it. The next day I’ve got a different oil, and it’s conventional. The next day I’ve got this… You run into that so often that India gives me goosebumps when I worry about the integrity of anything coming out.

Lynn Clarkson 32:37
Just in explaining organic, have you read all the organic rules? I can’t remember how many hundreds of pages it is. Mostly, you and I have reduced it to about five pages of facts that we need to follow. But 90 some percent of Indian farmers are illiterate. It doesn’t mean they’re not good people or trying to do a good job or have good thoughts, but how do you explain the details of organic?

Lynn Clarkson 33:06
It’s a new challenge to explain without people being literate what you need to do. Then the source of information becomes the neighbor over a cup of tea: “Well, I think you can do this. Pretty soon we can do this, and pretty soon you don’t have any rule. No rule is enforced.”

Dave Chapman 33:29
All right. I was in a conversation last week about certification. This was an American farmer, and they pretty much sold their crop locally directly to people, which is a wonderful way to run it. We all wish we could do that. I wish I could do it; I can’t on my farm. It was a friendly conversation.

Dave Chapman 33:55
They said, “We’re not sure that certification makes any sense for us, and this seems to be where a lot of farmers we know are going to becoming smaller and finding ways to market directly. Does certification mean anything to those farmers?” I said, “Well, in my state in Vermont, it does. People, if they’re organic, they choose to get certified, and it’s different from, say, California, where it’s very much an economic proposition.”

Dave Chapman 34:23
I want to ask you because you have such a different perspective. One of the things that I think is true is that this person I was talking to still wants to buy organic grain, and still wants to buy organic coffee, and still wants to buy all the crops that they don’t grow on their farm, or even that they don’t even know anybody who grows those crops.

Dave Chapman 34:45
They’d even like to be able to go to a restaurant and get an organic meal. What are the things that you might say in a friendly way to that person, “Maybe you should think about this?”

Lynn Clarkson 34:58
That’s a conversation that my merchandisers and I have with some frequency. First of all, the reason for certification is really trust in my mind. If I know you, and you tell me something, and I like you, and I’m prepared to believe you, and you’re selling it all locally, I’m your buyer for all your organic cattle or whatever, okay, you don’t need to do that.

Lynn Clarkson 35:22
But if you want the benefit of a dynamic market where you’re dealing with buyers who do not know you, then I have to have certification. I’m not going to trust you to tell me that, “Oh no, I’ve done this, this, and this.” I want to know that you’ve gone through some disciplined regimen of proving that to a third party. I think the certifications mean something.

Lynn Clarkson 35:47
Now, if you’re going to sell it all in the local community, maybe that’s not particularly important. But once you get away from that local community, to me, it’s essential. Whether you’re organic or Real Organic or something else, if I were buying something today, the Real Organic label would be meaningful. Organic with a “Raised in the United States” label would be meaningful to me.

Lynn Clarkson 36:12
The integrity curve of certifiers is parabolic, like most curves, and some of them are really good, and some of them aren’t so good, and some of them give in to economic pressure from clients that are perhaps on the wrong side of the gray line.

Lynn Clarkson 36:31
That’s what I’ve seen when Real Organic tries to make the pitch that I just said to you – it’s organic and was raised in the United States, where we got regulation – you have to explain to people that it was raised in the United States. That requires a longer conversation. If you get a label that just says “Product of the United States,” fine.

Lynn Clarkson 36:58
You may have noticed the USDA just created a “Product of USA” label, but they’ve applied it only to meat and poultry. I don’t know why they just didn’t say everything. There must be a reason. I don’t think it was an accident.

Dave Chapman 37:16
They used to have that law, Lynn, for produce in the stores. It had to have country-of-origin labeling. I don’t see that label. I guess they got rid of it. I don’t know.

Lynn Clarkson 37:28
I don’t know either. I know that there was a controversy. It was supposed to be discriminatory to have country-of-origin labeling. It came from such-and-such country, and I won’t like it because it came from that country. The reason I don’t like it is that the country doesn’t have regulations.

Lynn Clarkson 37:45
That country uses pesticides that are illegal in my country. It uses pesticides that are illegal in my country that I don’t want to see used at twice the rate approved for use in the United States. I do have reasons for discriminating, but I think there are very good reasons, and that’s why I prefer U.S.-raised.

