The Unified Approach: Organic Agriculture and the Creation of a New Ruralism in the Ozarks

As the 1970s ended multiple strategies appeared to reinvest in the nation’s troubled rural landscapes. The Ozarks were not an outlier in this: thanks to the efforts of a combination of hillfolks and hippies, a strategy emerged to protect small farming in a small place. This effort put Ozark voices in the middle of national debates around the USDA policies, bioregionalism, and more. Old populist ideas, knowledge of the agrarian writings of Wendell Berry, and the emerging organic movement all presented the potential for re-energizing the Arkansas and Missouri hills as they came under pressure from industrial agriculture. This effort was led by the Ozark Organic Growers Association (OOGA), which focused on addressing rural poverty, the decline of small-scale farming, and how ecological change brought on by the growing industrial agriculture model had harmed Ozark communities. Instead of advocating for another industrial model, OOGA created the “Unified Approach” (UA).

By relying on oral histories and untapped archival materials, this presentation details how OOGA built the UA to fight poverty, ecological decline, and support rural communities in the region. To do so, OOGA created a marketing cooperative for farmers to sell products into the national organic market, hoping this would increase economic resilience as farmers realized fair prices for crops and provide support for the traditionally decentralized communities of the region. It was also apparent technical support was needed, so an organic training and certification process was developed that predated the USDA system by nearly twenty years. Finally, to finance these efforts they built a microlending institution to readily put capital into the hands of Ozarks farmers. Though OOGA, like the Ozark Institute, ended, it offered a model of support for rural America that Tyson’s corporate extraction model could not manipulate and that still provides lessons today.