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While deciding between two bags of baby spinach at the grocery store recently, I was struck by a question that seemed obvious. What makes something organic?
Yet, after a few moments of head-scratching, and turning my soon-to-be salad ingredients over and over again in my hands, I realized I didn’t have an answer.
I soon found that behind the USDA organic label on the winning bag of baby spinach, there is a story.
It begins with a small group of Mainers four decades ago.
When Eric Sideman started working at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA, in the mid 1980s, there was no single definition of “organic” in the United States. Different states had different rules. MOFGA was among the first in the nation to establish an organic certification program for farmers and gardeners.
“We essentially tied with California,” Sideman told me. “It was right around the same time and they always fought on who was actually first, but MOFGA was first.”
By the late 1980s, there were growing calls for a uniform set of guidelines that would apply to farmers across the country. In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act, authorizing a National Organic Program (NOP) to be administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA.
Sideman was appointed to the National Organic Standards Board, the advisory committee to the USDA, in 1997. There, he helped develop regulations for the NOP that would be easy for farmers to understand.
“You've probably heard the slogan ‘feed the soil and it will feed the crop,’” Sideman said. “That's very different than conventional farming.”
To be considered organic, growers have to partake in practices geared toward developing healthy soil. This can be done by rotating crops, mitigating runoff, and adding organic matter, like manure. While using synthetic pesticides and fertilizers is generally prohibited by organic standards, there are some exceptions. For example, farmers may vaccinate their livestock against infectious diseases or use pheromones as a non-toxic way to divert insects from infesting crops like fruit.
“What it comes down to is that the organic practices of building organic matter in the soil and maintaining the soil allows the soil to sequester carbon,” Sideman said.
In 2002, the USDA took over organic certification across the country. MOFGA’s certification services became USDA-accredited, meaning they can inspect farms to verify they meet the national standards. Today, MOFGA certifies over 500 growers.
In addition to the annual process, growers are also subject to random inspections and product sampling, in which inspectors may check that crops do not contain pesticides or that proper crop rotation practices are being followed. These third-party verifications are what make the organic label so strong, according to Sarah Alexander, MOFGA’s executive director.
“This is the only [label] that is federally regulated, that there's a clear set of standards that everybody who is certifying to that standard has to meet,” Alexander said.
When I am at the grocery store, I cannot always discern between food labels. At a time when new ones seem to keep cropping up, it gets confusing to figure out what each one means. While wandering through the aisles on my recent trip, I spotted “regenerative,” “natural,” “sustainable,” and “non-GMO project verified,” just to name a few.
I decided to ask the experts at MOFGA for their help decoding these terms.
Some, like “natural,” do not mean anything, Sideman and Alexander told me. The same goes for regenerative and sustainable — it is just marketing.
Others, like the non-GMO project or Fair Trade, are backed by organizations, but do not have a legal definition. Unlike the label organic, they do not fall under a federally managed program.
The label organic — which in Maine can be denoted by either the USDA or MOFGA — is consistent across the country, and means that at least 95 percent of ingredients in any particular product are certified to organic standards.
This is different from the “made with organic” label, which is given to foods made with at least 70 percent certified organic ingredients. The “made with organic” label also means that the ingredients that are not organic were not grown with any practices banned by organic production.
“Whether it's us certifying here in Maine, or the Ohio farmers certifying it in Ohio, we know no matter where you go it always means the same thing,” Alexander said.
Like many federal agencies, the National Organic Standard Board is facing uncertainty as the Trump administration slashes funding. The board’s spring 2025 meeting was postponed because the agency did not have the staff to post the agenda to legally be able to hold the meeting, and federal funding freezes have impacted farmers across the country, including MOFGA growers.
Sideman said he is concerned about funding for the National Organic Program. The Organic Certification Cost Share Program, which offsets the cost of going organic for farmers, was not funded in the continuing resolution that passed Congress earlier this month. Future cuts could take further aim at the NOP or its staff, Sideman said.
“If the NOP doesn't have the staff to visit the certifier and make sure that the certifier is doing the job correctly,” he said, “the whole thing falls apart.”
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