Dave Chapman 38:03
Yeah. We just had – it’s ongoing – a big food safety issue with the baby greens from Mexico, from Taylor Farms. Somehow, everyone started out by saying it was Taco Bell, but that’s not who grew the lettuce. It was Taylor Farms. I’ve learned a lot about Taylor Farms in the last three weeks.

Dave Chapman 38:47
They’re big. They’re 40% of the baby greens sold in America. They’re also the biggest organic baby greens. They have a number of brands that you can’t even tell what’s theirs and what’s somebody else’s country of origin. Very murky, and it’s a problem. It’s a problem for anybody that’s that big.

Lynn Clarkson 38:57
It is a huge problem. There have been problems with blueberries. There have been problems with lettuces. There’ve been problems with corn. There have been problems with soybeans. They’re everywhere, these problems. There are things that we Americans like to consume that we don’t grow here.

Lynn Clarkson 39:11
“Okay, I’m stuck. I have to buy it from someplace else.” I would really like it to be a well-disciplined, organized, regulated supply chain that I have, but I know I can’t get as good a chain when I do that as I can if it’s within the continental U.S.

Dave Chapman 39:28
Yeah. I appreciate what you’re saying. We’ve been hearing this from grain farmers, particularly. I think that there’s lots of outright fraud on pesticides on things like blueberries coming from Mexico and Chile, but for grains, the percentage of imports is humongous – the majority. What’s going on there?

Lynn Clarkson 39:58
Dave, if you go back a few years to the time when we were just opening our doors to India, we were allowing Indians to certify everything as organic to our standards, and the standards weren’t our standards at all; they were just whatever worked.

Lynn Clarkson 40:19
There’s so much soybean coming in as organic from India that the processors in the United States who do toll work for other people – processors generally don’t just do their own stuff; they do stuff for other people – don’t have control of the sourcing of the material that comes through. It’s organic. It’s labeled organic. Somebody brings it into their plant. They’re going to do Dave’s organic for you.

Lynn Clarkson 40:47
Among Clarkson Grain’s clients are some premier baby food manufacturers that have markets around the world. They are extremely concerned about pesticide residues on baby food. We get to baby food; it doesn’t get much safer than that. We find ourselves one of the few companies that test things for pesticide residue.

Lynn Clarkson 41:17
Very few people do. It’s expensive. It takes time, and you’re going to get answers every once in a while that you don’t want to have, and you’re going to have to reject stuff after, probably, you’ve paid for it. It became almost impossible for us to find clean, organic soybean oil from processors in the United States. It was a serious problem.

Lynn Clarkson 41:47
At the time, I allowed our oil company to violate the rule I just told you. We had a rule that we don’t buy things overseas, but the cleanest oil we could find came from an Italian company that had gotten caught in one of these fraud deals, and its ownership had decided it was going to buy its own land and wasn’t going to buy from anybody except its own farms.

Lynn Clarkson 42:09
They had a crushing facility in northern Italy, and we started buying our oil from them, and we never had a problem. Then along came the war in Ukraine, and Ukraine was knocked out of the organic world. Those still standing in Europe were overwhelmed by the demand from other places, and we weren’t that big an account, so we lost our access to those people.

Lynn Clarkson 42:36
Then we come back to the United States. After we had done quite a bit as a country to stave off the fraudulent onslaught from India, it was easier, still difficult, but easier to find good oil from the U.S. But we would love just to be using a supply of beans that came from the U.S., but with 70% of the beans available to the processors coming from other places, it is unlikely we’re going to find a supply that’s pure.

Lynn Clarkson 43:12
When we’re checking for pesticides, what are we finding? We’re finding all sorts of pesticides that are legal in many places in the world and here at higher rates than you would find in the United States. We found pesticides that are illegal almost everywhere, except maybe China and India, and we found some pesticides that I think are illegal everywhere in the world.

Lynn Clarkson 43:38
That is a key reason that people look to organic – to avoid pesticides in the diet. We found that problem, and we weathered it, but it is always a problem – always an issue we have to work with.

Dave Chapman 43:56
Yeah. I want to come back to fraud in a minute, but one thing that I’m curious about is the market as a measuring device. This is the idea of capitalism that the market is the self-correcting mechanism. We don’t need to control it. People will make their decision about what they want, and they will bid it up if there’s a short supply. They’ll pay more, and farmers will move there to say, “Okay, I can make a living there.”

