Congressman Sam Farr represents California's 17th District - which includes the Salinas Valley, hometown of the author John Steinbeck and one of America's most productive agricultural regions.

Representative Farr, a Democrat, authored the nation's first organic standards law in 1990 as a California assemblyman. He now serves on the House Appropriations Agriculture Subcommittee and co-chairs the Congressional Organic Caucus, a bipartisan group formed in 2003 to promote organic agriculture.

He recently answered questions for Green Inc. about farming, food safety and a famous new vegetable garden.

Question: How did you first get interested in organic agriculture?

Answer: When I was in the California legislature in the '80s, the organic growers, who were sort of the small hippie farmers in those days, brought it to my attention that there were no regulations on organic labeling. In essence, anybody could just grow a thing any way they wanted and put "organic" on it. So I carried the legislation creating the California organic act.

Question: Some environmentalists and others have called for the creation of a national Sustainable Agriculture Practice Standard that would go beyond organic certification. Do we need a better standard to measure how sustainable our food is?

Answer: It's a lofty goal, but it seems on the academic side of any issue you need to have those lofty goals and you need some advocacy for it. Our area is, frankly, one that would be very interested. To make agriculture sustainable, the grower has got to be able to make a profit. There are a lot of market functions that I think prevent us from really becoming sustainable until we become, as a consuming society, more demanding that our food be fresh and nutritious and grown using practices that are not injurious to the environment.

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