News & Events

The Organic Trade Association held its annual Award Reception during Organic Week in Washington, DC, honoring leaders including Wolf & Associates’ own Katherine DiMatteo and Bill Wolf, alongside other honorees like Andy and Rachel Berliner of Amy’s Kitchen and Maria Rodale of Rodale Institute. In his acceptance speech, Bill Wolf called on the organic community to push for bigger goals, particularly closing the gap between U.S. organic demand and organic farm acreage by making farming and certification more accessible to small farmers.

This Wolf & Associates newsletter reflects on staying motivated to grow organic agriculture despite economic and political uncertainty, then covers industry news like rising EU organic imports, new USDA organic standards board members, and a court ruling requiring USDA to fix GMO labeling loopholes. It also notes research on organic farmers’ lower pesticide exposure, a tribute to the late author Wendell Berry, and a list of upcoming conferences the firm will attend.

This newsletter covers a new UK-EU sanitary and phytosanitary agreement affecting organic exports, plus China’s fast-growing organic farmland and sales. It rounds up US regulatory updates, including USDA’s rulemaking priorities, new HTS filing requirements, the newly available Common OSP templates, and open funding through the Organic Certification Cost Share Program and Specialty Crop Multi-State Program. Also featured are a Deloitte true-cost analysis favoring organic agriculture and growing consumer awareness of regenerative practices. It closes with industry news, including Rodale Institute’s 10 Million Acre Solution campaign and a tribute to researcher Dr. Kathleen Delate.

This newsletter covers the gap between organic recordkeeping and true organic integrity, tying it to NOSB discussions on the Organic System Plan (OSP) and the new Common OSP initiative. It also rounds up global organic market trends, Farm Bill provisions on organic inspections, Strengthening Organic Enforcement (SOE) data, EU gene-edited plant rules, and a Purdue study comparing organic versus conventional profitability, plus research on organic food and cancer risk.

This newsletter details Wolf & Associates’ collaboration with Quick Organics on the Common OSP, an unfunded initiative aimed at bringing more consistency to organic certification and the Organic System Plan process. It also covers global and domestic organic industry news, including a new UK-Japan organic livestock equivalency agreement, an organic dairy farmers’ lawsuit over USDA milk marketing orders, and USDA specialty crop grant funding. Rounding out the issue are updates on OMRI’s standards revisions, research on small family farms’ role in organic acreage, food co-op organic sales data, and consumer survey findings on organic purchasing across generations.

From the Farm Bill to Global Trade Changes: Here’s what’s shaping the Organic landscape.

Biofach is often called the world’s largest organic trade fair, but its real value lies beyond scale. It is one of the few places where all features of the global organic system are fully visible at once: retail goods, ingredients, services, multilingualism, regulation, deeply interconnected participants.

One thing that became clear immediately is how the U.S. market looks from the outside. The United States represents more than 40 percent of global organic demand, yet it is easy to lose sight of how dependent that demand is on imports…