Organics in Georgia is a gorging organism
Hey, this here’s a great story from Atlanta Magazine. So well written. So well researched. So insightful. Who wrote it? Oh, yeah: Me!
Dee Dee Digby worked more than a decade for produce suppliers at the State Farmers Market. Then she stumbled upon a way to upset the applecart.
The facility in Forest Park bills itself as one of the “world’s largest” farmers markets, but it doesn’t quite bring to mind fresh harvests and folksy growers. Instead, rows of jumbo stalls occupied by wholesale distributors line asphalt swaths wide enough to handle the loading and unloading of tractor-trailers. The place looks more industrial than pastoral, which is appropriate when you think about Georgia’s deeply entrenched agriculture-industrial complex.
Early this decade, Digby became manager of a new distributor at the market, Destiny Produce. Soon afterward, an idea ripened into an opportunity. “All we were doing was conventional produce,” says Digby, who became president of the company early this year. “But the need for organic became apparent.” Consumers had begun to clamor for more produce grown without the help of pesticides and other chemicals. Big supermarkets that were her customers began asking if she could help them fill the growing demand.
That was the beginning of a radical transformation. Digby and her employees had to retrain themselves for a very different supply chain, one that started with an understanding of the variety of foods demanded by a more sophisticated market and that hinged upon dozens of new relationships with small growers and boutique food processors. “It’s a lot more difficult, but it is profitable and it has set us apart,” Digby says. “We love where we are right now.” Earlier this year, Destiny Produce changed its name to Destiny Organics. It is currently Georgia’s only certified organic produce distributor.
But if Digby and her team jumped at the chance to learn about the emerging organic market, the state’s mainstream agriculture industry has proven a recalcitrant student. Despite its vast farm sector, the Peach State/Peanut State/Poultry State has lagged well behind the nation (and much of the South) when it’s come to producing food the old-fashioned, natural way. A U.S. Department of Agriculture 2007 inventory found that only 2,015 of Georgia’s 10.1 million farm acres were dedicated to certified organic farms. That’s barely one-fourth the organic acreage reported the same year in North Carolina, which has 16.5 percent less farmland overall.
What happens next in this scintillating story? Continue to read at Atlanta Magazine.
Our new website!
