Farmer Richard Randall doesn't believe in the notion of "peak oil," the argument that civilization will soon experience an acute -- and irreversible -- petroleum scarcity that will fundamentally alter our way of life. A 61-year-old wheat and sorghum grower from Scott City, Kan., Randall says he's seen high oil prices before, and that today's expensive petroleum is just part of a natural market cycle that will eventually adjust itself, leading to lowered fuel costs.

"I think there's plenty of oil there," Randall said recently. "I feel that if we allow the marketplace to work without interruption in the supply, we will find a level. It's not going to be as low as it was, but it will come down. We do need to produce oil where we can."

Randall may not be certain when oil prices will level out, but it's abundantly clear to him that $70/barrel petroleum is taking a huge bite out of his business. Nearly every part of his farming operation is being impacted. The price for the diesel fuel that runs the tractors and trucks on his 4,500-acre farm have more than tripled in the last four years, rising from 80 cents per gallon to close to $3. Fertilizer prices are also up sharply. Since synthetic fertilizers are made from natural gas, they too are impacted by higher fossil fuel prices; the cost of fertilizer has gone from about $160 per ton to $460 per ton in the last three years. Smaller, organic growers are also feeling a pinch from costlier petroleum. The price for the plastic drip irrigation tape commonly used on organic fruit and vegetable farms is up 20 percent from two years ago.

Because farmers operate in a commodity market where buyers and brokers dictate the price of the harvest, high oil costs have been particularly painful. Unlike other businesses, farms have no way to pass their rising costs on to consumers.

"All of our expenses have gone up pretty well, but we can't put on a surcharge for fuel like everyone else can." Randall said. "It's made it a lot tougher."

Tomorrow's crises

For farmers like Randall, today's challenges may be tomorrow's crises. The problems of coping with high oil prices reveal how utterly dependent our food production system is on nonrenewable fuels. As long as oil is plentiful, that dependence isn't a concern. But in some circles fears are growing that if global petroleum production begins a steady decline, our entire food system will be strained, testing our ability to feed ourselves.

"How dependent on oil is our food system?" Richard Heinberg, a leading "peak oil" scholar and the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies said in an interview. "Enormously dependent. Fatally dependent, I would say."

Of course, you won't find any oil on your dinner plate, but petroleum and other fossil fuels are inside of every bite you eat. About one-fifth of all U.S. energy use goes into the food system. The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that are essential for high crop yields are a byproduct of natural gas. Gasoline and diesel fuels power the combines that rumble through the grain fields. Countless kilowatts of electricity are burned up in the factories that process all of the packaged goods that line the supermarket shelves. And then there's the gasoline required simply to get food to market. We now have a globalized food system, one in which the typical American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork. Organic products -- though they may have a more sustainable veneer -- are in many respects no different; 10 percent of organic products come from abroad. Without oil, we would all be on one harsh diet.

"We've created an agricultural system where, on average, for every energy of food calorie we produce, we need to expend about 10 calories of fossil fuels," Heinberg said.

Such an imbalance would not be worrisome if there were an inexhaustible supply of oil. But, as every child learns in elementary science class, petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. A heated debate is under way about when that resource will begin to decline. Some say that we have already passed the summit of peak oil and point to a leveling of global petroleum production as proof. The U.S. government argues that we have decades before oil extraction begins to decline. Others calculate that we will hit the peak oil mark sometime in the next 10 years. Regardless of when exactly oil production starts to drop, it's clear that in this century humanity will have to learn to live without cheap, abundant oil.

What this means for our food system is also up for debate. At the very least, costlier oil will lead to more expensive food, especially for processed and packaged goods. At the very worst, peak oil could seriously disrupt agriculture, especially in highly industrialized nations like the United States, where food systems are heavily reliant on oil.

"This era of increasing globalization of our food supply is going to draw to a close here in the next decade or so," Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the Organic Consumers Association, said. "I think it (eventual oil scarcities) is going to mean the end of importing billions of dollars of food from overseas. It's going to mean the end of relatively cheap food in the U.S. And it's going to mean a significant increase in starvation and malnourishment across the world."

Fuel vs. food

In response to alarms about the fragileness of the food system, some farmers are taking initiatives to wean themselves from petroleum and find more sustainable ways of growing food. One of the most popular approaches is biofuels. For farmers, it's a solution to high oil prices that makes intuitive sense, as it raises the possibility of growers cultivating their own fuel, just as most farmers did a century ago when they harvested oats to feed their horse teams.

Phil Foster is one farmer who has made a commitment to reducing his farm's reliance on fossil fuels. A prominent California organic fruit and vegetable grower who is a supplier to Whole Foods, Foster runs nearly all of the trucks and tractors on his 250-acre farm on B100-pure biodiesel. The remainder of his machines -- older tractors with more finicky engines -- operate on B30, which is a blend of biodiesel and conventional petroleum diesel. At the same time, Foster is trying to reduce the amount of electricity his farm pays for. Several years ago he installed a bank of solar panels to help power his packing shed, refrigerators, irrigation pumps, and sales office. He calculates that the sun provides about 20 percent of his energy.

