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Organization

Real Organic Project

A farmer-led add-on certification (founded 2018) for soil-grown, pasture-raised farms — created in response to USDA Organic's drift toward hydroponic and confinement operations. Roughly 1,100 farms now carry the Real Organic seal alongside their USDA Organic; the project anchors the dissenting wing of the US organic movement.

What they do

The Real Organic Project is a farmer-built add-on certification. To carry the Real Organic seal a farm must already be USDA Certified Organic, AND must be soil-grown (not hydroponic) and pasture-raised (not confinement). The cert exists because the USDA National Organic Program now allows both hydroponic operations and de-facto confinement to wear the USDA Organic label — outcomes the original 1990 Organic Foods Production Act was widely understood not to authorize.

Why it’s listed

The directory cares about substrate. A cert that says “the food in this package came out of actual living soil, and the animal that produced it spent its life on actual pasture” is a substrate cert. Real Organic is the operational form of the farmer-side dissent inside the US organic movement, and the directory should surface it so eaters can find the farms that hold the line. ~1,100 certified farms is small but real, and growing.

See also

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

Sources

A listing in the 0mn1.one directory.

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

shares approach with

  • Regenerative Organic Alliance complementary post-USDA-Organic certs — ROC adds the regenerative pillars; Real Organic defends the soil-grown/pasture-raised baseline

1 inbound link · 4 outbound