Matthew Moore: This is Ozarks at Large. Joining us to talk more Ozarks history is our friend Jared Phillips. Jared, welcome back to the show.
Jared Phillips: Glad to be here.
Moore: We are talking today about farming — and specifically, as you just told me, hippie farming.
Phillips: Yeah. So some of your listeners may know this has long been an interest of mine. One of my first projects was about the back-to-the-land community here in the Arkansas Ozarks. But I got to thinking about talking a little bit about another group of folks, because next week is April 15. Those of us who are gardeners and farmers know that normally that's right around our average last frost date. So everybody that's been really wanting to put their tomatoes out, wait a few more days and then you can put them out next week, but still be ready to lose them because we have had frost as late as May. But I got to thinking about it because with the average last frost date in April, it got me thinking about the Fayetteville Farmers Market coming back, especially with the news that they may expand their hours and location size. And I got to thinking about the development of organic agriculture.
Moore: Maybe let's define a term here. What do we mean when we say organic agriculture? And is there a TM beside that that makes it have to be this sort of thing to fit that mold?
Phillips: It's not trademarked, thankfully — at least in my knowledge — because it's a USDA certified program. The federal Department of Agriculture has a program that certifies something as organic. Anytime you go into the grocery store, whether it's Ozark Natural Foods or Walmart, you'll see either in black and green a little circle on the front of your package that says USDA Organic. It's only organic if it has that. It can be grown by organic standards, but to be certified, it has to have that label. And all that means, basically, is it follows a list of rules that were developed in part by some of our very own Ozark farmers — a list of rules about what you can use, as far as whether or not you can use chemicals, certain cultivation methods, fence post types, medicines, all these different things — to create a more essentially natural, all-natural product, for lack of a better term.
Moore: So let's tie it back to the Ozarks here. What is the connection when we think about organic farming and this sort of work here in our region?
Phillips: So this idea of organic is actually really new in American history as far as a legislative thing goes. In 1990, there's going to be a farm bill that is passed that builds on a whole bunch of other programs from the '80s, and it sets the stage for a decade-long process to create the national organic standards — the rules that you've got to follow. Those go into effect between 2000 and 2005, depending on the particular crop. So it's very new, 20 to 25 years old. But the story of organics begins much earlier than that. In the Ozarks, it really begins in the 1960s and '70s when a lot of these back-to-the-land folks are moving in. These are folks that are really concerned about the ecological crisis, the environmental crisis. They read Silent Spring, they're part of the first Earth Day, they read Mother Earth News, the Whole Earth Catalog. One of the things that they pick up out of that and implement is a desire for what they were calling then organic, or all-natural, or alternative gardening and farming. They start to develop their own home garden systems for it. But by the end of the 1970s, they're trying to figure out how do they transition from small-scale systems into something that's a little bit more impactful.
Moore: And so when we think about that movement that happened in the '60s and '70s, we saw an outgrowth, and then in the '80s and '90s it became more of a national conversation — perhaps spurred on by 60 Minutes, perhaps spurred on by legislation.
Phillips: They take part. So there are a lot of moving pieces here in the Ozarks. We're a complicated place — it's one of the things we've been talking about the last several months. One of the things that makes this complicated is that because we're not an isolated area and we have all of these people moving in and out through these decades, one of the things that the Ozarks becomes is a hub for a national conversation around ecological thinking. We can think about it in terms of the organic farming movement, which we're talking about today, or this other thing called bioregionalism. And the bioregional folks and the organic farming folks become really interested in how do they empower small farmers in the rural Ozarks to survive the farm crisis of the 1970s and '80s. The thing that they come up with, just because of their particular perspective, is that organic farming is the way to do it. Organic products, even in the '70s and '80s, are getting a higher premium at the grocery store — 25 to 100 percent more for a conventional product. And so this is a great idea. You've got to work hard. We already work hard in the Ozarks. It really works at a small scale. All we need to do now is figure out a way that we can combine our efforts so that we can have a meaningful market share.
So between 1980 and 1985, there's going to be a group that emerges, kind of quietly at first, and then by '84, '85, '86, it gets really loud and powerful. That group is called the Ozark Organic Growers Association. This is one of my favorite things I've ever learned about in my entire academic career because they're an old-school cooperative, what we call a producers pool. This is like old-school populism from the 1880s and 1890s, like the guys in the New Deal that are trying to figure out how to fight back against really powerful businesses for the small farmer. And so that's what these guys are doing.
The big story for this is how everybody buys a bunch of blueberry plants in the early '80s. They plant them, and then it takes time before blueberry plants are productive. So by the mid-'80s, everybody's got a bunch of blueberries. What do we do with blueberries? They reconvene and form this cooperative selling machine and start to sell what they're defining as organic blueberries, and other things as well. But blueberries are really this defining crop. And they don't just sell them to a young Ozark Natural Foods or Harps or whatever — they sell to Whole Foods No. 1 in Austin, Texas. And they become a part of the launching platform of a national conversation around how Americans think about the production of food, growing blueberries in the Ozarks.
Moore: Does that seem like something that wouldn't happen now?
