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Organization

Certified Naturally Grown

Also known as: Certified Naturally Grown, CNG

A 501(c)(3) grassroots certification for ecological farms and apiaries, founded 2002 as a peer-review alternative to USDA Organic for operations too small to absorb federal certification cost. Certification is by transparent peer inspection (often a neighboring farmer), the standard meets or exceeds USDA Organic on prohibited inputs, and every certified producer is public. The directory's substrate-builder tier draws on it as a high-trust signal of small-scale ecological growing.

Certified Naturally Grown (CNG) is a 501(c)(3) grassroots certification founded in 2002 for ecological farms, apiaries, and growers. It is the values-aligned alternative to [[usda-organic|USDA Organic]]: the standard meets or exceeds federal organic rules on prohibited inputs, but certification is by transparent peer review — typically an inspection by another farmer — rather than paid third-party audit, so it stays affordable for the smallest operations.

This page is regenerated by _private/scripts/ingest-cng.py every run; it is the source hub every certified-as: certified-naturally-grown edge points to.

How the platform uses it

CNG’s producer directory is consumed respectfully and at very low volume via its public WordPress REST API (wp-json/wp/v2/cng_farm) — five cached calls for the entire ~498-producer set, far gentler than its 600-second-crawl-delay HTML directory. Listings enter the directory at verification: corroborated (a real third-party signal) and link back to CNG and to the farm. The intent is to drive discovery toward CNG farms, not to substitute for CNG. Operator personal names and emails exposed by the API are never ingested — only the farm name, per the directory’s no-solo-operator-names rule.

This snapshot (2026-05-16)

Producers in source: 498 · enriched onto existing entries: 6 · new entries created: 492

CategoryProducers
produce and flowers439
apiary27
livestock15
mushrooms15
aquaponics2

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Enables: [[0mn1one]]
  • Counterpart to: [[usda-organic]]
  • Member of: [[organization]]

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

certified as

492 inbound links · 3 outbound