Caring for the Environment   >  The Carbon Footprint Dilemma

The Carbon Footprint Dilemma

From time immemorial, mothers have been after their children to eat their fruits and veggies. They knew something that science has proven: eating fruits and vegetables is one of the healthiest things people can do. We believe eating organic produce is an even healthier choice. Organic farmers grow their crops in ways that care for the land and help keep synthetic chemicals out of the soil, water, air, and food supply. Eating organic food provides healthy, delicious sustenance for ourselves and our children, who are especially vulnerable to pesticide residues.

In the past couple of years, there’s been a lot of discussion about “carbon footprints” and how large organic food producers are an improvement, but they’re still hard on the environment due to nationwide transportation of their products. And as an antidote to our transportation-intensive world, there’s been a focus on choosing food produced locally. This conversation is good; it gets us thinking seriously about what we eat, who produced it, how it got to us, and what resources were used in its production.

There are many benefits to buying from local family farms: getting fresh food, supporting small farmers, knowing where your food comes from, and gaining access to heirloom produce varieties that don’t ship well. As an example, we run a local Farm Stand just down the road from the original farm where we still grow our first crop, heirloom raspberries. We could never ship those berries anywhere because they’re so delicate — but they’re so sweet and flavorful, they just fall apart in your mouth. During the summer, baskets of those ripe berries disappear from our Farm Stand as fast as we can pick them!

I urge everyone to take advantage of those local food opportunities, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that many of us live in places where local produce is available only during a short season every year. During those times when local produce isn’t available, should we forego the delicious, nutritious fresh fruits and vegetables that are such an important part of a healthy diet? I think we have to look closely at the tradeoffs.

For example, it would be a big sacrifice for my family to give up eating meat — we really enjoy it. But meat carries a high energy cost. Beef, for example, requires about 16 times more fossil fuel energy and generates 24 times more CO2 than the caloric equivalent of vegetables and rice. So I try to serve a meatless meal at least twice a week. Recently I made a dinner of Mediterranean Lentil Soup (with spinach, carrots, onions, garlic, and potatoes) with a big Greek Salad (including romaine lettuce, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions — you can find the recipes in our cookbook, Food to Live By). Because it’s winter, not much is growing, even here in the Salad Bowl of the World; I confess that none of these delicious vegetables were grown within 100 or even 200 miles of where I live. So fuel was definitely used in getting them to my grocery store. But if I had foregone this vegetable meal, I might well have opted for steak and potatoes — and unless that steak was locally raised and grass-fed, many more carbon resources would have gone into producing it.

All I’m saying is that the choices are not as simplistic as they might seem, even though most of us want to do the right thing and crave some simple answers that could help us. I agree that the national food distribution system is overly reliant on fossil fuels — as are many other industries. But Earthbound Farm's mission is to bring organic food to as many people as possible, which means getting it to supermarkets where people shop every day. For now at least, that means using our existing distribution system.

Transportation is a huge concern for us, not just for its cost but for its consequences as well. We’re actively searching for ways to reduce fuel use in our operations and beyond (including converting our farm machinery to biodiesel).

Ultimately, we believe that organic farming of all sizes provides important protections for the land, the farm workers who tend the crops, and the consumers who enjoy our harvest. With our 40,000 acres this year alone, we’ll keep more than 12 million pounds of chemicals out of the environment, conserve 2 million gallons of petroleum, and sequester enough carbon dioxide to equal taking 7,700 cars off the road. We’re proud of that, and we’re proud to make an organic alternative available alongside conventional food in supermarkets and club stores, where the vast majority of Americans regularly shop for food, even as we struggle to reduce our use of resources.

Myra Goodman founded Earthbound Farm with her husband, Drew, over 24 years ago with a 2.5-acre backyard garden and a roadside raspberry stand. They believed that growing crops organically, in ways that protect the land and the people who work on it, would yield healthy, delicious food that they could feel good about selling and serving to their own family. Today, Earthbound Farm is America’s #1 brand of certified organic produce.