What’s With All the Certifications? Part One: Organic

What’s With All the Certifications? Part One: Organic

What “Organic” Really Means

“Organic” is one of the most familiar words in the grocery store, and one of the least understood. It can read like a marketing flourish, a green badge that lets a strawberry cost a dollar more. In the United States, organic is a legal category, governed by federal regulation, verified by inspectors, and renewed by growers year after year. When we talk about how our food is grown—what goes into the soil, what stays off the crop, what reaches our plates—it's the most established system we have, and it's worth knowing what’s behind the label.

Start with the scale, because organic is more of a niche than the ubiquitous label suggests. Of the roughly 880 million acres of farmland in the United States, only about 4.9 million are certified organic—about 1%. By farm count it’s the same story: there are some 17,000 certified organic farms out of nearly 1.9 million, a share that actually slipped about 4% between 2017 and 2022. The green sticker is on half the produce aisle, but the farming behind it is comparatively rare.

Within that sliver, one state towers over the rest. In 2022 California had 3,060 certified organic farms—the most of any state, and nearly 1 in 20 farms in the state, roughly five times the national rate. It produced about 39% of all U.S. organic sales, some $3.7 billion, more than four times the next state. When Rootstock sources organic produce from California, we're sourcing from the undisputed center of organic farming in America.

To sell food as “organic,” a farm can’t simply decide to call it that. It has to pass through a formal certification process under legally binding federal standards—the USDA National Organic Program, written into law as 7 CFR Part 205. The law requires regular inspections, detailed record-keeping, and on-site visits by licensed certification agents who confirm, every single year, that the farm is still doing what it says it does. In California, much of that work runs through CCOF—California Certified Organic Farmers, one of the oldest and largest certifiers in the country, founded in Santa Cruz in 1973.

The standards prohibit synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizers and most synthetic pesticides—restrictions rooted in concerns about soil health, biodiversity, environmental impact, and human health. Organic certification is not just a list of rules, but rather a system of ongoing oversight.

That maintenance has a price. Certification isn't a one-time checkbox; it's an annual cost that scales with the value of what a farm sells. A small operation—under about $50,000 in organic sales—typically spends $700 to $1,800 a year to stay certified. A mid-sized one ($50,000 to $500,000) runs closer to $1,400 to $3,200. A larger operation (above $500,000) can pay $3,600 to $4,500 and up. Those figures cover application fees, annual inspections, documentation, and testing, all of which grow along with the operation. It's the cost of proving, over and over, that the food is what the label says.

For all that, organic certification is the best tool we have for keeping synthetic pesticides and prohibited inputs out of our food at scale—and for holding farms to it with the force of law. But it isn’t perfect, and the gaps are exactly what the next wave of farming is trying to close.

The first shortcoming is the cost we just described. Certification is an annual expense that lands hardest on the smallest operations, where a few thousand dollars and a mountain of paperwork can be the difference between certifying and not. The system is most burdensome for precisely the farms—small, diversified, local—that many of us would most like to see thrive. The result is ironic: plenty of outstanding growers farm organically in everything but name, skipping certification because of the cost and paperwork. This means they can’t legally call their food organic or command the prices that certification would unlock.

There’s confusion for shoppers, too. Walk a farmers market and you'll meet growers who'll tell you their food is organic but can't legally print the word—standing beside others waving labels that sound similar and mean something different. Certified Naturally Grown holds farms to organic-style practices but verifies them through peer inspections by fellow farmers instead of paid certifiers, which keeps the cost to roughly $250 a year but carries no federal standing. CA GROWN tells you a product was raised in California, not how it was raised. And a Certified Farmers Market certificate, issued by the county, confirms that the person selling the tomatoes actually grew them and is representing them honestly—a genuinely useful guarantee, but one that says nothing about whether they're organic. Each of these labels is legitimate. None is the federal organic seal, and telling them apart is more than most shoppers signed up for.

Set aside the sheer number of labels: when you look closer at the organic label you find blind spots—good intentions with loopholes. Take seeds: a crop can carry the USDA Organic seal even when it was grown from conventional seed, because the rule requires organic seed only when an equivalent variety is “commercially available.” It’s a sensible practicality, but it means “organic” doesn’t always run all the way back to the seed. Or take soil: organic rules do require crop rotation and practices that maintain soil organic matter—but it’s a practice standard, not an outcome requirement. It confirms that a farmer does certain things, not that the soil is actually growing healthier, more alive, or more nutrient-dense year over year. A farm can follow every rule and still slowly draw down the land.

And then there’s everything organic was never designed to measure: the wages and working conditions of the people in the field, the health of the surrounding watershed and community, whether a farm is leaving its corner of the world better than it found it. A fuller picture of “good farming” would weigh all of that—and organic, on its own, doesn’t.

None of this is a reason to dismiss organic—at Rootstock, we treat organic practices as the floor, and we want to help farms move away from conventional growing. Some of our growers raise both conventional and organic crops; we're transparent about that, and we sell only their organic products.

All our farm partners have set their sights higher than organic: rebuilding soil, supporting the people who tend it, and farming in a way that gives back more than it takes. In Part Two, we'll take a closer look at the emerging next wave of standards for farms going beyond organic.

 

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