Perennial crops like these flowering French chives, Mongolian Chives, and Garlic (Asian) Chives are part of Henry’s diverse, sustainable farm that mimics Nature so as to sustain a biologically and ecologically healthy farm, community, and planet — for us and for future generations.

Until this year (2025), the answer to “Is Henry’s Farm Organic?” was quite simple. I began by saying: “My farm and therefore everything I grow on it is 100% USDA Certified Organic. What that means is that I not only meet, but go above and beyond, all the USDA standards for organic production.”

Well, the answer is no longer so simple. Although I was certified organic by the USDA from 2012 through 2024 (and before that certified organic by OCIA), I’ve decided not to get certified this year. I’m not going to change any of my farming practices and will continue to exceed all USDA organic standards. The only thing that is going to change is that I won’t spend the time, effort and money doing the paperwork, jumping through the hoops, and losing a day of work to the on-farm inspection.

So you’d think I could simply do a “Delete all” on the term “USDA certified” from my pre-2025 website and be good to go. For example: “My farm and therefore everything I grow on it is 100% organic. What that means is that I not only meet, but go above and beyond, all of the USDA standards for organic production.”

Unfortunately, life in our modern litigious world is not that straightforward.

The summer sun rises over the just-cut hay in the bottomland field during its fallow years.

First, a little history. The USDA, under the National Organic Program (NOP) legislation, took over the organic certification of farms and food in 2001. Prior to that, farmers, including me, were certified organic by private certification agencies. I was certified organic under the international Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA) from my first year of farming in 1993 until 2000, when USDA took over certification.

Since the USDA took over, they became the de facto owner of the term “organic,” at least when it is used to label and describe farming practices and food. If I describe my farm or my vegetables as organic, without being certified by the USDA, I face fines of up to $20,000 per occurrence.

This actually happened to me. Around 2006 or so, I got a letter from the USDA giving me 60 days to remove any use of the word organic from my website or face the financial penalties. Apparently, someone ratted on me, since the USDA doesn’t pay people to search through websites and find offenders.

I believe that the offending phrase on my website back then was “non-USDA certified organic.” I was trying to explain that I followed organic farming practices, but wasn’t going through the USDA-certification process.

I remember calling up a guy at the USDA, a nice-enough fellow. “Can I say, ‘I follow organic farming practices?’” I asked.

“No.”

“How about, ‘I’m an organic farmer, but I don’t get certified?’”

“No.”

“My practices go above and beyond mainstream organic practices?”

“No.”

“Then how can I describe what I do?” I asked him.

“Oh, you can say whatever you want, as long as you don’t use the word ‘organic.’”

So, here we have a word--a word that has been used to describe a certain philosophy and set of agricultural practices at least since the days of the early titans of organic agriculture such as Sir Albert Howard in Britain and J.I. Rodale (of Organic Gardening magazine) in the early 1940s—but a word whose use is now denied to me.

Here we have a word that has its own entry in modern dictionaries. Merriam-Webster’s entry reads, “Relating to, yielding, dealing in, or involving the use of food produced with the use of feed or fertilizer of plant or animal origin without employment of chemically formulated fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides.”

While Merriam-Webster is allowed to use the word, under U.S. law, this is no longer a word that I, a farmer whose daily activities follow that definition, can use. It is in fact a word that I am told I must erase from my vocabulary.

So how can I describe my farming philosophy and practices? How can I explain how I farm, what I do, what makes my vegetables different from conventional, chemically grown, industrially produced vegetables without using the most appropriate, accurate, and historically used term, organic?

Well, let’s start with how the USDA defines organic. This is from the National Organic Standards, “Organic is a labeling term that indicates that the food or other agricultural product has been produced through approved methods. The organic standards describe the specific requirements that a USDA-accredited certifying agent must verify before products can be labeled USDA organic.”

In other words, according to the U.S. government and U.S. courts of law, “organic” and “USDA certified organic” are synonymous.

And what are the USDA’s “approved methods” and “specific requirements?” They are pretty basic. In short, to be a USDA-certified organic farmer you must not use or have used for the previous three years any synthetic chemicals of any kind on the farm. That means no man-made insecticides, herbicides, or fungicides. A certified organic farmer can kill no organisms with manmade chemicals whether viruses, bacteria, weeds, or insects; even rat poison in a packing shed is banned. To be certified organic, one must use no synthetic fertilizers, no hormones, no sewage sludge, and no genetically modified organisms of any kind.

My farming practices easily clear those bars. I actually subscribe to an even stricter definition. I think that to farm organically means to farm in an environmentally sustainable manner, or at least to aim towards sustainability, which at its root means the ability to sustain a biologically and ecologically healthy farm and a healthy planet for future generations. For me, this means that I limit (and continuously find new ways to curtail) my use of nonrenewable energy. I limit and innovate to further cut back on my use of nonrenewable resources such as water from our local aquifer. I cut out use of plastics wherever I can, and limit and reuse when I can’t.

My aim of sustainability also means that my prime focus is not to produce as much food as possible, but to produce food in a manner that, at the very least, 1) does not degrade my local environment by depleting my soil, does not adversely impact biodiversity in my fields and in the surrounding wild areas, and does not pollute the water in my watershed; and 2) doesn’t degrade the larger environment--from the watershed downstream from my fields to the global environment (think CO2 greenhouse gas emissions that raise temperatures worldwide). If fact, I work every day to actually improve my local environment as well as the larger environment.

