205: Organic California field and row crop farmer Scott Park details the success he’s found with his low-input, targeted tillage operation for a room full of real organic certified farmers. Primarily a tomato grower for canneries, Scott’s does not shy away from sharing his experiences with slippery price negotiations and the headaches around the regenerative movement’s lack of enforceable standards. Scott’s full talk and excellent slides can be viewed on our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdGiGqNTf2M
Scott Park and his son Brian run Park Farming Organics in Meridien, CA and are known for investing excess time, money, and effort into thoughtful experiments aimed at growing food in concert with nature. Scott was the main speaker at our Farmer Friday event this past September, which was held one day before at our conference at Churchtown Dairy in Hudson, New York – Real Organic: A World Movement.
https://parkfarmingorganics.com/
To watch a video version of this podcast with access to the full transcript and links relevant to our conversation, please visit:
https://realorganicproject.org/scott-park-normal-ca-farm-farmed-abnormally
The Real Organic Podcast is hosted by Dave Chapman and Linley Dixon, engineered by Brandon StCyr, and edited and produced by Jenny Prince.
#Organic #OrganicFarming #OrganicFood #RowCrops #FieldCrops #Vegetables #TargetedTillage #ReducedTillage #IntentionalTillage #CoverCrops #Compost #CropRotation #GreenManure #ScottPark #ParkFarmingOrganics
The Real Organic Project is a farmer-led movement working towards certifying 1,000 farms across the United States this year. Our add-on food label distinguishes soil-grown fruits and vegetables from hydroponically-raised produce, and pasture-raised meat, milk, and eggs from products harvested from animals in horrific confinement (CAFOs – confined animal feeding operations).
To find a Real Organic farm near you, please visit:
https://www.realorganicproject.org/farms
We believe that the organic standards, with their focus on soil health, biodiversity, and animal welfare were written as they should be, but that the current lack of enforcement of those standards is jeopardizing the ability for small farms who adhere to the law to stay in business. The lack of enforcement is also jeopardizing the overall health of the customers who support the organic movement; customers who are not getting what they pay for at market but still paying a premium price. And the lack of enforcement is jeopardizing the very cycles (water, air, nutrients) that Earth relies upon to provide us all with a place to live, by pushing extractive, chemical agriculture to the forefront.
If you like what you hear and are feeling inspired, we would love for you to join our movement by becoming one of our 1,000 Real Friends:
https://www.realorganicproject.org/real-organic-friends/
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Golfer's can be a real problem
l'm having a really hard time desiring to get organic certification when the USDA has the "say so "in the end and are not willing to listen to the Scott Parks, Gabe Browns, etc…..! I am not willing to get certified by a government agency that "lumps " soil grown with hydroponics…. in a way, conventional corn/soybean rotation is hydroponics (soil is only a substrate holding up plants) while the "farmer" adds nutrients and the USDA offers subsidies to these farmers and is also an organic certification entity
Organic farming is not necessarily regenerative regenerative farming is taking into account the entire landscape, including all of the biology and wildlife such that at the end of the day your farm is more abundant from the perspective of more life of every kind. You’re not necessarily working towards production in many ways, if you’re focusing on yield your introducing a counterproductive narrative to regeneration, which requires a very long-term perspective, I know many farmers who are certified organic farmers, using organic inputs in the forms of fertilizers and organic pesticides Are not much better than conventional farmers so much so that they leave the farmland as depleted of minerals nutrients and biology as they did when they started. Suggesting that regenerative and organic is really counterproductive and we really need to focus on educating our farmers into a cooperative, small scale farming model because to truly be regenerative we must allow each piece of land to be in continuous evolution, which means that we can’t be working on a monetary model which requires us to farm the same thing year in and year out by being cooperative, we can allow the land to evolve in dynamic balance overtime.the industrial and financial model which we take for granted must be overcome if we are to embrace the regenerative farming model
I'm not a farmer, but I am interested in where my food comes from, and this was a great, detailed presentation. It put "regenerative" and no-till into perspective for me.