More than 150 organic industry stakeholders, including farmers, processors, manufacturer, retailers and more, met with staff from more than 160 legislators’ offices to celebrate how retail sales of their products now exceed $71 billion in the US and are verging on 6% year-over-year growth with nine in 10 US households buying organic products in the past six years. They also touted organic as a voluntary program that benefits people, the planet, rural communities and farmers and as a way to Make America Healthy Again.
But as Ivanna Yang, vice president of government affairs at the Organic Trade Association, explains in this episode of FoodNavigator-USA’s Soup-To-Nuts Podcast, they also asked for help addressing hurdles that are holding back the organic industry, including international market fluctuations, the risk of fraudulent imports, rulemaking delays that hamper business planning and innovation, and labor challenges related to the ongoing immigration crackdown among others.
Raising organic industry’s voice
As an advocacy-forward organization, the Organic Trade Association lobbies Congress year round, but as Yang explains, gathering individual members from across the country to visit their legislators in-person can have an outsized impact.
“Members of Congress hear from lobbyists like myself every day, but who they really want to hear from, though, is their constituents, because these are the people voting them in and out of office. So, that is why we like to bring our members in who have businesses, who create jobs in these members’ districts, who have suppliers in these districts, to really tell the members how they are impacted by the policies that we are asking them to support,” said Yang.
The OTA armed its members with talking points and strategies to promote six bills that are either pending or introduced that could dramatically impact individual organic stakeholders and the industry at large.
The DOME Act would help level the playing field for domestic organic production
At the top of OTA’s list is the Domestic Organic Market Expansion bill, which is pending introduction, and would help level the playing field for farmers, processors and logistics providers in the US who face increased competition from foreign players.
For context, organic imports surged to more than $5.7 billion in 2024 – up from less than $1 billion in 2011.
As Yang explains, DOME would strengthen domestic organic supply chains across segments by funding additional processing capacity, market development activities and targeted equipment purchases.
Yang adds it also would help them compete against international market fluctuations and competition from imported organic products – like beef.
OTA advocates for additional protection from international competition
The DOME legislation is not the only way that OTA members are looking to shore up protection from international competition. They also promoted the Organic Imports Verification Act, or OIVA, which was introduced in the Senate as bill 1398.
Currently the bill focuses on organic feed, but Yang said OTA wants to introduce a broader bill that would help protect domestic producers across segments.
This legislation would build on OTA’s long history for rooting out and protecting against fraud that includes a best-practices guide created in 2018 by the Organic Trade Association’s Global Organic Supply Chain Integrity Task Force that was created in response to the unwelcome discovery that some corn and soy from Eastern Europe was fraudulently labeled as organic.
Out of that effort came the Strengthening Organic Enforcement, or SOE, final rule, which passed in January 2023. The transformative rule was lauded as the biggest update to the organic regulations since the original Act in 1990 and provided a significant increase in oversight and enforcement authority to reinforce trust in organic production by improving farm to market traceability, increasing import oversight authority and providing robust enforcement of the organic regulations.
While SOE was widely supported, it also created extra reporting burdens for smaller farmers and producers. Yang explained that the Organic Trade Association is trying to “right size regulatory burdens” through another pending bill with the working title Risk-Based Certification.
Organic dairy bills aim to democratize data
OTA members also sought to even the playing field by promoting two dairy bills introduced in the House and Senate.
The first is the Organic Dairy Data Collection Act, which Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree from Maine and Republican Congressmen Tony Wied from Wisconsin and Nick Langworthy from New York reintroduced in June.
“The Organic Dairy Data Collection bill works to mend a gap in the data for organic dairy. A lot of the data that we are asking for in this bill, like the price of organic feed stuff, the price for how much organic milk is selling around the country … is already available to conventional milk producers,” and make it available would help with forecasting, Yang said.
Democratic Senators Peter Welch of Vermont and Cory Booker of New Jersey along with Independent Senator Bernie Sanders also reintroduced in June the Organic Dairy Assistance, Investment, and Reporting Yields Act – also known as the O DAIRY Act. It would extend the Emergency Assistance of Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-raised Fish Program to cover income losses due to input cost changes. It also would streamline payment processes and improve data collection.
OTA seeks to speed industry-supported oversight and regulations
OTA also supports the reintroduction of the Continuous Improvement and Accountability in Organic Standards Act, nicknamed CIAO, which Yang explains shares a similar philosophy to the organic dairy bills.
The act would establish predictable, consistent processes for updating organic regulations through a stakeholder-informed rulemaking process by establishing a five-year working period to ensure proposed rules reflect current research and market requirements, according to OTA.
The bill responds to long delays to industry supported rules in the past.
So far, the CIAO Act faces similar challenges to those that it proposes to address in that it also is bogged down in logistics. It was first introduced in April 2021, but didn’t get far despite bipartisan support and the endorsement of the American Sustainable Business Council, the Environmental Working Group, the National Farmers Union, the National Latino Farmers and Ranchers Trade Association, the Organic Farmers Association and the Accredited Certifiers Association, among others.
OTA advocates for updated agricultural guest worker program
The last bill that OTA members advocated for on the Hill last week was the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which was reintroduced in the house by Republican Representatives Dan Newhouse of Washington and Mike Simpson of Idaho, and Democratic Representatives Jim Costa of California, David Valadao of California, Adam Gray of California and Zoe Lofgren of California.
The bill, which was also introduced in three previous congressional sessions, seeks to update the H-2A agricultural guest worker program to help stabilize US farms and farmworkers.
While Yang was quick to note that OTA is not an immigration policy organization, she explained that this bill provides some reassurances to farm workers at a time when the Trump administration is aggressively enforcing immigration laws.
“We have heard from our larger produce members, like Taylor Farms, that they are already facing labor shortages because people are just afraid tow ork, even if they are here in the us legally. It is just an atmosphere which a lot of people don’t feel safe,” Yang said.
Sufficient funding wanted for National Organic Program
OTA members also broadly encouraged legislators to boost funding for the National Organic Program either in the Farm Bill, or more likely a continuing resolution given partisan differences that likely will stop legislators from agreeing on a comprehensive budget strategy by the Sept. 30 deadline.
While group lobbying days, like the one OTA organized last week, can be powerful, Yang notes individual constituents reaching out to their representatives also hold significant influence. As such, she encouraged organic industry stakeholders that could not join OTA on the Hill last week to still contact their members of Congress. The trade group includes talking points on its website for stakeholders who want to promote shared policy goals.