Dave Chapman 44:27
That sounds like a great idea. But if the measuring device is rigged, it doesn’t really work. In this case, being rigged is somebody from some other country who’s saying, “Hey, this soy is clean and was grown in this way,” but it wasn’t. As you say in your testing, you’ve discovered that those lies are very frequent.

Dave Chapman 44:51
Do you think that the fact that there’s such a high level of fraud in the imported stuff really affects the price structure for the domestic farmers? If there was no fraud, would American farmers naturally move to organic production?

Lynn Clarkson 45:14
When India got shut down because it was just certifiably a bad supplier, when they got shut down, over the span of six months, the price of an organic soybean went from $24 to $50. I think the $50 price lasted for maybe a week, and then it gradually tapered off. Within two years, it was back to more sustainable pricing.

Lynn Clarkson 45:49
It’s not really in the interest of farmers to have the highest possible price nor the lowest possible price. You want a good, sustainable price that you can rely on year after year. The price differentials I just told you in corn are fantastic.

Lynn Clarkson 46:06
I have difficulty in understanding why people won’t do that. It’s been one of the puzzles of my life for the past 20 or 30 years. We want more. It’s not that hard. You can raise the corn without pesticides, you can raise it without synthetics. Why don’t you do that? I’ll pay you twice as much. “But you’re not as convenient.” You’re right. I’m not.

Lynn Clarkson 46:28
There’s nothing that I would say is really convenient about organic farming. The convenience goes with conventional farming. You use pesticides to address problems that the organic farmer addresses in what I think is a far more environmentally sensitive manner. In my mind, that also covers the issue of soil erosion from working the soil, no matter what.

Lynn Clarkson 46:58
I live in a farm community where we’re under aerial bombardment for fungicides for a significant period of the summer. I know an inordinate amount of people with Parkinson’s disease and cancers that are associated with a series of pesticides that are related.

Lynn Clarkson 47:20
Many of the organic farmers I know have a family member that they believe was injured by a disease that was caused by that. You look at the differences in disease rates over the generations. I was born to a mother that never had pesticides sprayed on her because they weren’t used, because I was born right at the tail end of World War II, and the chemical factories producing chemical warfare items hadn’t yet shifted their focus to the farming community and taking care of agriculture.

Lynn Clarkson 47:57
Now you’ve got people who are several generations into having their chromosomes beaten upon by whatever’s coming out of the pesticides and other ag chemistry. I don’t know that it’s a cause, but I see a lot more disease among youngsters who weren’t in… I don’t know. When were you born?

Dave Chapman 48:22
In 1952.

Lynn Clarkson 48:25
Okay, so 1952. Your mother had very little exposure, but if you’ve been born in 1970 or 1980, oh man, here it comes. I don’t know why this wouldn’t be a cumulative problem, and it sort of looks to me like it is, but I don’t have any probative data. I just have anecdotes.

Dave Chapman 48:46
Yeah. We’re going to have Chuck Benbrook speaking at the Churchtown Conference, and he thinks he does have data.

Lynn Clarkson 48:54
I believe Chuck knows more about pesticides. There can’t be more than two or three people in the world who know as much as Chuck does about pesticides. I think he’s done a fantastic job.

Dave Chapman 49:04
That’s right. I agree. He’s exceptional, and he’s very articulate. Lynn, we could keep talking for quite a while, but I know it’s been an hour, so maybe I should thank you very much, and I really appreciate it. You’re helping educate people.

Lynn Clarkson 49:32
I appreciate you made this thing work with the Zoom revision.

Dave Chapman 49:37
That’s right. We went through a lot of stuff here to get it to work. People don’t know. We’ve had several interviews where one of us had an echo, so we had to keep trying until we got it right.

Lynn Clarkson 49:49
You managed to find and help develop a cadre of people who are bright, care about things, and help make this market a viable place. The biggest threat to that market, in my mind, is without a doubt fraud. We have to keep that constrained. I think the USDA is interested, but once you leave the United States, I don’t think they have the ability to regulate well.

Dave Chapman 50:15
All right. We’ll keep working on it. We’ll talk again, Lynn, I promise, if we survive that long. Lynn Clarkson, thank you very much.

Dave Chapman 50:32
Dave, you’re very welcome. Thanks for what you do.