 episode of Hawaii Food and Farmers Series. I'm your co-host here today with Justine Espirito and as always we are here on Thursday afternoons starting at four o'clock. And if you want you can join the conversation by tweeting in at at Think Tech H.I. Also you can see the show afterwards on our YouTube channel H.I. Think Tech. Justine, why don't you go ahead and introduce who we have on the show today. Thanks Matt. Today we have Diane Hennelly who is the Senior Certification Officer and Inspector at Oregon TILF. So we talk a lot about organic farms and organic standards so we're here to get a little more background on the history of those standards in the U.S. and how farmers kind of gain that certification and we have Diane here to explain that to us today and get some of her own background as well. So thank you so much for joining us Diane. Thanks so much for having me. Awesome. So let's start with who you work for and kind of the mission of that organization and some of the services and then we can kind of backtrack to kind of the history of the organic movement and where you guys fall into place. Sure. I work for Oregon TILF. It's an organic certification company. It's based out of Corvallis, Oregon but we do certification throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico. Fortunately out here in Hawaii which is great. Oregon TILF's mission is to make our food system and agriculture biologically sound and socially equitable and so our organization has kind of a certification side of things where we're dealing with policy and organic certification and then we have an education outreach side of things where we are working with the community, working with farmers, working with processors and kind of making that connection helping to educate people on what organic is and why it's worth it, how it can impact our system. Very brief history of organic food movement. 60s, 70s farmers started getting kind of excited about organics and making their systems more sustainable and different companies started popping up with their own private certifications that you can be organic or you can be certified organic with TILF but they were all private certifications and a lot of these companies started working together to make all of their regulations line up and the USDA didn't get involved until later and in 2002 it became a USDA regulation that if you want to use the word organic in the U.S. to talk about food you have to be certified and you can't be certified by anyone you have to be certified by an accredited certification agency they have checked off as saying yep these guys know what they're doing they can certify you to our standard and fortunately Oregon TILF was one of those players and they have kind of from the get go they have been interested in creating a more sustainable world. I've been working with TILF for four years I've been in organic certification for nine years and throughout my work with TILF I've gotten to travel a little bit and gotten kind of into the policy side of things and certification side of things. I think that may have over answered your question. No I'm not worried. We weren't in here at all. No that's great. This is a great point to kind of jump into talking about organic because there's definitely a lot of questions and people are always talking about it and I think there's a lot of misunderstanding what exactly that means so when you're saying it's USDA certified organic if I'm a farmer or even a restaurant or I want to use a term organic what's the process this is a farm as an example what does that look like where they have to do to be able to legally call themselves organic. That is a great question and actually the answer is the same whether you are a farm or whether you are a restaurant or a processor or a broker distributor if you want to use the word organic you can break it up into the folks that have to be certified which is anyone who's physically handling the product where it might get contaminated so your farm your processor and then you've got the folks that can voluntarily choose to get certified because they want to go that extra step and that's where your restaurants and your brokers come into things your private label companies. Basically the way that the program works is every year you're going to send in an application to your organic certifier such as Oregon TEL and say yep we want to renew our certification we want to be certified for another year we want to keep using the word organic we say great and we review that application we review their organic system plan where for a farm you have indicated this is what we want to grow this is the land we want to grow on here the inputs we want to use these are our seed suppliers this is our fertility management plan here's what we're doing to protect the surrounding areas this is our whole organic plan and this is how we're going to document it we review it we say okay yeah that matches the regulations we send an inspector out inspector shows up on site and they're going to verify that everything you have said you're doing as a farmer matches what's going on on the land you know if the inspector shows up and you've got cans of roundup everywhere and all of your crops look burned they're gonna say well my problem in my brief time doing farm inspections no okay but the inspector is in a great position because they don't make the final decision they're just gonna write notes on what they're finding they're gonna make notes on the documentation that was or wasn't available what they saw on site and they submit that report back to the organic certifier so they would send it back to Oregon Tilt and that's the point that I usually get involved where Oregon Tilt then gives me that report and they say here Diane figure out what's going on and I would work with that report and with the client to figure out whether everything was going with the regulation or whether there were any problems and if there are issues of concern or issues of areas that could be better I'm gonna communicate to that that to them or