A Special Earth Day Message
For our company, Earth Day is a very special day. Not only is it the official holiday to recognize this most privileged planet on which we all live, it is also the birthday of New Country Organics. On Earth day in 2015 our company changed its name to New Country Organics to fully and publicly acknowledge our defining stand and close embrace of the organic standard as we offered our feeds and minerals to the world.
We believe the organic certification is an essential standard in today's world of conventional, chemical agriculture with all its focus on short term yields and profit at the expense of the environment and human, animal, insect, plant and soil health. For us, certified organic is an essential "weight and measure" in our very complex modern world. Our company only makes certified organic animal feeds and minerals - no others - and we wanted that to be very clear to people.
For example, we continue to be astounded by how many people don't know that NON-GMO is a seed standard and does not mean organic. It can be a very lucrative game for some producers to charge nearly organic prices by marketing a "natural" product, while the ingredients are essentially conventional. In fact, we'd like to see more NON-GMO producers challenged on why they don't certify their products as organic if their products are truly "natural".
For us though, organic is in our DNA. It is in our name. But what about the rest of the name? Why did we choose "New Country"? Those words have meaning on several levels. We see ourselves as pioneers heading into new territory. We see ourselves opening up new possibilities for our community. We see ourselves as people on a mission to create something beautiful, healthy and new.
The company itself was not new though. Our company originally goes back to 1998 in Fishersville, VA when it was founded as a seller of organic growing supplies, and then just over a year later as a certified organic feed producer. In fact, our first feed, poultry layer, pre-dated the USDA's National Organic Program and was recognized as organic by special license from Virginia’s Secretary of Agriculture.
With the name change in 2015, came our very distinctive spiral logo and a crystal-clear articulation of our mission. The spiral is a visual depiction of the famous Fibonacci mathematical sequence and the golden ratio, reflected everywhere in the natural world from space to sunflowers. The first component of our mission is to create evermore organic acreage in the USA and Canada. That's why we only buy North American certified organic grains. In 2021 our customers supported about 4,000 acres of organic production in the US and Canada with their purchases. The other statements of our mission reflect helping people take back the food chain, one egg at a time, and helping producers put more into the soil than they take out.
Happy Earth Day!