Ohio U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown — who’s in the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture — introduced a bill that would address some of the challenges Ohio’s organic farmers face.
Ohio is among the states with the highest number of certified organic farms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Challenges for organic farmers include how to control weeds without herbicides or how to transition a conventional farm to organic, though there’s not enough research, according to Amalie Lipstreu, the policy director at the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association.
Lipstreu said some research agencies under the umbrella of the USDA allocate less than 1% of their budgets toward organic research.
“If you're doing research that's based on all of these artificial inputs [like] artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, that kind of research doesn't apply to organic because they don't use those things,” Lipstreu said.
Lipstreu added the USDA is an incredibly large agency; this bill would create more coordinated initiatives among its many departments.
“We know that if you look at the market, organic agriculture makes up more than 6% of the food sales,” Lipstreu said. “So this would create more equity in terms of like representation for the organic market share in the kind of research that's being done.”
The bill would make sure the USDA prioritizes more organic agriculture research, and designate more money for university research grants into organic agriculture.
“The public is increasingly looking for food that's produced in a way that does not use synthetic inputs,” Lipstreu said. “So we need food that recognizes that we have limits to our ecological system and we need to take care of it.”
Alejandro Figueroa is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.
