If you saw a sign for apples “grown without antibiotics” at your grocery store, you’d probably do a double take, right? The fact is, though, that the antibiotics tetracycline and streptomycin are used in both conventional and organic apple and pear orchards to control a devastating infection called fire blight.

Our orchardist hasn’t had to use antibiotics on our apple trees here at Rodale Institute, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t consider it. Shocked? Here’s why: Fire blight is extremely destructive, often requiring the removal of entire trees to prevent spreading the disease through an orchard, which can prove economically disastrous for farmers. A newly planted fruit tree takes years to begin to produce a harvest.

Not surprisingly, organic consumers are upset to hear that organic fruit harbors the very antibiotic residues they want to avoid by buying organic, and the issue has been getting a lot of media attention lately, as the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board is debating a timeline for phasing out its allowance of antibiotics in organic orchards.

The Truth about Organic

Here’s what those stories aren’t telling you…

1. The antibiotic treatments are considered a last line of defense in organic orchards, only following a cadre of prevention methods. There is a strict permitting process to use the antibiotics that includes proving your trees do indeed have fire blight.

2. The disease spreads at bloom time, which is also when treatments would be applied to affected trees, not during fruiting.

3. Growers and researchers working in the organic community have been working furiously to find, test and make available alternative solutions. Work has focused on developing fire-blight-resistant varieties of trees, testing preventative biocontrols and dormant oils, establishing bloom-thinning techniques, and various combinations of all these non-antibiotic approaches. None of the individual non-antibiotic options or combinations of options has resulted in a solution that comes close to answering the issue.

4. Organic farms in Europe have relied on heavy use of copper for disease control as an alternative, resulting in toxic soils. Copper is just as highly restricted in organic production as antibiotics because it is also detrimental to the environment and human health in large quantities.

What Too Much Copper Does to Your Body

5. It is extremely rare that antibiotics are used in plant production to begin with, and organic orchardists use them minimally and only as a last resort. Organic and conventional tree fruit production combined makes up less than 0.5 percent of total antibiotic sales in the U.S. Industrial livestock production makes up 73 percent of total antibiotic sales in the U.S. If we’re truly concerned about protecting the efficacy of our antibiotics, we should immediately prohibit the “preventative” use of antibiotics in all livestock production.

This is one of those extremely difficult issues the organic community has had to and continues to wrestle with. No one in the organic community is happy with the current antibiotic or copper stop-gap measures. But, when organic orchardists were surveyed in Washington State, nearly 50 percent said they would be forced to exit organic production if this already severely restricted last line of defense were completely eliminated.

For us, this highlights the incredible importance of organic research. Providing certified-organic farmers with alternative solutions that WORK is key to the continued success and availability of organic products. Organic farmers don’t expect solutions that will match what conventional growers might get with highly toxic chemicals, but the ability to continue to produce and stay in business is essential. And organic agricultural research is extremely underfunded.

Because this issue has such dramatic impacts for both growers and American families, the National Organic Program established a task force to focus on evaluating the progress being made to get antibiotics out of organic fruit tree production. For more information on the fire blight/antibiotic/organic issue, refer to Washington State University’s overview of the discussions and work being done to figure it all out.

As the organic community strives to make organic fruit tree production completely antibiotic free, we’d still rather eat a certified organic apple than a conventional one that’s been doused in toxins from bloom through fruiting and even during transport