Together for Organic: Key Takeaways from My 2026 OEFFA Keynote

Thank you OEFFA for inviting me to keynote your 2026 conference, Finding Common Ground!

A huge thank-you to the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association for inviting me to give the keynote presentation for the 2026 OEFFA conference, Finding Common Ground! I’ve uploaded a recorded version of Together for Organic to YouTube, which I encourage everyone to watch. I customized this presentation for Ohio, but the message is for everyone, and here’s why:

We are living in a time of unprecedented opportunities for organic farming. The new USDA Dietary Guidelines are the closest ever to what organic farmers have been recommending since the 1930s. The MAHA movement is the first time that the federal government has endorsed a grassroots movement focused on the connection between nutrition and health. And more ethnic, racial, and cultural minorities are interested in organic food and farming than ever before.

But despite the fact that every sector of American society is now represented in the movement, organic isn’t growing like it used to. Certified organic farmland has stagnated at about one percent of all farm acreage. Organic food sales are leveling off at about 3 percent of the total.

Why? Of course there’s all the usual suspects—agribusiness claiming glyphosate is “regenerative,” the beef lobby trying to turn the push for grassfed beef into just another “eat more beef” campaign, ag lobbies hijacking the MAHA strategy report to promote pesticides. These are just the newest iterations of the battles organic farmers have been fighting for years.

What troubles me more is division within the organic movement. There’s political division, with various groups trying to tie the movement to one or the other political party. The danger with that, as we’ve seen so clearly in the past few years, is that each party only stays in power for four to twelve years, and then the other party reverses everything they did. If we want organic to endure, we have to keep it nonpartisan.

At the same time, there’s been a huge attack on the USDA organic standards. I get it—the standards aren’t perfect. We really need to get the hydroponic loophole closed. BUT—we still need to support the standards while we’re working to improve them. When the average consumer hears criticism of the USDA organic label, they assume it’s meaningless, and they buy conventional instead. That’s what the statistics show.

Although these challenges are real, they’re not insurmountable. We can move beyond them. Diversity should be a source of strength, not division. We need everyone’s diverse backgrounds and perspectives to make this succeed. But we also need to focus on a common goal. So I say—why not make it our goal to eventually make all US farmland USDA certified organic? While the USDA standards aren’t perfect, they’re sure a lot better than conventional, and transitioning all our farmland would be a huge step toward finally building a healthy food system.

People often ask me what I think the future will be. My answer is that the future will be whatever we make it. We shape the future by the decisions we make in the present. So if we want organic farming to be the normal farming of the future, we need to start now. We need to reclaim the word “organic.” We need to support organic certification while working to improve it. We need to focus on the positive and remember—we’re all in this together. So let’s work together for organic in 2026!