Big Organic vs Small Organic. What a dilemma.
On the one hand it makes great sense to grow as many crops as possible that are free of chemical inputs so that as many people as possible will have access to the food. But on the other hand these organic products are often more expensive than their conventional counterparts, so people need to have a more holistic understanding of what they are buying. They need to see the product as supporting a worthwhile system, and not just as something to eat.
But if this is the case then it is worth questioning the logic and ethics behind Big Organic. Although there are no toxic fertilizers and pesticides applied to the crops there is still a tremendous use of petroleum in the form of fuel for tractors and harvesters, not to mention the energy intensive process of preparing products for sale, as seen in the Earthbound Farms example. Also worth noting is the way crops are grown in intensive monoculture systems where variety and balanced inputs and outputs are not a factor. Pollan makes the distinction between the two systems when he talks about the attempts of the USDA to set standards for organic products. He calls the two systems the "organic industry"and the "organic movement"(155) and inevitably, in the case of the set standards, the desires of the industry won hands down over the movement.
If the goal of Big Organic farms is to produce as much food as possible than prices for those products should be as cheap or cheaper than their conventional counterparts. If their goal is to produce food in a way that is sustainable for the land and the environment than they should drastically scale down their farm size, incorporate species diversity, and integrate animals into the mix so that manure can be used for fertilizer. In a nutshell there does not seem to be any way that Big Organic is good for the environment, except for the fact that they don't use chemical fertilizers, but as Pollan says that is pretty much offset by the fact that petrol is used in almost other aspect of the farm.
Despite all these factors it seems to come down to one specific thing, and that thing is demand.
". . .Study after study has demonstrated that, measured in terms of the amount of food produced per acre, small farms are actually more productive than big farms; it is the higher transaction costs involved that makes dealing with them impractical for a company like Kahns [Cascadian Farms]- that and the fact that they don't grow tremendous quantities of any one thing"(Pollan 161). Sadly, when big food retailers want to buy your products it makes a sick kind of sense to cater to their desires and thus "the industrial values of of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization wind up crowding out ecological values such as diversity, complexity and symbiosis"(161). The solution???