Phillips: There's still an Arkansas Blueberry Growers Association. The University of Arkansas extension has tons of different blueberry research going on. Still a very active industry here — maybe not as big as it once was, but what was unique about these guys was that blueberries were a way to allow for a little bit of scale to emerge, to make it commercially viable and let you focus on the organic work, because organic work is a lot of work. And they're not alone. We're going to start to see the creation of concerns in the Ozarks around organic vegetable production — carrots, tomatoes and stuff like that. And then off and on through the '80s and '90s there's a conversation about how do we produce organic meat? How do we grow chickens organically? This is the poultry capital of the world, especially by the 1980s. How do we grow organic beef? We are one of the highest-producing cattle areas in the country, especially in the 1980s. So they're really interested in a whole-system conversation.
But they hit some roadblocks. One of the first roadblocks they hit is with the extension service. The extension service is an incredible resource — everybody, whether you're organic or not, needs to be talking to the extension service for help with soil testing and advice on crops and all kinds of stuff. At the time, the extension service was really geared up for non-organic things. There wasn't an organic conversation. Organic stuff was what your grandparents did before the Depression, with an old broke-down mule — that's how you grew cabbages. This is the modern era, the era of agribusiness. So extension didn't have a lot of resources. There were people interested in helping out, but they didn't have the resources and the funding to do it.
So what OOGA does is they realize, if we want this to be a viable thing, they're going to create what they call a shadow extension service. Because again, the point of this is to create a way for small farmers to make a living. If you want to encourage people to adopt these methods and take advantage of that higher price point, you've got to help them figure out how to do it. So they create this thing called the Ozark Small Farm Viability Project — the OSFVP — a shadow extension, a training and technical service program.
But that wasn't enough, because this is the 1980s and there's no money for farming — there's really no money for farming in the 1980s. And if you're a wild-eyed hippie farmer that wants to grow organic blueberries and you go in to get a loan, they're not going to give you a loan. Everything's risky enough as it is. So what they do is they say, OK, we've got a sales mechanism, we've got a training mechanism, we've got to help people get funding to get off the ground. So they start this organization called FORGE — Financing Ozark Rural Growth and Economy — as a micro-lending institute, borrowing from the Grameen Bank model. Muhammad Yunus wins the Nobel Prize for this. They all band together, put money into a pot and dole out loans. And what was really unique about them, especially compared to the main farm credit systems, is they would take anything as collateral for a loan except your farm, because people were losing their farms because they were in debt, and they didn't want to be in the business of taking a farm from somebody.
Moore: Wow.
Phillips: And through all these things, this helps them become the voice for Ozark organic agriculture. They're going to work with other organic groups around the country. Probably one of my favorites would be Organic Valley, a dairy company headquartered out of Wisconsin. And people like Gordon Watkins, who we've heard before talking about stuff around the Buffalo River, and others are going to work with the founders of Organic Valley to lobby in Washington, D.C., during the 1980s and 1990s to create a federal system to protect and provide resources through the USDA — to help define what this means, give it international trade credibility, and define what the term is. So that way somebody can't just say we're organic but dump a whole bunch of Roundup on a tomato.
Sadly, OOGA will kind of phase out as the organic system emerges, and as people — just life happens, things grow and change and evolve. And then as funding goes into the USDA and into the extension service, the extension service will take on a lot of that shadow extension idea. But FORGE is still around. FORGE is still a functioning, really cool organization outside of Huntsville in Madison County, still kicking along.
Moore: So as we look at today, 2026, how are we seeing this still exist and thrive because of the work that happened then?
Phillips: One of the best possible ways that we can see the legacy of this is Ozark Natural Foods — and the old Ozark Cooperative Warehouse that was sort of paired with them. They were one of the early anchor points for the movement, and the folks at OOGA did sell and still do sell to them. And then of course the Fayetteville Farmers Market is one of these legacy projects. I'm not trying to single out one particular farm there — everybody there is lovely — but Dripping Springs Farm. Mark Cain is one of the OG members of the Ozark Organic Growers Association, was one of the technical trainers. And there's a reason why people say that farm is one of the best to go and ask for advice from. They're one of, if not the only, certified organic farm at the farmers market.
And then there's just this larger legacy of organic agriculture in the country. It exists in part because of the work of advocates here in the Ozarks. One of the people that was really influential was Eric Ardapple-Kindberg. One of the things that Eric did before he moved out of the state was he helped to run the national survey at the behest of the USDA during the 1990s that helped to get farmer feedback from across the country. He worked with farmers and policy advocates from everywhere to figure out, what are the things that are really important? How do we distill down what it means to do this thing for this kind of crop? Are there size restrictions? What's the timeline to transition? So that legwork was done in part by Ozark farmers to help create a national system.
Moore: Wow. Yeah. Super impressive. And as someone who grew up in Illinois, I think of farming a lot differently than farming looks here. It is remarkable to think about the legacy of organic farming, and farming broadly, that happens here because of the work of people like that.
Phillips: Yeah. They're kind of quiet about their achievements. I've been fortunate enough to go and do oral histories with this community, and this is a part of a new book that I'm working on. They're aware and they're very proud of the work that they did, and they should be proud of it.
Moore: Jared, as always, I feel like I come in thinking I know what we're going to talk about and I'm always left with much more knowledge than I expected. Thank you as always, Jared.
Phillips: Anytime.
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