*Campaign ended September 22, 2021. Visit Ensuring Organic Integrity for our current work.*

It is now time for the National Organic Program (NOP) to take action to protect Native Ecosystems. Doing so will preserve integrity of the seal, help reverse the biodiversity crisis and reduce global warming.

Add your voice with thousands of others to the campaign to protect our Native Ecosystems!

Our work to protect Native Ecosystems from being converted into organic production overnight was recently featured in two news articles.

U.S. 'loophole' can push organic farmers to destroy wildland, by Carey Biron, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Organic Farming Should Protect Nature, Not Destroy It, by Amanda Little, Bloomberg News

Background

In 2018 the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted near-unanimously to protect native ecosystems. They sought to change the current perverse regulation that incentivizes the immediate destruction of native ecosystems and conversion to organic production as a cheaper and faster option than transitioning existing conventional farmland over a three-year period.

It is now time for the National Organic Program (NOP) to take action to protect Native Ecosystems and thereby preserve the integrity of the seal, and help reverse the biodiversity crisis and reduce global warming.

Protecting native ecosystems slows climate change. Native ecosystems store carbon in woody plants, in the soil’s duff layer and its deeper horizons. Native grassland and forest soils contain 20 to 50 tons of organic carbon per acre in about the top three feet of soil, which is so much more than farmers can ever hope to store in converted cropland.

Native ecosystems can be used in organic production, including low-impact grazing, mushrooms, maple syrup production, and other kinds of wild crop harvesting.

Organic consumers are distressed to learn the NOP rules incentivize native ecosystem destruction. Organic farmers don’t think it is fair that this loophole allows immediate certification, when many have waited three years to transition conventional land.

Wendell Berry has said “Land destruction is easy. For it only requires ignorance and violence. But to restore the land, and to conserve it, requires humanity in its highest, completest sense.

Sign the petition today! 

*Campaign ended September 22, 2021. Visit Ensuring Organic Integrity for our current work.*

For the wild,