Members of the Organic Trade Association, including farmers, food companies and advocates, descended on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, last week to press legislators for help overcoming challenges that could limit the sector’s growth and undermine consumer confidence in the organic label.
Among their priorities were increasing domestic organic production and processing, strengthening enforcement of the organic label, maintaining federal support for organic research and programs, and providing greater certainty around trade, labor and farm policy.
Their visit comes as the organic industry strives to grow sales from an estimated $76 billion in 2025 to more than $100 billion in the coming years.
But, as stakeholders explain in this episode of FoodNavigator-USA’s Soup-To-Nuts Podcast, reaching that goal will require the industry to overcome significant challenges — including insufficient infrastructure to produce, process and move organic products, as well as growing competition from other sustainability claims, including regenerative agriculture, and questions about the value and integrity of the organic certification.
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Domestic supply limits organic growth
Research by the Organic Trade Association shows base sales or organic products in the US are up year-over-year since 2016, and growing twice as fast as the overall market in 2025 and 2024.
According to Adam Warthesen, vice president of government & industry affairs for Organic Valley and OTA board member, this trajectory suggests that consumers trust the USDA Organic seal and are willing to pay a premium for it even during a challenging economy.
“The survey report showed organics grew at about 6.8% year-over-year and that it is about $76 billion in trade. That is impressive,” he said, noting some categories – like dairy – grew even fast at 10% year-over-year.
He attributed the growth in part to rising awareness of the diet’s role in health health, increased use of GLP-1 medications for weight loss, the Make America Health Again’s support and people who “want to treat themselves with better food.”
But growing consumer demand alone is not enough to help the organic industry close the gap between its current annual sales and its ambitious goal of $100 billion a year in the near future. It also needs sufficient supply, which Warthesen explains is proving difficult to deliver.
“We have our headwinds, too. Everybody is talking about $6 diesel,” and the higher cost of growing food as well as an aging and declining organic farmer community, he said.
According to Warthesen, recruiting new organic farmers – and maintaining the existing ones – requires price stability, technical resources, a network of support and sufficient infrastructure for long term growth. And for that, he said, the industry needs Congress’ help.
Boosting domestic production
One way Congress could help is to pass the Domestic Organic Investment Act, which creates a grant program to support businesses that want to grow organic throughput by enhancing their infrastructure and their processing capacity, Warthesen said.
OTA Co-CEO Matthew Dillon confirmed that garnering support for and passage of the Domestic Organic Investment Act is the trade group’s No. 1 priority, but he also warned it has “stalled out a little bit.”
He told conference attendees that organic farmers are shipping their products long distances for processing, which “eats into their profitability and makes it tough for more farmers domestically to come online.”
Bipartisan support for the DOME Act would help “de-risk production,” he said.
The consequences of the infrastructure gap that the Domestic Organic Investment Act targets go beyond the cost of moving a product from one facility to another.
According to Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, who spoke at the OTA conference, a viable organic market can determine whether farmers have an economically sustainable outlet for what they produce. As a longtime organic farmer and co-chair of the bipartisan Organic Caucus, Pingree pointed to Maine’s dairy industry as an example of how organic markets can support farms and rural communities.
“What we need is agriculture to continue to be strong, and often, organic is the pathway to economic security. We just got make sure that we don’t lose those opportunities,” she said.
For OTA, that’s the broader argument behind its push for the DOME Act: expanding processing and other infrastructure could give farmers more reliable outlets for organic production, while giving businesses the capacity to bring more organic products to market.
Short-term farm relief vs long-term growth
While OTA is pushing for long-term investment in domestic organic infrastructure, farmers are also dealing with more immediate economic pressure, including higher input costs and uncertainty around farm policy.
In response, Dillon explained to conference attendees that OTA is asking Congress to include organic farmers in broader federal farm relief, while setting aside additional support for domestic organic investment.
“We want a chunk of that,” said Dillon. “We want to make sure that our farmers are getting compensated with relief at the right levels because organic production costs are more than conventional. But we’re also making an ask of $100 million for the domestic organic investment in the emergency relief, and we have some strong Republican signals for doing that, but every office we want to be talking about the importance of this.”
Reinforcing trust in organic
Building out and reinforcing infrastructure is one side of the industry’s growth challenge. The other is trust.
USDA Organic Certified is one of the few sustainability claims on food packaging that is backed by a federally regulated certification system. Some stakeholders worry, however, that distinction may be lost on consumers who are inundated with sustainability claims – including increasing regenerative agriculture claims – which some argue could dilute consumer trust in all related claims, including organic.
That is why Warthesen says maintaining organic’s distinction requires continued investment in oversight and enforcement.
“As organic, we are really proud that we have the one that is backed by federal statute and oversight,” he said.
He added that he doesn’t want to “disparage anybody else who is trying to make a sustainability claim, as long as consumers have visibility into claim’s foundation and what it means.”
Bolstering fraud prevention and federal oversight
Another concern raised by OTA, as explained by Warthesen, is whether the system can keep pace with the volume and complexity of organic products entering the US market, and whether imported products carrying the organic label are, in fact, meeting the same standards
“The bigger concern there across the whole trade association is just if we have imported product, are we really confident in it being certified organic? So fraud prevention is right on the mark, and it should be, and we should bolster the things that make sure that that’s legitimate product that comes to our our shores here in the US,” he said.
USDA has already tightened the rules around organic imports. Under its Strengthening Organic Enforcement rule, implemented in 2024, imported organic shipments generally must have an electronic National Organic Program import certificate, creating a traceable record connecting the shipment to certified operations.
The question now is how that enforcement system continues to evolve as the organic supply chain grows.
One response is the Organic Enforcement Modernization Act led by Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman and heavily backed by the OTA. It seeks to close structural gaps in existing legislation and build upon the recently passed landmark Strengthening Organic Enforcement rule.
OTA Co-CEO Tom Chapman said the legislation is “friendly to both sides of the aisle, democrats and republicans” and does not add to stakeholders’ burdens, but rather is about regulatory reform, cutting red tape and bringing government efficiency.
Industry leaders also raised concerns about staffing and resources at the USDA’s National Organic Program, arguing that the government needs sufficient capacity to administer and enforce the standards as the sector grows.
Trade, tariffs and uncertainty
Beyond organic-specific policies, industry stakeholders are trying to navigate a broader agricultural environment marked by higher input costs and uncertainty around tariffs and trade.
Darci Vetter, vice president of public affairs at Driscoll’s, encouraged attendees at the OTA conference to tell legislators about the specific impact tariffs and trade agreements, including how they may have altered investment and innovation decisions.
“It’s very hard for businesses to plan, and what we’re seeing across the economy is just people have stopped investing in something new because they don’t know what the return is going to be,” she said on a a panel.
The long game
While the industry came to Washington with specific legislative requests, OTA’s advisers also stressed that congressional advocacy is rarely about getting everything done in a single visit.
Rather, it is about the long game and planting seeds now for changes tomorrow.
For an industry trying to grow from a roughly $76 billion market to more than $100 billion, the message from Capitol Hill was ultimately about building the conditions to support that growth from farms and processing facilities to the rules and oversight that give consumers confidence in the organic label.
