“Every challenge has a great upside,” Helge Hellberg, the cherubic executive director of Marin Organic, an association of Marin County’s 40-plus organic farms, told me a couple of months ago at a coffee shop in Mill Valley. That was before the state issued its surprising ruling against the wide-scale spraying of the pesticide Checkmate LBAM-F, in an effort to contain the light brown apple moth (LBAM).

Any Bay Area chemical-phobe knows the details by now: A native of Australia that somehow snuck its way onto our shores, where it munches on many of our crops, the LBAM (Epiphyas postvittana) created a genuine tempest around these parts. The state and federal governments said the moth had the potential to devastate the California economy to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, so they ordered an emergency dumping of Checkmate over much of the Bay Area, as well as Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. The spraying was scheduled to start sometime this month, and it would have delivered the chemical in billions of tiny capsules via airplane every few months over a period of several years.

So why was Hellberg so sanguine about such a threatening situation? After all, the spraying could potentially have dropped a chemical onto all the farms in his membership, making it impossible for them to guarantee truly organic produce for years to come.

The answer is only partly that Hellberg—a former German rock star—is an eternal optimist. The bulk of his lightheartedness came from the knowledge that his side is slowly winning the battle for the hearts and minds of consumers and, increasingly, farmers. Eventually, he was convinced, the LBAM controversy would pass—going the way of the “medfly” and the glassy-winged sharpshooter—and when it did, the organic movement would emerge stronger than ever.

Long rebuffed as a small-time methodology that couldn’t meet large-scale demand, the intrepid organic-farming movement is finally getting its due. In fact, while big ag and the state were in emergency mode about the LBAM, organic farmers from the Central Coast to the Bay Area were less anxious about the potential threat—mainly, they say, because their organic methods make them so much less vulnerable to pests. Most people, especially around here, already view organics as safer and tastier than conventionally grown food, but the LBAM debate could also amount to a tipping point for big ag’s willingness to embrace organic farming.

Indeed, the victory may be even greater than it appears, since the chem­ical the state was planning to spray wasn’t the worst of the worst. It’s a synthetic pheromone that, when applied in certain contained ways—on twist ties attached to plants, for example, where it won’t damage the soil or the fruit—is actually allowed under the national organic program.

Organic farmers and local activists weren’t happy about the plan for wholesale spraying, which, they claimed, could hurt crops and have harmful health and environmental effects. But if that relatively benign pesticide sparked protests up and down the coast, imagine the pressure that’s building on the state’s conventional farms, which bombard our food each year with about 130 million pounds of many more toxic pesticides.

No wonder Hellberg was excited about the moth’s PR potential. In his view, the moth could be a trigger of public outcry, a modern-day Silent Spring that would further push nonorganic farmers across California to rethink their ways. Though less than 10 percent of the state’s fruit and vegetable acreage is planted organically now, the trend is strong enough that organic advocates have begun to dream big. Could the state someday achieve the purism of Marin, where every single vegetable farm is organic?

Hellberg wouldn’t be shocked. “You’re seeing it everywhere,” he says, referring to big ag’s growing attraction to the environmental sanity and economics of organics. “Large-scale producers are beginning to talk about ecological balance, about perimeters and borders where you can plant the right plants that attract beneficial insects. It’s not going to happen overnight, of course, but situations like this can move it forward.”

Penny Livingston-Stark and her husband, James, directors of the Regenerative Design Institute in West Marin, are agricultural educators as well as organic farmers. Walk onto their sloping land near Point Reyes, and you can see a living case for intelligent organic farming as a better way to survive pest threats. You feel more like you’re discovering the Secret Garden than entering a working farm. Apple and pear branches arch haphazardly above lush greens and plump strawberries. The opposite of typical neat and tidy rows, everything kind of folds in on itself here. “We could walk away for 10 years,” says Penny, a proud, silver-haired Marin Organic member who has become quite famous in the world of organic growing, “and when we came back, there would be plenty to eat.”

Such is the wonder of permaculture, a style of farming that, like organic farming, strives to manage pests with a healthy environment, one in which good bugs eat bad bugs and nutrient-rich soil fends off disease. A common misperception is that organic farming can’t handle pests as well as its toxic big brother, but Penny has so much confidence in her natural system that even the voracious moth didn’t worry her. “If you have a really healthy farm,” she says, as we stroll past her goats and fruit trees, “if you see the bugs and hear the buzz, you can’t have an infestation. It’s impossible.”

A bit of an overstatement, perhaps, but not by much. Besides, the Starks have other ways of keeping bugs away. To decrease labor costs, most conventional farms plant rows and rows of the same crop year after year, a process known as growing monocultures. But because pests and diseases often become endemic when crops aren’t rotated, these farmers need to use chemical pest­icides, fungicides, and fertilizers, all of which deplete healthy soil and kill both helpful and harmful insects.

The Starks avoid this problem by rotating their crops and planting a more diverse assortment. They also spray their plants with bacterial ferments and compost teas—compost steeped in water—that are said to increase yield and boost immunity to disease. And instead of using nitrogen fertilizers, like anhydrous ammonia, which wreak havoc on water supplies, they plant cover crops and switch up crops to increase nitrogen in the soil naturally.