Visit my farm and I can give you concrete examples to back up these claims, so here let’s focus on just one—soil-health. My entire farm is set up to build, rather than degrade, my soil, predominantly by returning more organic matter to the soil that I remove through raising crops and sending them off-farm to grace your dinner tables. I do this by raising soil-building perennial cover crops during fallow years when no crops are harvested from the field. For every two years of raising food for you on a field, I rest that field for two years to rebuild the soil and the field ecosystem. I also keep my fields covered with cover crops between vegetable crops even during a crop-growing year.

This bottomland field was working hard producing vegetables for 2 years, and now it is fallow so that the soil can rest and rejuvenate while the biodiverse hay crop I planted sequesters carbon and adds organic matter and nutrients to the soil.

Through these practices, I return more green matter to the soil than I remove through harvesting your vegetables, and thereby, have been able to steadily, albeit very slowly, build up soil organic matter in my soils. A soil with more organic matter is a healthier, more fertile and friable soil. That means I rarely have to resort to off-farm fertilizers to supplement the natural fertility of my soil. I don’t use any synthetic fertilizers, of course, but rarely even have to buy so-called “organic” fertilizers (composted chicken manure, in my case). It means that my vegetables are extremely nutrient-dense, and their exceptional flavor is proof of their high nutrient levels (see Flavor = Nutrition chapter in “Organic Matters”). It also means that my soils have an extremely healthy ecosystem of organisms from earthworms and other macrobiota to single-celled organisms, bacteria, and fungi. This living net of life creates healthy plants that are resistant to disease-causing organisms and insect pests so that I have essentially no need for insecticides or fungicides. Again, I would never use artificial biocides of any kind, and I rarely have to use so-called “organic” biocides either. (The one exception is that in most years I have to dust my cabbage and broccoli once in June with a naturally occurring soil bacteria that kills cabbage worms.) A main tenet of my philosophy of farming is not to kill offending organisms, but learn to live, and to farm, within an ecosystem.

But how does soil-building benefit the larger regional and global environment? The cover crops I grow remove the greenhouse gas CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis (carbon dioxide + water + sunlight à glucose + oxygen). This biological reaction used atmospheric CO2 to create the carbohydrates that become the leaves and roots and shoots of the plants. Thus, through my soil-building processes, I am actually pulling greenhouse-effect-causing CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestering it (storing it) first in the living plants, and then eventually--as the plants die and are broken down--in the soi. Through soil-building, my farm actually makes the global environment healthier. Instead of contributing to the greenhouse effect through CO2 emissions, I am removing the major greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and doing my part in fighting against global warming, which is an existential threat to our planet and all of its inhabitants, you and me included.

*Even in late fall, the fields are verdant with both vegetable crops and cover crops, which sequester carbon and add organic matter to the soil.*

The USDA organic standards say nothing about soil-building, or CO2 sequestration, or much else. Fallow periods are not required; nor are cover crops.

But a true definition of organic farming goes beyond a simple list of rules anyway. Organic farming is more than a list of do’s and don’ts. Humans are clever enough to find the loopholes in any set of rules anyway, or sadly enough, to lie and cheat themselves around them. Organic farming is a philosophy and a way of life. Since organic food became big business, many farms, particularly corporate farms, have gone organic for purely economic reasons. To them, the organic standards are simply a series of hoops to jump through or get around in order to get their fingers on a piece of the organic pie—read “price premiums.” That’s why all the mega-food producers (Dole, General Mills, Nestle, etc.) have in-house organic brands. Dole is not interested in the philosophy of organic farming or the health of the environment; they are interested in grabbing their share of the organic market.

At its most basic, I define farming organically as farming in a way that is harmonious with Nature. I farm with nature, not against it. Nature is the true expert grower. An ecosystem is a master farmer, producing abundant food for all the living beings within it. Nature produces food for each organism without harming the environment for the other organisms. My goal as a farmer is to learn enough about Nature, and through Nature, to be able to produce food for humans without despoiling and destroying the environment for all other living things.

A mother bird built her nest and raised her young in the mulch of my sorrel patch, and she and her young eat catepillars and insects, many of which would be considered “pests.” but which I do not need to worry about because the birds take care of them and the ecosystem is in balance.

I believe that farmers should be able to raise food without polluting the air and water, without degrading the health and fertility of the soil, without destroying biodiversity, and without leaving our children a less healthy planet. This statement is self-evident and no farmer, no consumer, would argue over its validity.   In practice, however, it is a radical notion and rarely put to practice. Most of our agriculture today does, in fact, pollute the air and water, degrade the soil, destroy biodiversity, and leave the planet a less hospitable place for future generations. This is just as true of most USDA certified organic farms—particularly the large-scale, industrial level organic farms--as it is of conventional chemical farms. I see my duty as a farmer to fight this trend.

When it comes down to it, I’d rather have YOU, not the USDA, decide whether I am “organic” (or “natural” or “sustainable” or “regenerative”) enough for you. I encourage you to ask me questions about my farming practices and philosophy. You are welcome to come to my farm any time. You can do your own inspection and conduct your own certification process.

So I tried to give as short and concise answer as I could here. To give a complete answer to what organic farming means to me, I would have to write a book.

Wait a minute. Come to think of it, I already have. My booklet “Organic Matters” gives a fuller answer to the question of what I think organic farming is and how I practice it. We will be putting excerpts from it on this website and reprinting it so you can order it by emailing my sister Terra.

And speaking of Terra, she has written her own book about how we farm on Henry’s Farm. It is called “The Seasons of Henry’s Farm” and can also be ordered by emailing her.