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Organic StandardsCertified Organic Lawn and Landscaping Service Providers - COLLSP By Patricia File, OLA Strategic Issues Coordinator There’s a new acronym you will start to see in OLA materials – “COLLSP”. Several OLA Board and former Board members and staff met with Larry Lendhardt and Sherry Nielsen at the OCPP/Pro-Cert Canada, Inc. offices in Lindsay to begin the work of developing organic standards for lawncare and landscaping. But as you will see – we are not developing new organic standards – we are going to use the new organic standards for food to be the standard for lawncare and landscaping. In effect, we are saying that our lawns and gardens should be as safe for children and pets as the food they eat. This work follows on a successful consultation with members and others at the OLA conference in January, 2006 at a workshop on organic standards. Participants were asked to consider the options available to OLA members at this time: 1) Certify landscapes as organic - but not the service providers. This is the usual approach to organic food, ie. it is the farm or the land that is certified organic. This might be of interest to certain golf courses or parks, but would the average homeowner want to get their garden certified organic? 2) Certify lawncare and landscaping service providers under the Horti-Eco label developed by CAP Quebec. They have developed a third-party certified private standard, but they have been told by their provincial appellation body that they cannot use the term “organic”. They have developed another term/phrase that means good practices for the environment. 3) OLA develops its own private certification standard and label using the term “organic” or another word or phrase. 4) OLA continues with its current practice with no change. i.e. membership form which asks service providers to sign that they do or do not do certain practices that we feel are important to an organic service. 5) Certify lawncare and landscaping service providers under the new federal organic food standard. This standard has been developed over a 20 year period and the use of the term “organic” will be enforced by the CFIA. There will be issues that have to be overcome – but if we use this standard as our base, we will have the support of the organic sector and infrastructure. The consensus of the workshop participants and Board meeting prior to the workshop was to go with option #5. This will allow us to continue using the word “organic” and to be part of the growing organic industry which is promoting and will be enforcing this terminology as well. How will the new standard work? The new organic food standard is still being finalized and is expected to be published in the Canada Gazette on April 1, 2006. It will be a comprehensive list of permitted, restricted and prohibited practices and inputs that apply to organic food production in Canada. Turf and plants are agricultural products – so the standards will apply directly to these. As to the application to service providers – this is a new arena. But OCPP/Pro-Cert has obtained permission from their accreditor, the Standards Council of Canada, to develop these to help ensure there will not be confusion in the marketplace as to who is or is not an organic lawncare and landscaping service provider. The next steps for OLA and OCPP/Pro-Cert are:
Some issues identified so far:
We are not sure how to approach this, but one suggestion that we are considering is the development of a separate list of low-impact, low-toxic products that our industry has considered to be organic and allow a separate non-organic service that can supplement an organic service. This would allow the products on this list and only these products as part of a non-organic, but environmentally sound alternative to supplement a certified organic service. As certified organic supplies of these products become available, these products would come off of the list. We are interested in your thoughts on these issues. Timeline: We hope to have draft documents to review at an Organic Standards Subcommittee meeting sometime in late May, with a trial group of service-providers going through the course and exam sometime in August, 2006. We hope to refine the process and launch COLLSPs in January 2007. If you are interested in being on the subcommittee or passing on your comments, please contact Patricia File at bgillies@bconnex.net or send your name to the OLA office or email. To follow the developments of the organic food standard you can visit the website of the Organic Agricultural Centre of Canada. They have the latest drafts, including the permitted substance list, and updates from the group that has been working these many years to develop the standard. www.organiccentre.ca/std_canadian.html www.organicagcentre.ca/Docs/orgstds_Oct05_PermittedSubstancesList.pdf OMAFRA adds organic lawncare and landscaping information to their website Mark Mackenzie and Pat File met with Hugh Martin, Organic Crops specialist and Pam Charboneau, Turf Specialist and Annette Anderson, OMAFRA Manager to discuss a number of provincial issues. We encouraged the development of more resource information on their websites on organic lawncare and landscaping and voila – Hugh Martin has added several new sections to the Organic Crops page, including a link to OLA, more info on weed control for Horticultural crops, organic fruit tree and berry bush production, etc. Check out: www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/organic/organic.html for all sorts of organic resource info for crops production. |
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