For Foster, using biodiesel and employing solar technology isn't just an effort to be environmentally correct. It's simply smart business, he says, a way to ensure that his farm will be economically sustainable over the long run.

"It was kind of a no-brainer for me to move in that direction," Foster said. "Especially in a business like ours, customers that buy organic would tend to like their growers to be kind of on the forefront. As a business that wants to think about longevity, I want to know how we can position ourselves."

Organic growers aren't the only ones bullish on the future of biofuels. Large, conventional grain farmers are also looking at biofuels as a way to reduce their costs, and many corn growers are hoping to make money by selling their surplus harvest to ethanol processors.

"Diesel fuel used to be a minor cost, but now it's become a major cost," said Paul Penner, who farms 1,000 acres of wheat north of Wichita. "It looks like biodiesel is going to become a long-term solution. So I think we are going to be seeing some bigger switches across the country."

Some people, however, caution that biodiesel is unlikely to evolve into a permanent fix. Though biofuels may be useful in reducing petroleum dependence in the near future, it's doubtful that fuels made from plants could completely unhitch us from oil. Why? For the simple reason that making biofuels requires lots of land, and at some point -- were biofuels to become widely popular -- the nation would face a choice between growing food and growing fuel.

"As good as it sounds, you're taking crops that initially were being used as a food source and now are being used as fuel sources," said a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who asked to remain anonymous. "So where will all the additional food crops come from to feed the demand from American consumers? I expect some problems coming."

Problems involving the trade-off between cultivating food and cultivating fuel are already appearing. According to Ferd Hoefner of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, last year farmers in North Dakota sold a large portion of their corn harvest to ethanol processors. But that left local cattle ranchers short of grain to feed their cows, and so they had to import corn from Canada to beef up their herds, corn that was more expensive that the locally grown stuff.

Freewheelin'

As the North Dakota experience shows, there are no simple solutions to agriculture's deep reliance on oil. The fundamental challenge facing farmers -- and, by extension, everyone who likes to eat -- is how to reduce off-farm inputs and make farms more self-sufficient. That will likely require a dramatic overhaul of the food system, a wholesale restructuring that would return agriculture to a system of local production for local consumption.

"The only good thing about this is that there will be a massive stimulus for rebuilding local and regional food and farming systems, and a big increase in organic and sustainable farms, which are less energy intensive," the Organic Consumer Association's Cummins said.

Amy Courtney is a farmer who is pioneering less energy-intensive ways of farming. Courtney is the owner and sole employee of Freewheelin' Farms, a tiny operation on California's Central Coast. Four years ago Courtney, 31, started farming by herself on a one-acre plot just a few hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean. On her oceanview parcel she grows strawberries, blackberries, hothouse tomatoes, cabbage, squash, leeks, and a range of other vegetables. Her produce goes to 16 households in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and some restaurants in a nearby town, all of which she delivers on her bicycle after a seven-mile ride.

"I was a bike activist and chose not to have a car in my life," Courtney said on a recent sunny afternoon as she stood near the chicken flock that supplies eggs to her CSA members. "Then I got involved with agriculture and saw how much we were spending on diesel and oil spills on the fields, and the whole thing was kind of gross to me. I don't want to support that with my life. Or at least I want to unplug as much as possible. And now, with everything in the Mideast, it's like, duh."

Courtney does use some petroleum. She employs a gasoline-powered rototiller to supplement her hand digging of the soil, and she has a biodiesel truck for hauling manure from a nearby ranch so that she can make her own compost. But she estimates that her farm's annual fuel use is less than 30 gallons. She also tries to be more sustainable by using as many recycled materials as possible. She inherited her greenhouse, and the bike trailer she uses for delivering her produce was scavenged from a junk pile.

"There's stuff out there that people aren't using, including land and equipment," she said. "I'm amazed how much food you can grow on a little piece of land. I don't care if they can't make Pez as cheap as they used to. I don't care if GM can't keep it together anymore. If we can't feed ourselves, we're fucked."

Freewheelin' Farms may not be scaled to feed a country of 300 million people. But it is an illustration of the basic principles that will be required to grow food in a post-oil age: Muscle-powered, localized, dependent on personal relationships. Courtney's model -- in which it takes one person to feed about another 20 -- also reveals one other change that will likely have to occur with the agricultural system: More people will have to start growing their own food. Currently less than two percent of the U.S. population are farmers. If we can no longer rely on the muscle of carbon energy, that number will need to grow.

