Mark Lipson, policy analyst for the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) has been awarded Nutrition Business Journal’s Organic Excellence award for his work on behalf of organic and the Farm Bill.

Mark has spent more than two years fighting on behalf of organic research in the 2008 Farm Bill. And thank goodness for that. The 2008 Farm Bill represented the largest gains for organic research and education ever.

It’s a catch-22. We need the funding from the Farm Bill to advance organic agriculture and industry and we need organic agriculture and industry to justify the allotments in the farm bill. Organic research and education impacts everything from pricing and premiums to peer-reviewed science on organic crops.

Mark helped launch OFRF in 1990 and has been toiling in the fields both as a tomato farmer and a senior policy analyst. But there is no rest for the weary, even thought the 2008 Farm Bill resulted in a revised Farm Bill that provides a five-fold increase from the 2002 Farm Bill it still represents only 1% of the USDA’s research budget. And then there’s all the work that needs to be done to “translate” and implement the provisions…