Going organic is no small feat

ST. JOHN, Wash. – For the past 14 years, Joe and Sara DeLong have delivered a rare commodity across the Pacific Northwest – organic pork.

From their little farm on 90 acres of Palouse River Canyon land, they have grown grain and hay, kept about 400 hogs and pigs in outdoor pens, and catered to a growing clientele of city folks and restaurants willing to pay premium prices for meat that they have handled from birth to packaged pork chops. Some of the area’s best restaurants served Sara Joe’s pork, swearing to its superior taste. Shoppers could find pork cuts at specialty grocers such as Huckleberry’s.

That will end this fall.Wiping dirt on his pants, DeLong said he regrets his decision to go out of business.

“I just can’t do this anymore,” he said of the couple’s company, Sara Joe’s Pork Products.

Americans have an appetite for organic food. Yet the economics of supplying that organic fare are daunting and tend to favor larger or corporate producers rather than local farmers.

“There is this whole groundswell of local organic agriculture, but it takes people willing to commit their lives to it,” said Nancy Allen, of Tilth Producers of Washington. “It seems larger farms are more likely to stay with the process.” Tilth Producers is an organization promoting organic and sustainable farming that includes more than 400 Washington growers.

Raising animals for meat that be certified as organic is difficult, as borne out by the fact that despite fetching premium prices, there are few organic meat producers in Washington state.

DeLong ticks off a long list of business difficulties – workload, lack of qualified farmhands and high fuel costs – and regulatory gripes.

His farm is the epitome of what shoppers want to believe they are buying when choosing organic.

Delong doesn’t give his pigs antibiotics or growth hormones. He buys and grows organic grains and hay for feed, steering clear of pesticides. Piglets run free in outdoor pens, stirring up plenty of mischief that irks and delights DeLong all at once.

He calls an especially frisky group of little pigs darting about “little renegades.” They chew up his tarpaulins and chase each other.

He “went organic” 14 years ago in hopes of finding a sustainable hog farming formula, one that would enable him to stay on the scenic Whitman County land his family settled in 1863.

Every day he feeds the boars, sows and piglets, throwing buckets of grain into the pens and filling water troughs with a garden hose.

The chores, which include grinding his own grain into meal, take hours each day. The rest of his time is spent with paperwork, taking retail orders, driving hogs to slaughter at Kapowsin Meats Inc. south of Tacoma, then personally delivering meat to restaurants and grocers.

When he is gone, his wife Sara runs the farm and takes care of the family.

It’s been too much work for too long, the DeLongs said recently.

Joe hurt his arm and said it’s getting more difficult to do everything himself. The main problem, he said, is that he can’t hire decent help – even for about $15 an hour.

Hog farming is tough work – especially during the winter. His animals live outside year-round.

“We’ve tried and tried to find somebody who can do the work well and we can’t,” said Sara DeLong, echoing a common complaint among today’s farmers. “It’s like no one wants to do hard work anymore.”

The couple also blames a regulatory system that passes and enforces rules that are tough on small farmers.

Especially worrisome to many small farmers is livestock identification.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also called mad cow disease, to work up a long-awaited program allowing the government to track livestock with electronic ear tags or chips.

Backers of the National Animal Identification System say it will protect the national herd by quickly enabling investigators to trace diseased animals. The program would also help safeguard public health by ensuring tainted meat could be pulled from store shelves, and protect export markets by assuring trading partners that the United States has a rigorous safety system in place.

But many in agriculture worry the NAIS is unnecessary government intrusion.

For now, livestock identification will be largely left to the individual states. In Washington, state regulators are asking cattlemen, hog farmers, and others raising animals for food to voluntarily register their farms. It’s the same in Idaho.

Other states, notably Wisconsin, are requiring registration.

But many questions remain largely unanswered, such as, how much information is enough? How much will animal identification or premises registration cost and who will fund it? Will it satisfy the federal government’s charge of protecting the overall livestock economy and consumer health?

Such questions worry even those who have a couple of horses, a few chickens and maybe a dairy cow, because it’s unclear whether these smallest of farms will be forced to register and tag all of their animals

It depends, according to government documents.

Regulators aren’t concerned until animals are “co-mingled.”

That means if a horse is taken to a large trail riding event, for instance, it may need to carry identification just in case it is exposed to a horse afflicted with a serious and contagious ailment.

Chris Spaulding, an animal identification specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Washington’s voluntary program should alleviate worries of a government program run amok.

“We believe the reasons for doing it are solid,” she said. “If we can get a hold of a disease situation and get it stopped immediately, it can cost millions of dollars and markets.”

Yet the whole scenario is maddening to John Anderson, owner of Kapowsin Meats. He said the identification effort is just one more problem driving small and mid-size livestock producers — like the DeLongs — out of business.

New regulations increase costs, and even though organic goods fetch higher prices than non-organic products, the revenue still can’t keep pace, he said.

“They used say you can’t sell the squeal. But these days you better figure out how to,” Anderson said.