Even if a bad bug does cause problems, the Starks just add certain plants that attract more of that pest’s predators. The twist-tie method is another option, and there are many organically certified pesticides.

Granted, the Starks’ farmland is only three acres, making it easier to manage than a conventional one-crop behemoth. But there are plenty of large organic farms using similar methods. Earthbound Farm, for example, the largest organic produce grower in the world, has a total of about 40,000 organic acres spread out among plots of 5 to 680 acres in many different countries. Hundreds of studies now show that organic methods like Earthbound’s can come close to conventional ones in yield (within 5–10 percent). Just last year, a groundbreaking study from the University of Michigan, which analyzed 293 studies on the subject, concluded that in wealthier countries like the United States and Europe, organic farming can produce nearly the same amount that conventional farming can. In the developing world, the productivity of organically farmed land can be up to three times greater, partly because farmers there don’t have access to expensive pesticides and fertilizers, which increase yield, according to Ivette Perfecto, one of the study’s lead investigators.

Given today’s record-high food prices, some large-scale farms across the nation, especially those that receive tens of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies, are still reaping sizable profits. But in California—where recent droughts and astronomical gas prices present growing challenges, along with environmental laws that charge farmers for pesticide runoff—conventional farms often struggle. As a way to stay in business, more and more are looking to go organic so they can charge higher prices. Vernon Peterson, a Kingsburg farmer who grows peaches and plums, says he made the switch to organic about five years ago to save his 150-acre farm.

To become organic, conventional farmers must endure a three-year waiting period, during which they have to use organic methods but can’t sell at organic prices. Because of the slightly lower yields of organically farmed land, especially during the transition, Peterson took on debt during this period and barely made it through. But the gamble eventually paid off. Since the switch, Peterson has been making ends meet with sales to Whole Foods. And recently, he started a CSA (community-supported agriculture) program in which he can remove the middleman and sell his fruit directly to the public for close to the price of conventional produce in stores. He says he has never seen such demand. “I signed up 40 families in the past three days,” he told me back in June.

The California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), one of the oldest organic certifiers in the country, says that a majority of its clientele these days comprises recent converts like Peterson. It’s not all small to midsize farms like his, though—big brands are starting to ramp up on organics, too. In the Central Valley, Sun-Maid, the world’s largest marketer of dried fruit, is so keen on converting that CCOF spokesperson Viella Shipley says the company has been paying its grape growers who switch to organic a premium during the three-year trial period—the sort of corporate incentive that many org­anic advocates would like to see the government provide.

It’s tough to find exact statistics on how many con­ven­tional farms have gone organic, but the latest national numbers show organic acreage in the United States nearly tripling between 1992 and 2005. Carl Rosato, an organic farmer in Butte County who heads up his local chapter of the Going Organic Project, a CCOF foundation program that connects organic farmers with conventional farmers who are considering making the switch, says folks often just need to hear the facts to get inspired. “We have 30 or 40 conventional farmers at a lot of our meetings,” he says, “and when they hear the organic guys talk about their success with pest management and how they’re turning a profit, that’s often all it takes to raise interest.”

In the four years since the CCOF program was formed, 56 California farmers have switched all or part of their farms to organic, collectively creating more than 4,000 newly organic acres. In addition, many already organic farms are expanding. By 2010, Earthbound plans to grow to 50,000 acres.

These modest numbers are a sign of the significant hurdles that would-be organic farmers still face, especially on the largest farms, which might have a harder time enduring the economic hit of the three-year waiting period. Also, depending on how badly soil has been depleted, recovering from conventional farming can take 5 to 10 years, during which time yields could come in especially low. Organic methods don’t always work as well with monocultures, either, and converting to a polyculture method is another expense. Plus, there are some serious pests that organics just can’t control. Peterson, for example, says that during one wet spring, his organic fungus control failed, costing him nearly 100 percent of some of his crops that year.

But the biggest obstacle to farmers’ converting en masse to organics has nothing to do with organics: It concerns our love of red meat. More than half of all U.S. grain crops are used to feed beef cattle; many of these crops are grown in monocultures and require huge amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that aren’t allowed in organic farming. According to an April 2004 article in the journal Nature, organic farmers would be hard pressed to come up with the amount of nitrogen needed to grow the grain required for all that livestock. But that same article confirmed that if we could significantly curb our meat intake—granted, a big if—a complete conversion to organic farming wouldn’t be out of the question. And it could be sped up if even a portion of the tens of billions now given away each year in federal farm subsidies to conventional grain, soy, and cotton farmers was funneled instead to farmers who want to go organic.

The linchpin, of course, is consumer demand for organics—a demand that, Hellberg loves to point out, is intensified by pest-chemical controversies. More such scares are bound to happen, too, since government funding for keeping non-native pests out of California has shrunk gradually over the past 20 years. Hellberg is among many who are agitating to reverse that trend. Until that happens, though, he says, “It’s the light brown apple moth this year, but it will be something else next year, I assure you.”

---

Jaimal Yogis is a San Francisco contributing writer.