Standard Process Farm
Standard Process Farm: Growing Whole Food Nutrients Organically
By: Mark Geistlinger, Client Services Coordinator
Every MOSA organic certificate issued for the Standard Process Farm, since the farm was first certified organic on September 17, 2002, has listed one contact person: Christine Mason. That first organic farm certificate, dated a month before the implementation of the USA's National Organic Standards, fulfilled a major directive Christine received when she was hired the year before: "The owner said 'I will hire you, but we WILL be certified so when it becomes the law...we are able to say we are organic.'"
During Christine's 25-year tenure as Director of Farm Operations, the Standard Process Farm has grown immensely — in acreage, production yields, crop diversity, equipment sophistication, and national exposure. Standard Process Incorporated has also dramatically increased the scope of its MOSA organic certification, adding the post-harvest on-farm handling facility and the supplement production facility in Palmyra, resulting in the organic certification of a number of its finished supplement products. With Christine's planned retirement this summer, the MOSA Client Services Team (Christine Davies and I) asked to visit the Standard Process Farm to interview and appreciate this exceptional organic farmer. We talked with Christine and Vice President of Operations Scott Anderson and then toured areas of the farm with Christine and Steve Mason, Christine's husband and the Farm Operations Supervisor at Standard Process Inc.
The SP Farm, located just west of Palmyra in southeastern Wisconsin, looks different from neighboring farms at any time of the year. While nearby farms rotate between corn and soybeans, the Standard Process Farm grows over 25 production crops — yes, corn and soybeans, but mainly vegetables, buckwheat, alfalfa, and small grains — in succession across its 850+ acres and incorporates cover crops into gaps in the main rotation. When we visited in early April, many SP fields were green islands of alfalfa or winter wheat amidst a sea of brown neighboring fields. Then there are the unusual harvest methods that differentiate the SP Farm from its neighbors, since most crops are chopped into forage and immediately transported to the massive on-farm processing center for juicing and drying.
The processed crops are then trucked just one mile down the road to the MOSA Certified Standard Process production facility in Palmyra for processing into the company's whole food supplements. At least 75% of the raw plant materials used in the Standard Process supplements start at their farm. "If it can be raised here," Christine told us, "it'd better be from here." Scott added that "Our goal is to be as vertically integrated as we can." Growing their own organic, nutrient-dense, plant-based ingredients allows Standard Process to control quality at all phases of production and to grow ingredients that simply are not available commercially.
The founder of Standard Process, Dr. Royal Lee, formulated his first supplement product in 1929 and started Vitamins Products Company to produce and distribute the product. A mechanic, inventor, and entrepreneur, Royal Lee also earned a doctorate in dentistry. His dental school research convinced him of the logic of preventing dental concerns through sound nutrition based on whole foods. The Vitamins Products Company eventually grew many of its ingredients for the expanding product line at its farm in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Vitamins Products merged with one of its later divisions, Standard Process Laboratories, in 1970 as Standard Process, and in 1988, all three SP divisions — the farm, processing facility, and corporate headquarters — moved to Palmyra.
When Scott Anderson was hired at Standard Process in 2000, the 320-acre organically-managed farm was in need of some TLC. "We had a farm growing organically, run by employees, not farmers," Scott remembered. "One of the first things we needed to do was to transition to having this farm run by farmers." Scott started working with knowledgeable local farmers, including nearby grain farmer Steve Mason. Christine continued the story: "My husband was doing all of their combining, and he'd come home and go, 'Honey, I think they could use your help.'" Scott put it more bluntly: "Steve was combining a lot of weeds." So, Christine took the Farm Manager position at SP, leaving her job at Novartis — the latest in a string of agrochemical companies she worked for in a blossoming 12-year career after receiving a college degree in agronomy. Christine and Steve, along with Steve's parents, also ran the family's 1200-acre conventional farm a couple of miles west of the SP farm.
Christine liked the challenge of bringing a professional, production-oriented approach to the organic SP farm. "I wasn't opposed to it [organic farming], but I didn't believe; you don't believe until you live it." She did know that she wanted to part ways with toxic ag chemicals, having participated in several local well water hearings with her previous jobs. Her own family had grown that year with the birth of her and Steve's daughter, so Christine led the transition of the family's farm, Mason Acres, toward organic production, and MOSA issued Mason Acres its first organic certificate in 2005.
Christine and her farm crew embraced the challenges and opportunities of large-scale organic farming with a holistic approach, experimenting with improvements in each farm area to make the entire system work better. "My favorite part was that it was preventative and sustainable from the beginning," she explained. "You have to be more in tune with the health of the soil, the health of the crop. You have to understand disease cycles and insect cycles and life cycles of the crops themselves, and seed vigor, seed selection."
Many of the initial experiments netted promising results, and not only for the target concern. "We dove very, very deep into cover crops before it was popular," Christine remembered. "At first, cover crops were a way to keep the weeds down, and then after a year or two, you're like 'This is working better! These crops are growing better after a cover crop.’ And then we started diving deeper into which covers could produce more nitrogen."
