The primary focus of F.A. Farm is direct marketing of fresh, local, tasty produce. We feel that the term "organic" has been watered down over the years, especially since the USDA instituted their arbitrary control over the term by legislative fiat in 2000. As the Secretary of Agriculture admitted at the time, organic certification was not about food safety, but only about marketing. The analogy used at the time was to the grading of meat (prime, choice, select, standard, etc.), rather than a USDA stamp that signifies the meat was inspected. In other words, organic certification is about a brand, rather than about clean food.

The term "organic" in chemistry just means a substance has carbon atoms. In the last century, the word has also come to mean food grown as naturally as possible without chemical inputs. The pioneers of this use of the term "organic" were Sir Albert Howard and Robert Rodale. Their work was not only science-based, but also experiential. They looked at the problems of feeding people nutritious food that tasted good; all the while conserving the soil. Their solutions were based on understanding the dynamics of soil as a living organism. Nowadays, modern agriculture looks at soil as a factory - as dirt. This is not so.

Soil takes care of us. We should be proud to be its stewards. When we come to a new place, we should think about how we can make the soil better. This is what we did at F.A. Farm. When we arrived in 2004, there was a half-acre plot behind the barn that was covered with a blanket of thistles, five feet high. I spent three years pulling thistles and building up the soil with compost and organic soil amendments, but now I have wonderful, tasty produce that is remarkably free of insect pests. The rest of the farm was much easier to build up and now I have over two acres of very rich, friable soil in which to grow food.

Not only should our produce be organic - in other words, grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides - but it should also be sustainable. That is what we mean by Beyond Organic. Here at F.A. Farm, we worry about our carbon footprint and our calorie inputs, as well as not using chemical fertilizers nor pesticides. The most efficient use of calories in this world is to use human labor. By using calories as a measure of inputs and outputs, I produced 3.4 calories of food for every calorie I put into growing the food in 2009. Modern American agriculture, on the other hand, uses 10 calories of petroleum energy to produce 1 calorie of food. This means my labor-intensive methods are 34 times more efficient in calorie terms. Many people will quibble about these statistics, but the fact is that we are using up a finite natural resource (petroleum) to produce food, when we could be using a sustainable infinite resource (our own sweat and labor) to produce our food. Which is better? Taste some of my produce and decide for yourself.