Author Heinberg says the island nation of Cuba offers a model for how such a transition can occur. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist nation found itself cut off from the subsidized petroleum it had long depended on. In order to feed itself, the government launched a sweeping program to enlist citizens in urban gardening and composting. In the last decade, the country has become an internationally recognized model of sustainable agriculture.

"[Cuba] basically had an oil famine in the early '90s, and they had to break up the big state-owned farms and start smaller farms," says Heinberg. "They included farming as part of the curriculum in our schools. They raised the salaries of farmers.

"And they had to do these things, or otherwise they simply would not have survived as a society."

Most keyboard jockeys would die for the view from Orin Martin's office window: apple trees in blossom, lines of citrus, dozens of varieties of flowers and neat rows of peppers, garlic and potatoes. Martin is a farmer in Santa Cruz, Calif., where for last 30 years he has been an instructor at the University of California's agro-ecology program, one of the nation's oldest organic agriculture curriculums. Strong, stout and built like a tree trunk, with sun-bleached cornsilk hair, thick hands, and deep crowsfeet around his eyes from years of working outdoors, Martin loves farming, and it shows whenever he starts to talk about his craft, as he will happily do for hours on end.

In recent years, however, something has been amiss in Martin's idyllic setting. The weather is changing in strange ways. And for a farmer that's bad news.

"I don't know if you can talk about predictable weather anymore," Martin said on a recent walk through his three-acre plot. "Each of the last ten years has been anomalous in one way or another. The weather here used to be like clockwork. Around March 15 it would stop raining. But all through the '90s we had rain into April, May and even June. If you talk with farmers and gardeners, oh yeah, they think there's something off."

Martin is right. From New England to the Midwest to California, farmers and scientists are noticing that once-dependable weather patterns are shifting, and concern is growing that those changes will have a significant impact on our agriculture system. Farmers in the United States and around the world are likely to face serious challenges in the coming decades as new kinds of weather test their ability to bring us the food we all depend on.

The culprit is climate change, caused by society's burning of fossil fuels. When it comes to global warming, farmers--who are more attuned to weather patterns than most people--may be the proverbial canaries in the coalmine.

"Some of the changes in weather are consistent with climate change predictions, and that's real troublesome," says Michelle Wander, a professor of soil science at the University of Illinois. Wander recently published a report with the Union of Concerned Scientists which predicted that within 25 years Illinois summers may resemble the hotter climate of Arkansas. "By the end of the century, I think we will really be suffering."

The weather changes underway differ by region. In California, which has a typical Mediterranean climate with a wet winter and a dry summer, rainfall is stretching later and later into the spring. New England is experiencing a warming trend, with average temperatures up 1.8 degrees F over the last century. Winter warming in the northeast is even more pronounced; temperatures between December and February increased 4.4 degrees F in the last 30 years, according to a study by the University of New Hampshire. In the Midwest, the springs and summers have become unseasonably wet, while the summers get hotter and drier.

"What we're experiencing is rather abnormal," says Dave Campbell, who farms 225 acres of oats, wheat, corn, soy and hay in Maplepark, Illinois, land that has been in his wife's family since the 1830s. "It just keeps raining and raining. Last year, from May 10 to June 21 we had 13 inches of rain. Normally we have 38 inches of precipitation the whole year. Last year we had real trouble with our wheat crop because it was so excessively wet. We just get dumped with rain."

The weather, of course, has never been exactly dependable--farmers have always been at the mercy of the vagaries of sun and rain. But general weather patterns have at least been broadly predictable, allowing farmers to know when to sow their seed, when to transplant, when to harvest. As weather patterns become less reliable, growers will be tested to develop new rhythms and systems for growing crops.

For a city dweller who thinks that food comes from Safeway, rain may seem like an unqualified benefit when it comes to growing food. Farmers know better. Too much rain at the wrong time can make it difficult to plan or harvest crops. Above-average rainfall also contributes to fungi and insects that can dramatically reduce crop yields. Too much warmth is equally problematic. Some plants require a certain number of frost days each year in order to thrive the following spring. As temperatures warm, farmers who are accustomed to growing, say, blueberries in Maine or soybeans in Indiana may find themselves having to either shift to different crops or actually move their operations to new locales. Unreliable weather will make it harder for farmers to be as productive as we have come to expect.

"When it comes to the weather, we expect the unexpected," says Henry Brockman, 41, a vegetable farmer in Congerville, Illinois. "It's not as predictable as it used to be. It used to be that the ground was frozen all winter. Now in the winter it freezes and thaws, freezes and thaws. Some of the models show this part of the country getting very dry, and that would be a big problem. If the weather got any drier, I wouldn't be able to farm as I do."

