How hard is it to get "organic" certified?

About as hard as you think it would be when the companies that do the "certification" only make their money certifying organic farms and collecting the fees. It has about as much legitimacy as buying a Ph.D. in Theoretical Phys Ed in the mail.

There is a good reason that about 25 percent of organic food is just overpriced regular food and that reason is - there are no surprise spot checks on farms in America and if you believe Russia or China are telling the truth about their organic process, they have a bat from Wuhan wet market they'd like to sell you.

Once President Clinton legitimized the anti-science movement by scuttling green energy programs such as nuclear (which resulted in a surge in coal), putting alternatives to medicine under the NHS umbrella, and creating a government organic certification, it was only a matter of time before movements began to chase the money.

One such ill-defined certification is regenerative agriculture, and if you happen to be a rancher, regenerative ranching. Want to get the progressive halo of being a holistic rangeland management guru? For a fee, you can. Writing in The Ecologist, Spencer Roberts notes he did just that, and got a certification from Regeneration International - for a dairy farm that doesn't exist. 

Roberts doesn't just go after them, he goes after Joel Salatin and, indirectly, the organic industry's favorite toadie Tom Philpott, who puffed up Salatin so much it's little surprise he is considered part of "The A-Team" for organic marketing groups. Who then tore Salatin down, which means he never knew what the guy was really about, he just promotes anyone his clients tell him to promote.

In the same week we've had The Ecologist go after bogus environmental certifications and Mother Jones go after the anti-vaccine sentiment that also dominates the organic industry. They say a Republican is just a Democrat who got mugged, which means people who used to be anti-science progressives but discovered during the pandemic that medicine actually works are going to do a lot of policing of the kooks they used to hide under their umbrella.