Has organic agriculture really become just another big, soulless business? That's what we've read nonstop the last eight months, most recently in lengthy take-outs in The Economist, Business Week, and of course in Michael Pollan's writings, notably his last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

A different perspective jumps out of a little noticed USDA update on organic agriculture trends released in early December (by ERS economist Catherine Greene).

It turns out the area of U.S. farmland in certified organic production expanded nearly 1 million acres for the second year in a row in 2005.

With that leap, organic agriculture now comprises 0.50 percent—one-half of one percent—of the more than 796 million acres of U.S. farmland devoted to crops and livestock.

That's right, out of nearly 800 million acres, a titanically trivial four million are certified organic.

How can this be? Hasn't organic agriculture grown explosively in recent years?

Virtually all of the bedazzled accounts of the organic agriculture sector’s growth have focused on retail organic food sales, not physical measures of food production like acres or pounds of food. Sales have grown dramatically because of the increase in higher-value foods, including processed foods like dairy products and cereals, and also eggs, some meats (notably poultry) and fresh-market vegetables.

But in acreage terms, organic agriculture's laudable growth from its miniscule base has brought it to a...somewhat less miniscule fraction of U.S. farm production. Fruit production, for instance, takes up a very small slice of the U.S. agricultural landscape, under 4 million acres in 2005. Organic fruit occupied only 2.5 percent of it. Vegetable production in the United States is confined to about 2.1 million acres, and organic’s share is 4.6 percent.

And those are the crops where organic has the biggest presence. Corn is an entirely different story. The area devoted certified organic corn increased by a third between 2004 and 2005. But that brought the grand total to 130,672 acres nationwide, out of almost 82 million acres of corn grown that year, or 0.16 percent. And of course, most of that is GMO corn, and a rapidly growing share of it is going into ethanol production. So in the heartland, the problem isn't "big organic". It's "almost no organic".

Of course, organic dairy has been the subject of most of the controversy, because of the flawed USDA organic rules for pasturage that have allowed some very large operations to be certified organic. It's an important issue, no doubt, both for consumers and perhaps for small to mid-size dairy operators. But meanwhile, the nation's entire organic dairy herd stands (and moos) at just over 86,000 animals in a national herd of more than 9 million dairy cows, making organic's share just under 1 percent.

I'll be writing a lot more about this in the days ahead, as EWG reframes the debate to where it should be on this issue for the 2007 Farm Bill: how can we expand domestic organic production?

Is our main concern about organic really that it has become a corporatized behemoth that has 'lost its soul' when, after all its much discussed "growth", we find ourselves in this latest count with fewer than 8,500 certified organic producers nationwide?

This is 'big organic'? There are more farmers in New Jersey