Climate change is likely to impact different parts of the world in vastly different ways, climatologists and agronomists say. Scientists at a recent international conference in London reported that warming temperatures could lead to substantial harvest reductions in major food crops such as wheat, soy and rice. And for years the World Bank and others have been warning that climate change will be especially burdensome on poor countries in the tropics, where soil quality is generally inferior. According to a study conducted in the Philippines, for every one degree C increase in temperature, there will be a 10-percent reduction in yields for rice, a staple crop for billions of people.

But here in the U.S., most observers agree, it's doubtful that climate change could cause a food security crisis. The U.S. food system--though highly concentrated in terms of ownership and control--is geographically very diverse, which means that crops could be shifted to other areas if necessary. Also, the U.S. produces so much surplus grains for animal feed and food processing that it would take enormous crop failures to create real food scarcities. At least for residents of the U.S., a climate-change induced famine is unlikely.

The uncertainties wrought by global warming, however, could be make-or-break for many already-struggling farmers unless they are prepared to adapt to new conditions.

"For farmers, climate change is yet another darkness in the night, another stress for farmers facing uncertainties," says Bill Easterling, director of Penn State's Institutes of the Environment and a longtime researcher into climate change and agriculture.

Farmers are a famously adaptive lot, well accustomed to reacting to forces beyond their control. The worry among scientists is that if the agriculture establishment does not take climate change seriously enough, it will become much more difficult to respond effectively when weather disruptions hit. Easterling says the window for farmers to successfully adapt to new weather conditions is about six to 10 years--the time it takes for researchers to breed new seed varieties suited for specific conditions.

"What would worry anyone is if climate change starts to exceed the system's built-in adaptive response," Easterling says.

Among farmers and researchers, there is disagreement about which types of growers climate change will impact most--large agribusiness growing operations, or smaller, family-run farms. Some agriculture industry observers says that the bigger farmers will have an advantage in coping with weather changes, as they will have more resources to switch to new crops. Others says that since family farms usually grow a wider range of crops, their biological diversity will make it easier to cope with whatever changes occur.

"A large corporate potato farm may be more vulnerable because they have all of their eggs in one basket," says Vern Grubinger, a berry specialist at the University of Vermont. "It's very hard to find small, family farms that have only one thing. They may have 100 or so species. You won't be in nearly as bad a shape if you were growing only one or two crops."

"When you have a real diversified profile with what you're planting, you know that at least something will do well," says Santa Cruz farmer Martin. "And that's an advantage."

What all agriculture experts agree on is that farmers need to start preparing today for climate change. Growers ought to be thinking about what warmer temperatures, fluctuations in precipitation, and an increase in extreme weather events will mean for their farms, and how they can respond.

"This is change; it's not necessarily disaster," says Grubinger. "The disaster will come if people aren't prepared."

The labels on some of your favorite organic products are the very picture of Mother Earth. Sunlight streams over fields, birds perch in trees, rows of bright crops glisten on the hills. But read the fine print and you may find that the organic garbanzo beans or fresh apple juice you enjoy is brought to you by a conventional food processor not known for its environmental stewardship – companies such as General Mills, Heinz and Philip Morris's Kraft.

Today a significant – and growing – percent of organic foods are owned by corporations more often associated with the predations of agribusiness than with the ideals of sustainable farming. The increasing presence of conventional food processors in the organic industry is raising debate among farmers, shoppers and consumer advocates about whether the values of organic agriculture and the motives of big business can co-exist.

Does the mainstreaming of organics represent a victory for farmers and the environmentally minded, or is it a case of corporate co-optation? Can success be reconciled with the organic movement's original intent, or will the very term "organic" be rendered meaningless? How can the organic food industry be at once popular and principled?

Who Benefits Most?

"There's this image that 'organic' means local, family-owned farms," said Ryan Zinn, campaigns coordinator for the Organic Consumers Association, a nationwide network that promotes organic and fair trade foods.

"But the reality is that mainstream food processors have set up front groups," he continued. "The big point of contention is whether this is co-optation, or if the organic movement is the victim of its own success. The biggest beneficiaries are consumers, who have more access to affordable organic foods. But in the long run there's a lot of downsides. As corporate consolidation increases, you'll see a reduction of choice as small and medium-sized operations are simply pushed out of the market."

Figures supplied by the Organic Consumers Association reveal the degree to which conventional food processors have penetrated the organic market. General Mills owns the organic brands Cascadian Farms and Muir Glenn. Heinz holds a 20 percent equity share in food distributor Hain, which owns Rice Dream soy milk, Garden of Eatin', Celestial Seasonings, Earth's Best, and Health Valley, along with 15 other organic brands. Kellogg owns Sunrise Organic, while Kraft owns Boca Foods, maker of the popular vegetarian Boca Burgers. The largest organic seed company, Seeds of Change, is controlled by M&M/Mars. Your morning Odwalla is now brought to you by Coca-Cola.

The large conventional food processors aren't entering the organic market simply because they think it's a nice thing to do. They are buying up organics enterprises because it's smart business. Although organics represent just a sliver of all food spending in the U.S. – about two percent of the market – organics are the only sector of the food industry experiencing sustained growth.