if there's something that's straight up like no you are doing something that's not allowed they would get a non-compliance and then I'd work with them remotely phone email to figure out a solution they would tell me how they were going to mitigate that non-compliance we'd sign off on it and they would get their next year of certification next year when you go through that same process again the inspector is gonna double check on those previous year issues and make sure that what they said they were going to fix it is actually happening to make sure that we are continually moving forward that there is an improvement in their system every year so whether you're a farm or a processor you're gonna be going through that same system of application on-site inspection review and then final certification so as a as a farm as a processor there's someone every year on-site the other question that you alluded to of what organic means like as a as a consumer if you were to go into a grocery store and see something that's organic versus conventional is it really worth that extra dollar if it says organic it means that pretty much everyone down the line from farm through processing they've all been certified they've all gone through the same process every year and on the farm side of things pretty much everything is 100% organic on the processed food side of things where you get an organic granola bar that's when you start getting into these different levels of certification right where people don't there's a little bit more misinformation out there okay there's a lot of people that say oh you have to look for the USDA seal there's no USDA seal it's no good right that's not true okay USDA seal is totally voluntary if you meet the organic or 100% organic requirements but you don't have to use it you're just you just have to use the word organic and that is the same so a box of organic granola bars versus box of granola bars with USDA seal same thing so if you're a farmer or a restaurant and you are using the word organic but you like you said like the whole supply chain of how that product got to wherever it is is not certified or hasn't gone through the process of working with a company like Oregon's help what are the ramifications of that no it's it's not something I deal with regularly it doesn't happen that often at the restaurant level yeah restaurants don't have to be certified okay they can choose to be certified so if you have a restaurant and you look at the menu and it says they're using organic tomatoes yeah you hope they're telling the truth but there's no one double-checking their work oh so no one's not at the restaurant level okay at the retail level like a retail labeled box of something yes and we do internal monitoring where every year we're going out and pulling stuff off shelves and looking at the labels if you're buying a processed product something that's in a box anything that says organic if you flip it over you're gonna look at the distributor information and underneath it'll say certified organic by organ tilt or one of the other 90 accredited certifiers in the US and so that's that's your first wave knowing like okay this is legit and then every year internally one of the things we do is we pull as many things as we can just off grocery store shelves and we look for organ tilt and then we make sure that that label that's on the shelf matches the one that we have actually approved and certified is everything matching up is there anything dodgy going on nope okay you get to do some of that go to the store we all do yeah we we kind of all spend some time everyone grocery saps doesn't take just going secret agent going into the stores do you like wear disguise there's been a lot of crackdown people care about organics they want to be able to trust it and so anytime someone sees something that they think shouldn't be there's a lot of communication going internally you can contact the NLP directly and say this is like I don't think this is good on that on that note in terms of having a seal or a certification process that has credibility who makes these standards and how often are they changed or reconsidered so within the US we have the National Organic Program and the National Organic Program is a federal regulation it's 7 CFR 205 and it's incredibly short and very very dense regulation so if you wanted to print the whole thing out and read it front to back you know you're looking at 40 pages but you can spend you know a lifetime nitpicking it and figuring out what they mean the NLP is is great because it's a living regulation it is being updated it is being reviewed we have the National Organic Standards Board which is a federal advisory board of 15 volunteers from the community they're appointed by the US Secretary of Agriculture and each member is appointed for a five-year term and there are recommendations made by the board and that goes out for community response people can write in they can show up in person and respond and then the board will vote on whether or not the proposal should pass and if it passes by a two-thirds majority then they make the recommendation to the USDA to amend the National Organic Program regulation and what's the background of these committee members everything actually I I was just looking at this right now we've got four who own and operate organic farms two that are organic handling operations one owns a retail establishment three have expertise in areas of environmental protection and resource conservation three represent public interest and consumer interest groups one has experience in toxicology ecology and biochemistry and one is a certifying agent so it's it's a diverse crowd that are representing you know the the organic community most often what I see on those updates are there's a list of allowed substances called the Nationalist and if you buy that organic granola bar that means that 95% of the ingredients are organic and the other 5% are going to be allowed on this Nationalist of non-organic ingredients and those ingredients are always being