Despite critics, organic farming thrives in heart of US corn country

By Keith Schneider

WEST BEND, Iowa – People searching for ways to limit the toll industrialized American agriculture takes on communities, land, and water may want to make a visit to Clear Creek Acres in northern Iowa.

With just shy of 800 residents, West Bend, Iowa is barely a blip on a prairie landscape, but it has become home base for an uncommonly large expanse of organically grown crops- operations that have found success in challenging the popular convention that pesticides and other agricultural chemicals are needed to feed the world.

Towering grain bins are surrounded by close to 50,000 acres of corn, soybeans, oats and other crops grown without the use of synthetic chemicals. Farmers fertilize the land with chicken litter and hog manure and weed much of the land by hand, or with non-chemical tools, such as new laser weeders.

What’s occurred here since 1998, when farmer Barry Fehr experimented with raising chemical-free soybeans on 45 acres, is the development of the most expansive and profitable area of organic grain production in Iowa, and possibly the United States. Most of the land is farmed by multiple generations of the Fehr family. The family also manages about 3,000 organic acres in Colorado. Generating millions of dollars annually in a “sustainable income,” the success of the organic operations here in the heart of corn country defies long-held conventions about a need for chemicals in farming.

The agrochemical industry, led by Monsanto-owner Bayer, Syngenta and other global seed and chemical giants, maintains that weed killers, insecticides and other pesticides are essential to robust food production, and that a growing global population requires use of the chemicals in agriculture.

But 71-year-old Dan Fehr, who has been farming more than 50 years, says “that is debatable.”

The Fehr family farms are nearly matching the yields of crops grown conventionally, perhaps seeing only about a 10% yield decline in comparison, Fehr said. Their costs are lower because they’re not buying pesticides and the high-priced genetically modified seeds designed to be used with certain weed killing pesticides.

And the prices they reap are higher because organic crops command premiums in a marketplace where consumer demand for organic foods is climbing. About 25,000 acres of the Fehr farms in Iowa generate approximately $40 million a year in crop sales.

“The premium we got from selling organics is the key reason,” said Fehr. “The demand for organic has definitely grown a lot. That is why we do it.”

And, he added – “Nobody has died of not using pesticides. I don’t think it will hurt anything not to use pesticides.”