Since 1997, total U.S. food sales have grown between two and four percent, according to the Organic Trade Association. During that same time, sales of organic foods grew about 20 percent. Total organic sales – food plus personal care products, pet food and household cleaners – are now at $13 billion, and projected to reach $30 billion by 2007. General Mills and Heinz are simply doing what any savvy business does: They are following the green.

We've Come a Long Way

Clearly the organic movement has come a long way from its roots. What started out as fringe effort inspired by back-to-the-land types who wanted to live in greater harmony with nature is now firmly in the mainstream, with some 58 percent of US households having purchased organic products, according to a 2002 survey. Organic foods used to be available only at local co-ops or self-described health food stores. Now you can find organic products at Safeway, Albertson's, Kroger's and even Wal-Mart.

The spread of organics from the neighborhood co-op to the supermarket shelves helps explain why many mom-and-pop companies have been bought up by (or sold out to, depending upon your point of view) larger corporations. Small, local organic operations simply do not have the reach to coordinate nation-wide distribution. Bigger companies do have the expertise in getting products to shelves across the country, and as the market for organics has grown they have stepped in to fill that role.

"I can't supply an Albertson's in Wyoming," said Tom Broz, owner of Live Earth Farm, a 30-acre organic operation in Watsonville, Calif. "But the large companies can."

The Organics Consumer Association's Ryan Zinn says the explosive growth of the Whole Foods and Wild Oats stores, national organic food chains that together account for about 17 percent of all organic sales in the U.S., has fueled the corporate consolidation of organics.

"Much of the stuff at Whole Foods or Wild Oats are organic segments of bigger processors," Zinn said. "They have pushed the corporate-organic mold. To go from regional to national distribution, you need to get bigger and take advantage of economies of scale that big corporations can provide. What Whole Foods initially did, out of necessity, was to source from small or medium sized operations. But as they grew they had to approach conventional operators and see if they could meet the demand for organics."

A Whole Foods spokeswoman declined to be interviewed for this article and said that company executives who could address the issue were unavailable for comment.

Move To the Mainstream

Farmers, advocates and ordinary shoppers all share the view that organics' move to the mainstream carries both benefits and risks. On the one hand, more organic foods are available to people than at any time since the start of the industrial food age, and this should have very real benefits for public health and the environment. But some people also fear that big business doesn't really believe in the values of sustainable farming and that, in the long run, their participation in the industry will dilute the very meaning of the term "organic."

"I'm torn," said Julia Wiley, who with her husband, Andy Griffin, owns Marquita Farms, which grows 200 varieties of organic fruits and vegetables in Watsonville, Calif. "As a mother, I'm glad that more organic food is accessible to more people. I do love that I can buy organic oatmeal. But I'm conflicted, because what the big boys are doing is still conventional agriculture if you have a 100-acre monoculture of organic crops."

A similar ambivalence appears to prevail among consumers. Shoppers leaving the bustling Whole Foods market in San Francisco on a recent Saturday expressed surprise when told that large conventional food processors own many of the organic products they buy. When asked what they thought about that fact, about half said it was cause for concern, while the other half felt that it was an encouraging sign of organics' success.

"If an increasing percentage of profits is coming from organic agriculture, then they [conventional processors] will keep building up the market for organics, which is a good thing," said shopper Jeff Plotts.

Gil Roybal, another Whole Foods shopper, had a different opinion. "I would be concerned that maybe they aren't really organic," he said. "Large corporations like General Mills have never been organic, and maybe they're trying to circumvent the system just to get higher prices, because people will pay more for organic."

Roybal's concerns are well founded, and they represent what advocates say is the biggest threat posed by big business's role in the organic market: the drive to loosen regulations governing the definition of "organic."

Organic Standards

When the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) first moved to create a single organic standard in the mid 1990s, it did so largely at the behest of the largest organic operators, who were eager for a national definition after years of juggling different state rules. For local farmers, having a national standard was less of a concern since they typically only sold their produce within a single state.

To the shock of many longtime organic farmers and consumers, when the first USDA guidelines were published they allowed for the irradiation of meat, the inclusion of genetically modified crops, and confinement of livestock. After receiving some 275,000 letters protesting the lax proposals, the USDA backed off from the looser requirements and put in place the definition in use today.

But efforts by some of the larger organic companies to create a less stringent definition of "organic" continue. In April 2004, the USDA announced that it was considering allowing farms to retain the organic seal even if they used animal growth hormones, fed cattle non-organic fishmeal, or sprayed some kinds of pesticides. Consumer advocates mobilized against idea and sent thousands of emails and faxes to Washington, DC within just a few days. The USDA backed down.