reviewed again every five years we're gonna take a quick 60-second break and kind of follow up on that conversation and then get into kind of the specifics of what kind of work you guys are doing here in the life hi I'm Marianne Sasaki we just completed another great episode of life in the law and I'm here today with J5L hi Jay hi Marianne and what do we love about the law Jay there's so much to love about it right there's more to love about it all the time and no kidding we have to be a nation of laws we have to be a nation of laws and we have to be a diligent nation of law of law lawyers and citizens it's all about the rule of law Marianne the rule of law is alive and well and life in the law yes yes it certainly is tune in every Wednesday from one to one third and think tech hi I'm Chris Leetham with the economy and you and I'd like to invite you each week to come watch my show each Wednesday at 3 p.m. I've got the Beagle sisters here with a healthy tip we encourage you to enjoy the food you eat this holiday season and keep it local and healthy yeah eat the rainbow your rainbow and if you need any produce come to the red bar and we're back to life food and farmer series I'm your co-host Matt Johnson here today with Justine Espiritu and justine who do we have with us today we have Diane Henley who is the senior certification officer and inspector at Oregon tilt hi guys I'm actually one of several senior certification officers and certification officers at tilt there are a bunch of us and I'm one of many inspectors both in the company and then we also have a bunch of contract inspectors that just do inspectors for inspections for us so I'm I'm one of many okay so yeah just during the break we're talking a little bit about the actual farms here in Hawaii as you mentioned that you guys specifically Oregon tilt work with six farms that are certified organic yeah and can you talk a little bit about like what are the size of these farms were they growing is this are you where are the trends with organic farming what what are you seeing what's out there okay right now Oregon Tilt certifies farms in Hawaii on Oahu Maui Big Island and Molokai and one processing operation on Maui ideally I would love it if we had more organic farms on the islands especially under tilt so that I could go do those inspections my my background is actually more on the processing side of things and it wasn't until I moved to Hawaii that I noticed kind of an opportunity to help the farmers save some money because with that annual onsite inspection the farmers have to pay for an inspector to come out from the mainland to do those onsite inspections and that can be very expensive when you start adding in the flights and the hotels and so I kind of went after that and said I can do farm inspections in Hawaii like let's save them some money so you know with the farm in Oahu that's an easy to just drive up to their farm it's a day trip there's no flight involved there's no hotel the farms on the other islands you know it's so easy you just hop over and along that that cost side of things the other thing we were chatting with about before a big question I get when I chat with people about organic is oh it's just too expensive you know it's cost prohibitive especially for a small farm we just we can't afford that and we're in a unique position right now that's fantastic Hawaii is the first state to offer a tax rebate it's a tax credit it's a bill that got passed last year but that didn't go into effect until I think technically December 31st of last year so this will be the first year that farms actually get to see the benefit of that okay and there's also a cost share program that's a federal program that one's been going on for several years and they just renewed it again so that's still in place and the cost share program through the federal government says we will refund you up to 75% of your certification costs up to $750 so if you are a small organic farm on a Wahoo and your certification costs for the year were $500 and then you also had to pay $500 for your organic inspection you're looking at $1000 of organic fees for the year well you can get $750 back from the federal government and then ideally with this new tax program you can get the other 250 back from the state of Hawaii so your certification costs might be nothing the big difference is that with the cost share program they're looking at inspection costs they're looking at certification costs they're even doing transitional costs so if you have you've been a conventional farmer and you want to switch to organic even though so during that three year transitional period where you're not yet organic but you're trying you can get certified transitional and you can get those costs refunded too and you're saying that's unique to the state program that's the that's the federal program the thing that's unique about the state program is that they will also cover the cost of machines that you need to buy or equipment that you need supplies that you need as part of the transition as as part of your organic program okay so as a as a an ongoing organic farmer you can apply to get refund back this is the first year that it's been in effect with those so I don't know how it's gonna actually look I don't know how it's gonna play out I just hope it means that you're gonna be a lot busier that would be great I would love it if we had more farms and processors certified organic through Oregon Tilt on the islands I think that a big misconception people here Oregon Tilt and they assume oh they just do certification Oregon but no we do Canada we do Mexico we do the US we're all over the place and I have a question kind of on your description the idea of the transition yeah and you can say if this is about the the Hawaii farms or in general do you see farms that are applying for certification are they usually in transition or is it usually new farms that are kind of starting off great question and I don't do the initial farm reviews so I don't know off the top of my head I would guess that