The term “organic” with reference to foods, has become a victim of its own success - at one time it was a meaningful description of how a food or food component was grown, but it is now merely marketing puffery due to redefinition and allowance of levels of contamination that render it meaningless.

Yes, local producers at farmer’s markets still offer foods produced without pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers.

Yes, farmers of any size or scale can rationally balance the market prices of organic products against the expenses of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers, the costs of application, and the potentially lower crop yields from doing without them.

But if there is no testing of products, no certification of crops versus farmland, no auditable paper trail from soil to seed to plant to crop to mill, the “organic” has as much meaning as “improved” or “healthy” in the marketplace, and is wide-open to the type of fraud described in this article.