As the fight over the federal standard reveals, there is an inherent tension between the principles of sustainable farming and the imperatives of big business. Sustainable agriculture puts a premium on biodiversity, on small scale production, and on intimate relationships between producer and consumer. In contrast, corporate capitalism prizes uniformity, large scale production, and mass marketing. The organic movement's growing pains center on the question of whether these two disparate value systems can be reconciled in today's economy.

Combining Worldviews

The people at Stonyfield Farms believe the two worldviews can be combined. Founded in 1983 in New Hampshire, the organic yogurt brand says its mission is to "support family farmers and sustainable farming methods ... to serve as a model of environmentally and socially responsible business ..." and to "recognize our obligations to stockholders."

Today Stonyfield is the number one seller of organic yogurt in the U.S., and well known for using its recyled plastic lids to plug various progressive causes. The company is also 80 percent owned by Group Danone, the French manufacturer of products such as Evian water and Dannon yogurt.

A Stonyfield spokeswoman, Cathleen Toomey, said that when the Stonyfield executives were in negotiations with Group Danone they were adamant about retaining full management control of the company, and that the legal agreements governing the merger lock that arrangement in place. According to Toomey, Stonyfield is as committed as ever to its founding principles of preserving family farms. When asked if the company can remain close to family farmers even though it is owned by the world's 12th largest food processor, a corporation located on the other side of the Atlantic, Toomey replied:

"The question is: Can you maintain your mission? It's different with each company. We try to stay close to the farmers and the mission and that keeps it real. Because if you take the mission away from Stonyfield, you lose the value of the brand."

What About Sustainability?

For farmers and advocates, the tension between commercial success and staying true to the movement's values also hinges on the difference between organic farming and truly sustainable agriculture. As some see it, what the big companies are practicing may be organic, but it's not necessarily sustainable. Truly sustainable agriculture requires local production for local consumption; soil conservation; and farming practices that respond to nature's cycles rather than dictate to them.

The large organic companies may not be using pesticides or animal growth hormones, but they continue to engage in industrial farming. They plant monocrops in which hundreds of acres are dedicated to a single plant, and they remain involved in a system in which the typical American meal travels 1,200 miles from farm to fork.

"In the long run, this kind of farming – in which you have 10,000-acre organic farms – won't help," said Broz of Live Earth Farm. "It won't help the environment and it won't help the workers. It's not sustainable. Sustainable means growing food in a harmonious way with nature. There's also the social aspect, to have fair practices for workers. There's also the economic factor; I would rather see 100 small farms than two giant ones."

Julia Wiley of Marquita Farms agrees. "The federal standards are just about what 'thou shalt not do.' It doesn't talk about what you should do: soil conservation, reducing the distance food had to travel, staying away from monoculture. Staying local is important because it means that the food on your plate used less fuel to get there."

Both farmers say that consumers who are concerned about the corporate consolidation of organic farming and want to support sustainable agriculture should buy from local farmers markets or join a CSA (community supported agriculture) in which city dwellers receive weekly produce deliveries directly from the farm. Farmers markets and CSAs, these growers say, are the truest expression of the original ethic of the organic movement: That by getting to know our farmers, we will also get to truly understand our food.

And if current trends continue?

"We could end up with just one or two kinds of organic tomatoes," Ryan Zinn of the Organic Consumers Association warned. "And then we end up facing the same pitfalls in terms of environmental sustainability and food security that we now face."

One hot-button issue riling voters in Nevada is the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. For decades, the nuclear power industry has grappled with questions of how to dispose spent nuclear fuel, which remains dangerously radioactive for centuries. Industry and government officials figured the best plan was to just put all the hot stuff in one site, and picked a section of the Nevada desert well outside the state's former nuclear testing ground. Not surprisingly, many Nevadans did not take kindly to the idea of being the dumping ground for the nation's nuclear waste, and for years the proposed repository has been one of Nevada's most inflammatory political issues.

During the 2000 campaign, Bush and Cheney said they would not agree to open Yucca Mountain unless the science was sound and the site proven safe. Bush won the state by 3.55 percent of the vote.

Less than two years later, in July 2002, Congress and the White House, overriding the objections of Nevada's elected officials, agreed to start sending waste to Yucca Mountain. But, according to Peggy Maze Johnson of the local environmental justice group Citizen Alert, a host of safety questions remain unresolved. "Two hundred and ninety-three scientific questions about Yucca Mountain are unanswered,' Johnson says. "If you weigh the options, it just doesn't compute.'

The Bush Administration's support for Yucca Mountain has many Nevadans crying foul, and it has provided the Kerry campaign with a wedge issue. In a recent visit to the state, Kerry said he wouldn't support opening the nuclear waste site, detailing his reasons in a May 16 Op-Ed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Kerry has consistently voted against appropriations for the project and, in fact, voted with 39 other members of the Senate against moving the waste to Nevada.

