To the Editor,

I enjoyed the article “The Challenges, and Joys, of Owning and Operating a Small Farm” in the June issue.

There is some erroneous information therein that I would like to correct. The article states, “Husky Meadows made the decision to become a state-certified farm.”

The State of CT has never been in the business of organic certification. The State of CT does hand out the reimbursements to organic certified operators from a federal program that gives the operator back 75 percent up to $750 of their costs of organic certification.

Organic certification is a federal program that came about as the result of the Organic Foods Act of 1990. Implementation of the National Organic Program (NOP) and law was achieved in 2002. This ended what I like to call the “my organic is better then your organic days” for the most part. The NOP accredits certifying agents, of which as of 2015 there were 80 with 48 based in the United States and 32 based in foreign countries.

When I started to work in the organic certification world in 1993 we measured organic sales in the hundreds of millions. In 2015, organic sales in the United States were 35.95 billion and somewhere around 5 percent of the food purchased.

To better understand organic certification readers can go to AMS.USDA.gov/about-AMS/programs-offices/national-organic-program.

Wishing the best to all our local farmers,

Carlton Holcomb