Jennifer Taylor

Your Turn

As organic farmers, we care deeply about the food we put in our bodies and how it’s grown. On our small farm in middle Georgia, my husband and I grow U.S. Department of Agriculture-certified organic food — strawberries, Muscadine grapes, kale, sweet potatoes, ginger, turmeric and sweet onions — without toxic pesticides.

Food should nourish our bodies and the land — but a new study shows that most people are consuming toxic pesticides every time they eat. Researchers from University of California Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Friends of the Earth studied four families who typically eat non-organic food. They found over a dozen chemicals in each person from different classes of pesticides. Then the families switched to eating only organic food, and the results after just one week were remarkable.

Levels of all detected chemicals dropped an average of 60.5 percent. The biggest drops occurred in a class of highly neurotoxic pesticides called organophosphates, including chlorpyrifos which dropped by 61 percent. Chlorpyrifos is linked to increased rates of autism, learning disabilities and reduced IQ in children and is also one of the pesticides most often linked to farm worker poisonings.

I find this study tremendously hopeful. When we choose organic foods, we can get these dangerous chemicals out of our bodies and in turn support a food system that is healthier and that cares for our communities, farmers, farm workers and the land we farm. It’s a powerful opportunity where the solution is as clear as the problem.

Having served on the National Organic Standards Board from 2011 to 2016, and now on the Organic Farmers Association Governing Council and the board of Georgia Organics, I know this cleansing of our food system won’t happen overnight. But I also know from experience that we can make this vital, life-nourishing organic shift. It will involve you (and me) making the decision to choose local organic. This is how we lead the change.

And we can also push for major policy investment in organic farming systems. Policy change can help farmers across America move into organic farming, learn about farm stewardship and generate huge benefits for their farm environments by joining the growing organic marketplace. We need policies, incentives and practices that support healthy soils, healthy plants and animals and healthy communities — these are central to organic farming systems — and that make healthy organic foods accessible and affordable for consumers everywhere.

We farmers are stewards of the land and of public health. But all of us are stewards of our own bodies and the health and survival of our children and grandchildren. In this way, we share a common goal: to nourish our health, improve well-being and sustain the land.

Across Georgia and throughout America, this new study is a wake-up call to do everything we can to support organic farms and eat organic. Our lives, land and future depend on it.

Jennifer Taylor and her husband Ronald Gilmore are organic farmers at Lola’s Organic Farm, a USDA-certified organic farm in Glenwood, Georgia. Taylor is also the coordinator of Small Farm Programs at Florida A&M University.