However, Kerry's selection of Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina as his running mate may be problematic with Nevada voters in the election. Some appear happy with the selection. For example, although Edwards voted twice in 2002 in favor of sending the waste to Yucca Mountain, Nevada's senior representative and Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid, said that Edwards has changed his mind.

"John Edwards supports John Kerry on all issues important to the people of Nevada, including Sen. Kerry's pledge to stop nuclear waste coming to Nevada,' Reid said in a released statement.

If Edwards has changed his mind, he hasn't yet told his home state of North Carolina, which wants 2,248 metric tons of irradiated fuel from its nuclear power plants buried at Yucca Mountain. North Carolina newspapers have carried no reports of an Edwards switch on the Yucca issue. The New York Times noted the difference in opinion between Kerry and Edwards on the Nevada site without reporting any change of mind.

One of the centerpieces of Edwards' legislative record is a measure he introduced in November 2002 to provide for procedures for transporting the waste to Nevada (to reduce fears about moving the poisonous stuff on the nation's highways and railroads). Moreover, if Edwards tailored his position to Kerry's for the purposes of the election, he could still revert to his own position on the dump if he became president through succession.

Johnson said that the Yucca Mountain controversy will likely increase voter turnout this fall. Her group is organizing 25 town hall meetings across the state between now and November to discuss Yucca Mountain and other issues.

"If people could have been shown that it was safe, they would have been OK with it,' she said. "But the science is not there to support the myths that the Administration is putting out. People feel that the science has been manipulated to give us Yucca Mountain and they're right, it has been manipulated. I think people in Nevada feel they were deceived.'

Regardless of the final findings of the scientific analysis of Yucca Mountain, the issue remains politicized and polarized in Nevada, with some Nevadans of the belief that Yucca Mountain is a done deal. In fact, in an abrupt about-face of decades of state policy of not parleying a deal with the federal government to take the nuclear waste, this year's Nevada Republican Party platform included a plank that demanded the party "minimize negative impacts from federal control and exploitation of federally-managed lands in Nevada.'

April 1, 2004 -- As veteran corporate accountability activists, we both have spent years challenging big business to be more responsive to the needs of workers, communities, and the environment. We have picketed outside corporate headquarters, organized sit-ins, sponsored shareholder resolutions and bird-dogged company executives. When it comes to pressuring Corporate America, we've done it as much as anyone.

But the protesting thing is getting old. We figure it's time to give up our placards and trade them in for some PowerPoint presentations. We've decided to drop our commitment to advocacy and adopt a more lucrative career -- consulting.

With long histories as gadflies, we bring a unique perspective to business consulting. Since we've never been inside the box, we think outside the box as a matter of course. Our unique point of view can provide shareholders and management with solutions that will dramatically cut costs and raise revenues.

In this era of ruthless of competition, we deliver ideas that will boost a company's earnings and productivity. We can show you how, by firing a single individual, you can save millions of dollars. We show you how to outsource your CEO.

In recent years, hundreds of U.S. companies have generated significant savings by sending high-skilled, well-paid positions to countries such as Singapore, India and the Czech Republic. The economics are clear: If a job can be done equally well somewhere else for less money, then it should be sent abroad. Our consulting firm takes this concept to the next logical step by outsourcing all the way to the top of the corporate ladder.

Why not? After all, equally skilled and experienced chief executives in Europe and Asia earn a fraction of what U.S. executives take home. The average chief of a major U.S. company receives $10.83 million in compensation per year. The typical CEO in Europe receives about $2.7 million. Japanese CEOs are a downright bargain: Your company can expect to pay as little as $300,000 to $500,000 per year for an executive based there, with year-end bonuses averaging just 10 percent. Even if you exclude the value of stock options and bonuses -- which account for the bulk of American CEO pay -- CEOs in the U.S. on average receive twice as much as executives in other industrialized nations.

The prospective savings to your company's shareholders are immense. You get the same quality of corporate leadership, but at a much more reasonable price. Goodbye Michael Eisner, hello Gunter Thielen and Nobuyuki Idei.

We understand that your company may be concerned that off-shoring the CEO could impact performance. That's why we have a Two-for-One Plan. For the same salary you pay one American CEO, you can get a CEO in Europe and one in Asia. By having an executive on each side of the globe, you get uninterrupted service, corporate management around the clock. Instead of putting your back office in Bangalore, you put your front office in Berlin and Tokyo.

The benefits to your company go beyond cost savings alone. When you offshore the boss, you get rid of the person that hourly workers and management employees alike love to hate. Just think how it will boost worker morale to see the CEO booted out the door. The resulting increases in worker productivity will pleasantly surprise you.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If it makes sense to increase profits by outsourcing skilled labor, let's save big money by outsourcing the most uncompetitive worker in the U.S. corporate hierarchy -- the CEO.

