Decades of Change: The History of Organic and natural FarmingFifteen years back, you may have had difficulty finding an organic and natural tomato in your neighborhood supermarket. Because of current farmingimprovements and public awareness, on the other hand, consumers can find a host of organic products in grocery store cabinets and in theproduce section of supermarkets across America. How did we come to the point we’re at today and when did purchasing producebecome so difficult.In fact, it’s the type of farming in which farmers use artificial pesticides, herbicides and other standard farmingstrategies that is really historically new to us. Before 1940, much of the produce grown and eaten in American homes wastotally organic and was often picked no further than one’s own backyard.The use of chemical additives and even farm implements we see today gradually found its way into farming in the first halfof the Twentieth Century. In 1950, there were three million tractors in the US, up from 600 tractors in 1910. At aboutthe same time, proponents of natural harvesting methods began to practice their trade, from Central Europe and Indiaaround 1920.Organic harvesting methods began to reach buyer awareness, from the 1950s and, in the following two decades, therewas an increasing concern about the environmental effects of farming techniques using chemical pesticides and herbicides.This was when food-purchasing cooperatives and specialized natural food producers came to the forefront among some buyers.In the 1970s and 1980s, regulators recognized a growing requirement for some way to provide organic and natural certification to those farmerswho followed specific growing rules and who used approved growing methods. It wasn’t, nevertheless, until the 1990s that theformal or governmental certification of natural foods became available in the US and in numerous countries throughout theworld.In the last two decades, the supply of natural foods on the market grew significantly and, at one point, the surge ofgrowth of the organic and natural food market exceeded twenty percent per year. Actually, the sales of organic and natural baby food increased byalmost twenty-two percent in 2006 alone.In the last five to seven years, multinational food companies have jumped on the natural food bandwagon and have increasedtheir research and development of foods that could be certified organic. This has led to a growth in the availabilityof processed organic and natural foods and in the lowering of the cost of these types of products.In today’s time, organic and natural foods continue to be more expensive than their traditional counterparts, in part mainly becausethat organic farmers must meet stricter quality guidelines. This is a labor intensive process that drives up the costs ofthe product.To meet customer demand, supermarkets strictly devoted to providing organic and natural foods, such as the Whole Foods Market andWaitrose (in the UK), have gone into business and are providing quality organic and natural foods to buyers. In order to provideorganic foods to a larger population, Wal-Mart announced its plans to increase the availability of organic foods to itsbuyers and at a lower cost than the supermarkets.It would appear that, almost as soon as the big farmers began putting synthetic pesticides and herbicides on their crops, abacklash developed and a group of devoted farmers and consumers worked—and continue to work—toward improving thesupply and quality of natural foods for those food consumers who can’t grow an organic produce garden in theirown backyard.