Christine became an eager student of organic farming, attending MOSES (now Marbleseed) courses, peppering her first organic inspector (Harriet Behar) with questions, and contacting local organic farmers and University of Wisconsin professors. Scott credits this inquisitiveness with the rapid success Christine brought to the farm: "For Christine and her team, the best thing about them is their intellectual curiosity. Just asking questions. I'd love to tell you that everything we've tried has worked — it hasn't! Some things were failures, and some things were 'how about if we tweaked it?'"
The team found that not only could they succeed without synthetic chemicals, they could farm better without them. "You would find people who believed you could never farm without coating your seed, that you couldn’t avoid planting purple or blue or red seed. And then you do it, and you're like, 'But this looks better!’” Christine realized firsthand how building better soil improved production and strengthened crops. "Our organic matter is higher than when we got here; that is not how America is trending. Our cation exchange capacities are higher. We are not only pumping out these yields: we are improving the soil."
Scott described how the farm's successes began to attract attention. "One of the most fun things for me over these 25 years was watching how this farm has improved. When I started, people drove by and laughed at us. It wasn't a few years before some of those people were stopping in and asking Christine, 'What are you doing?!' We had corn in this field right out here in a drought; it was green and looked way better than everybody else's."
The health care professionals who recommend Standard Process whole food supplements to their patients also wanted to visit the farm, prompting the company to build an on-farm Welcome Center in 2009 to host tour groups. SP had a unique, inspiring story to tell in the competitive market of nutritional supplements: whole food, organic ingredients, most of which are produced a couple of miles away on the company's own certified organic farm. "Our customers have tremendous faith in us because we're organic," Christine emphasized. The farm and production facility grew tremendously together in the past 25 years. A year after the addition of the farm's Welcome Center, the processing plant expanded with a major addition, and then the farm added 200 acres in 2015 to keep up with the plant's demand for more organic food ingredients. Another 100 acres were purchased in 2019, and 60 acres were growing transitional winter wheat when we visited, bringing the total managed acreage to over 800.
The farm continued to make improvements in each production area. I was struck by how closely Christine's organic production plan reflected the best practices of each of the National Organic Standards. Christine purchased and trialed organic seeds from the beginning, though initially the availability was sparse and the seed quality was low. She expanded their search to international sources, buying organic black radish seed from Germany. Later, they started cleaning and saving their own harvested seeds and recently began developing two proprietary small grain varieties that emphasize particular nutritional qualities.
The farm's fertility program relies on an extensive, diverse crop rotation that integrates soil-building cover crops. The farm now also produces its own compost from the pulp waste leftover from the farm's post-harvest extraction process. Focused soil testing allows the farm to apply the few off-farm inputs used, humates and potash, at location-specific rates.
Weed control has dramatically improved with the crop rotation and the integration of precision planters and in-row weeding implements. Christine explained: "Our philosophy is: as early as possible and as shallow as possible because we're trying to save our soil structure. We are very good at scouting; if you can flip up a white root, that's when we cultivate." Christine found that experimenting with plant varieties and planting dates, along with extending the crop rotation, has nearly eliminated insect pressure, without the use of pesticides or fabric barriers. "We don't put the same family of crops in the same field for five years." She thinks the strong fertility program has helped as well: "Our plants aren't sending out the stress signals."
The farm now has the results to prove that organic farming can produce more and better food than conventional farming. The successes converted its manager and then made her an organic evangelist. Still, not everyone sees it. "The thing that makes me the saddest," Christine articulated, is when people say, 'You are being selfish because organic can't feed the world.' I think it's the only way to feed the world! And it did not happen overnight, but we compete with everything: everything there is an average for, we out-yield every conventional average in the state of Wisconsin. We'll grow you 60-bushel beans every year!"
Listening to Christine and Scott describe the farm's growth during her tenure, it became clear to me that she must have been a top-notch supervisor to attract, retain, and motivate such a skilled, veteran farm crew. When I asked her about this, she immediately complimented her team. "I think that I have a strange obsession with organization that helped. The paperwork didn't bother me, to trace every field activity or to do all the mapping; I enjoyed that part, and these guys are way better on the tractor than I am. This farm wouldn't look like this if I were the one on the tractor."
"The best thing about our product," Scott expanded, "the best thing about this farm — soil is great, plants are great — our people are what make it work...we have people who care, and there's a direct correlation between how they've been treated so we try very hard to treat people well and it sure helps make them care."
We left the SP farm realizing that, while there will be a new contact person listed on the next MOSA organic certificate for Standard Process, the characteristics and beliefs with which Dr. Royal Lee founded the company — innovation, curiosity, a relentless commitment to quality, and a fervent reliance on organically-produced whole food ingredients — will surely carry it forward into its second century of success.
Standard Process has proudly supported health care practitioners for over 95 years. To learn more visit: standardprocess.com