Real Organic: An Interview with Linley Dixon, Co-Director, Real Organic Project

Bioneers recently sat down with Linley Dixon, co-director of the Real Organic Project, for a conversation about the fight to keep organic farming honest.

Editor’s notes: The word “organic” on a food label used to mean something specific: grown in living soil, without synthetic pesticides, by farmers who understood that healthy land produces healthy food. It still means that to a lot of farmers. But since 2017, it has also been applied to tomatoes grown in water, chickens that never see a pasture, and operations that have more in common with a factory than a farm.

Linley Dixon has spent years inside that fight. She’s a soil scientist, a first-generation organic farmer in Colorado, and co-director of the Real Organic Project, a farmer-led organization that created an add-on certification to fill the gap left when the USDA declined to prohibit hydroponics from carrying the organic label. In this interview, she traces how that decision happened, why it matters, and what farmers and consumers can do about it.

The conversation covers the basics for anyone new to the issue, and the deeper structural problems for those who already know the landscape: how industry pressure shapes the National Organic Standards Board, why transparency and enforcement have eroded, and what it looks like when farmers decide to hold the line themselves. If you’ve ever wondered whether the organic label on your food is telling the truth, this is a good place to start.