Organic farming, food growing in popularity

By Ben Singson R EPORTER

Clint Bland is not trying to feed the whole country with his farm.

What he is trying to do is provide local customers with food grown with organic methods, something that both farmers and consumers are turning their interest towards.

“I’m a huge proponent of regional food and regional producers,” he said, “so my interest is just feeding the people here in the central Illinois area.”

Bland opened his Jacksonville organic farm, Bland Family Farms, alongside his wife in 2016, though he only became a full­time farmer about nine months ago. The farm raises eggs, pasture­raised birds, grassfed beef and chemical­free vegetables.

Bland’s farm is part of a wider growth of organic farming in the United States. A 2019 article from

Pew Research Center found that between 2011 and 2016, the number of organic farms in the country jumped 56% to over 14,000. In the same time frame, sales of certified organic goods more than doubled, from $3.5 billion in 2011 to almost $7.6 billion in 2016.

Organic farming is more intensive than traditional farming, Bland said. For vegetables, he said the differences came down to things like weed management, which avoided the use of chemicals in favor of things like covering crops in straw or black landscape fabric to keep them free from weeds. It also required him to be more on top of things, particularly because they could not rely on herbicide.

“You let a weed get away and get too big? Now you have a gigantic root base,” he said. “You’re not going to get that thing out of the ground unless you take your hand and pull it out.”

John French (left) and Clint Bland of Bland Family Farms pick up the remains of a chicken coop destroyed by wind to take to the scrap heap. Bland Family Farms is one of thousands of organic farms that have appeared in the U.S. over the past decade.

As for livestock animals, Bland said his farm allows its chickens to roam and eat bugs, rather than keeping them sequestered in coops and only giving them feed.

The end result of that extra work, Bland said, were products that maintained the health of the land that it was grown on while also being more dense in nutrients than food grown with standard farming methods. Modern, traditionally­ grown food has been noted to be less nutritious than food in the past by multiple researchers. A 2004 study found that between 1950 and 1999, 43 different garden crops showed noticeable declines in six different nutrients, including protein, calcium and iron.

“We’re having to consume more vegetables, more things, to get the same amount of nutrients as what they got 80 years ago,” Bland said.

Bland Family Farms came about due to Bland’s own fascination with growing his own food for his family, he said. He wanted to be able to look at a plate and know that “90% of what we just ate was produced by us,” he said. To that end, Bland and his family started gardening before expanding their scope to livestock.

“It came to a point where I just fell in love with the idea of growing food,” he said, “and then being able to provide people in my community and the area that same food.”

That desire to know more about the food they are eating is also fueling the growing public interest in organic farming, Bland said. Many people were curious about where their food came from, he said, and they wanted to that it was farmed “They care about how those animals are raised,” Bland said. “They care about what was put on that food because they don’t want to ingest something in their bodies that’s going to give them cancer.”

Bland hoped that more organic farms began showing up across the country, though he was worried that a lack of available land and a cost-prohibitive barrier to entry may drive away potential growers. He said many smaller farms get their land bought up by larger entities after their owners die and that it was “extremely capital-intensive” to become a farmer the way he did.

“You can’t just be a good farmer,” Bland said. “You have to be a good business- man. You’re running a business here, you have to have profitability in mind. Oth- erwise, you’re just a homesteader. You’re a hobby farmer.”

In spite of the roadblocks and uncertainties, Bland said being able to provide organically-grown food to his customers built up his self-esteem

“I’m doing something good,” he said. “I’m doing something not necessarily altruistic, but I’m doing something I feel good about. Knowing that I’m giving them something that’s not laden with chemicals, that’s going to be good for them and their family? You just feel good about that.”