typically farms are reaching out to an organic certifier earlier on and saying what do we need to do to become organic and we have the transitional program where we can talk them through it and a lot of times they have just bought the land and they know they want to be organic and they're kind of at square one and if they have land use affidavits going back three years showing that nothing prohibited was applied then they can move forward with organic right away or maybe they say oh you know we bought it from this other farmer his records show that they applied something one year ago okay great you've got two more years of transition you can get certified during that period and you can start getting into the requirements of okay what do I need to be organic you've got the support system at TILF you can start your record keeping and get that you know audited to make sure that oh this is sufficient this will prevent us from getting a non-compliance once we actually meet our three-year requirement actually TILF has a quarterly publication and the most current one that just came out it arrived yesterday in my mailbox is all about transition but it's a great publication it's a fun read and it talks about transition transitional farming it talks there's a bunch of interviews with different farmers who were in that process or what the the speed bumps that they faced were when they decided to switch to organic from conventional farming it's a great read and it is actually online too okay so you don't even need a hard copy so even though there's only six Hawaii farms do they ever get represented in this I don't know I'll ask them when I'm out doing my inspections this year and what do you what is your feeling in terms like I guess either nationwide or even internationally are there more farms that are going through this transition yeah I mean right now I mean I think within the US only like 1% of our ag land is actually organic which is sad but the the number of people who are buying organic is increasing at a huge rate something like oh I don't want to say a number and be wrong it's more than 10% we make up numbers okay she was off 5% but so that people people are becoming more and more educated they want clean food they want food that's good for the environment good for their families good for their body they are becoming more and more willing to spend the money now to buy organic as opposed to spending it later on medical bills and so the demand for organics is growing huge which is great and so one of the things help us doing is putting these programs in place like the transitional certification to help farms kind of start meeting that demand and help the small farms get off the ground and be able to supply organic produce so Diane I want to hear a little bit about your background how did you become a certifier something you went to school for and you're like yep I want to be an organic certifier no I went to school in central Pennsylvania and I went to Bucknell and my background was environmental science and French and when I moved to San Diego in 2007 you know recession no jobs to be had and there happened to be an organic certifier there who needed a French speaker and at that point in life I could speak French cannot I cannot speak French anymore but at that point I could and they needed a French speaker to help with the Canadian clients to help with that and I have the the lab background and the environmental science background that worked well for them and kind of the foot in the door and I fell in love with it and just started realizing how big an impact it has and I remember reading through the regulation you know it's my first week of work nine years ago reading through the regulation and some of the rules I'm saying well of course that's a rule like why would why would they have to write that into the organic regulation like isn't that just required for all agriculture no no it's not required for all agriculture conventional agriculture allows that thing to happen that's scary and just all different things down the line like oh this is this is really important and we're making a difference and looking at the process and realizing where the holes were but also where it where it was really strong and realizing through through my work in organic certification that yeah I can I can trust if something says organic that it's legit and I can trust that everyone is getting inspected every year and that they're getting better and better every year and the program's been in place for long enough now that it's it's really become incredibly strong and I feel very very proud to be working for an organic certifier and I love Oregon TILTH I love their mission and they they have they have a structure that is incredibly supportive of small farmers which I appreciate like in which way what what do you mean TILTH is the third largest organic certifier in the US but one of the things that makes them particularly unique is that a lot of the certifiers out there really focus just on the farm side of things or just on the processing side of things and TILTH is split almost 50-50 so we're really certifying farm to fork which is it's great for for our clients because we've got a you know producer search engine on our website where you can say oh well I need to find organic broccoli and you can type that in you can find a bunch of farms that grow organic broccoli that are certified by Oregon TILTH and it kind of helps connect all those dots helps them stay you know connected it's just nice that's it we actually I have 60 seconds left so that ends our time here I didn't get through my nose I told you was gonna be enough time that's awesome so thank you so much for coming on and letting us learn more about this specific certification company glad to hear you guys are working with six different farms here and hopefully with this new legislation and program to kind of refund that money spent on transition and and being certified that we'll see more of that I hope so so thank you so much for coming on thanks much for having me