The farmers are not always the good guys here. Think about those migrant workers: you're insisting that organic agriculture necessitates a huge pool of laborers willing to work long, hard hours for extremely low wages? If the only way to save organic farming from corporatization is to argue for cheap, disposable labor, count me out.

Maybe it's time for a new "organic, fair wage" label that requires not only organic practices, but actually paying well enough, and providing good enough working conditions, that people might actually want to show up and pick those tomatoes. Trying to keep up with those large corporate farms by being the same as them, only smaller, probably isn't going to work.

My thoughts exactly. If you have to rely on exploiting workers' undocumented and relatively desperate status to be profitable, I doubt you'll find much sympathy from the upper-middle class consumers that form the base of organic sales. Even railing against the Wal-Mart bogeyman will only get one so far, concerns about commodification aside. That cutting of costs and mass production that lead to 'commodification' of food since the 1930's also eradicated starvation as a day-to-day concern for a vast majority of Americans, so the relative consumer and producer surpluses have to be weighed against each other.

Of course a producer of any good is going to be concerned about competitors entering the fray, driving down premiums and margins, but as far as public policy goes, we have to balance the benefits to consumers against those of producers. Especially when producers (and consumers for that matter) are benefiting from cheap, disposable labor.

I'm an organic produce farmer in Ohio. I currently work 80+ hrs per week, have $15,000 in debt and have earned a grand total of $1500 this season to put in my pocket. Granted, part of this is because I have a new business. Even so--I've done the math: My maximum revenue would be about $20,000 minus about $10,000 expenses. This leaves me with $10,000 for myself, well below the poverty line. I'm sure there are plenty of things I can do to increase my margins and add value to my product (Maybe 25%?). Even then, however, we are not talking about a living wage here.

So, after two years of constant toil for a few thousand dollars, my question is: Do food-conscious Americans really know what it would cost to produce truly organic, fair-wage, sustainable food? Most Americans spend only about 12% of their income on food. This is the lowest in the world, even among other developed countries. We've become so used to cheap subsidized, commodity-based foods like high-fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, etc., that we've come to see cheap food (even cheap organic food) as some kind of birthright. Meanwhile, we don't think twice about shelling out the big bucks for an overpriced house or SUV.

If we were actually to give farmers a true living wage, eliminate unfair commodity and energy subsidies (which actually drive the price of food down, not up), and promote truly sustainable agriculture, we would have to get used to paying twice what we currently pay for food. Is organic America prepared to pay this price? If they really care about the values behind organic, they have to face up to the facts. If, on the other hand, all they want is the organic label slapped on their cheap milk carton, the Wal-marts of the world will prevail.

Don't get me wrong, by the way; I love farming. It's rewards are numerous: phyical health and exercise, access to fresh vegetables, being outdoors, social contact with customers. But it's very hard work; the kind of physical work most Americans have never experienced. If farmers cannot be given a fair wage for their products, we will burn ourselves out--running just to stand still. More and more farmers will go out of business and more organic production will get sent overseas.

What will happen to a country where all our food production is shipped overseas? What if gas prices continue to rise to unsustainable levels and food cannot be shipped long distances anymore? What happens when we find out all of our good agricultural land has been depleted beyond repair or paved over with suburban sprawl? What happens when no one knows how to farm anymore and we desperately need farmers?

These are the core issues that the organic movement was founded on. It's now up to consumers to decide where we go next.

I disagree with some of the letters here. I think they frame the problem about cheap illegal immigrant labor in the wrong way. Our food sources are always going to come from cheap labor inputs. And if it has to come as the product of cheap labor, why not cheap labor from foreign-born farm workers in the US rather than cheap farm labor from peasants in China? The problem here, as I see it, is how to legally get the labor into the US, and have them receive basic worker's rights.

For the record though, I do not view the success of US farmers –organic or otherwise – as more important than the success of Chinese farmers. But if the end product is better in the US, then its better to support US organic farms.

The question I have is: do economies of scale in organic farming actually save resource inputs and benefit the land? Does a local farmer who trucks his produce to the farmer's market consume more or less strategic inputs (water and oil) than organic food shipped from China by container-load. I question whether organic produce shipped in from China is not only cheaper because of labor resources, but ultimately may consume less non-renewable resource inputs. But I really don't know the answer to this. Is there a study about it?

I heard a radio interview on NPR about this topic recently, and I thought the farmer made a couple excellent points.

He said that the undocumented workers who come and work at his farm, at other farms in CA and in the vineyards come from Mexico so that they can make better lives for themselves, that working long days for low wages (in US standards - I think he said the farms were paying $8-9 per hour) improved the lot of their families in Mexico.

His second point was that the farmers have been unable to get American workers to work in their fields. He said that as part of the welfare to work program in CA, there were supposed to be a certain number of people who needed work. Of that number, only a very small fraction turned up for the first day, and only a very small fraction of those people came back (sorry, I can't remember the numbers).

He said that he thought the best solution would be some sort of guest worker program that allowed the workers to go home to their families in Mexico during the off season. I know my husband works with some Indian men (I forget the name of the visas they get to work in technology jobs) who go back to India for a few months, then return here for a period and so on, so why is that not an acceptable solution for lower paid workers?

I am not saying that people shouldn't be paid fair wages; I'm just saying that we shouldn't make victims out of the undocumented workers and there's more to it than paying a "fair wage" and raising prices accordingly.

Finally, I encourage everyone to join a CSA if there is one near you. In my experience, the vegetables are delicious and plentiful (plenty to share, in fact!). Find a CSA near you at localharvest.org.