Jason Mark and Kevin Danaher are the authors of 'Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power' (Routledge, 2003). They work for the human rights organization Global Exchange.

Pete Bennett is fed up, and he's not going to take it anymore.

"People are tired and angry and upset," says the 47-year-old unemployed worker from Danville, California, frustration noticeable in his voice. "People are hurting, losing their homes. If we keep pulling jobs out of the country, how is the economy going to stay up?"

Coming from an autoworker or a steelworker, these would be familiar words. But Bennett isn't a laid off Ford or GM employee. He used to work for companies such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, where, as a contract database programmer, he earned between $80,000 and $90,000 a year. But in the last year, he says, he hasn't been able to find any programming work -- such jobs, he is told, are moving overseas.

Bennett is not alone. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of highly skilled, well-paid positions have been sent abroad.

These days architects in the Philippines are producing blueprints for Fluor; electronic engineers in India are designing cell phone chips for Texas Instruments; and computer programmers in the Czech Republic are building software for Kodak. The stream of job loss is set to become a torrent; a November 2002 study by the consulting firm Forrester Research estimated that over the next 15 years some 3.3 million US service sector jobs would be sent abroad. A more recent report by economists at UC Berkeley says as many as 14 million programming, accounting, paralegal and other service jobs are at risk of being "off-shored."

The off-shoring of service jobs is déjà vu all over again. In the 1970s, U.S. corporations started shipping manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries such as Mexico, China and Indonesia in an effort to cut labor costs. Now, that same drive to reduce labor costs is hitting more highly skilled workers as service jobs go to well-educated workers in New Delhi and Prague and Singapore. As skilled workers are painfully starting to learn, the logic of cost cutting doesn't distinguish between blue collar and white collar.

While the economics of sending manufacturing jobs and service positions abroad may be the same, the political consequences promise to be different. In American politics it's one thing to attack the working class, but quite another to undermine the middle class, which votes in higher percentages. As any political consultant will tell you, as the middle class goes, so goes the nation. By cutting white collar positions, American businesses are sowing the seeds of a populist backlash that could redraw the political map.

One political topic that is bound to be influenced by the off-shoring of service jobs is the hot-button issue of trade policy. Surveys by the Pew Center show that support for free trade policies splits sharply along income lines. Among families earning more than $75,000 a year, 63 percent of people see globalization as positive; among families earning less than $50,000 a year, support drops to 37 percent.

In effect, better paid workers have supported free trade policies so long as they aren't impacted by them. But now many of those people are suffering the same cold fate that manufacturing workers have grappled with for decades. As more and more skilled jobs go abroad, supporters of free trade are almost certain to reassess whether corporate globalization is in their best interests.

The loss of high skilled jobs could also have a significant impact on next year's presidential election. Voters' job anxiety is shaping up as the number one election issue, with President Bush struggling against the loss of more than 2 million jobs on his watch and a so far "jobless economic recovery."

Off-shoring skilled positions is only going to make the anemic job market worse: According to the industry consulting firm Gartner Inc., one in 10 U.S. technology jobs will move overseas by the end of 2004. The disappearance of those good-paying jobs gives Democrats a chance to reach out to more affluent voters whose natural sympathies may lie with Republicans -- but whose anger could translate into Democratic gains.

Winning elections is in large measure about managing expectations -- and it's the newly unemployed skilled workers whose expectations are being downsized furthest. As Pete Bennett puts it: "These people have never experienced this before. ... What are we going to replace these jobs with? Flipping burgers?"

The long-term political effects of the off-shoring of skilled jobs promise to be larger than one single issue or one election. The export of skilled jobs could very likely cause an anti-corporate backlash that will reverse the decades-long drive toward deregulation and the weakening of organized labor.

During the heady days of the late 1990s, America's high tech class by and large supported the push for deregulation and laissez-faire economics. Now, the software designers and tech engineers who didn't think the government needed to play a role in overseeing the economy are the victims of uncontrolled economic forces. The once comfortable are becoming the insecure. The shift from being a winner to a loser is bound to prompt some serious rethinking about whether corporations should be given free rein to do whatever they like.

The first signs of this are already evident. Newly vulnerable high tech workers -- traditionally not big union supporters -- are starting to listen to the entreaties of organized labor. The Communication Workers of America says it is seeing increasing enthusiasm for unionization among off-shored high tech workers. Calls are also increasing for government regulation to staunch the hemorrhage of jobs. In response, state and federal legislators are considering laws to keep service jobs in the United States. The laissez-faire mentality of the 1990s is being replaced by demands that government act to restrain corporations' basic instincts. The political pendulum between dislike of big government and dislike of big business is swinging in a new direction.

Those businesses shipping high skilled jobs overseas should beware: Short-term profits may come at the cost of future political peril.

Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark are authors of the new book, "Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power" (Routledge Press). They work for the human rights group Global Exchange.