The sequel is to yesterday’s post about Vermont agriculture, and the report suggesting that the farm of the future might be the small vegetable farm or value-added dairy, often selling directly to customers, or letting those customers come pick their own legumes and salad greens.

Not mentioned in yesterday’s post was that many of these farms are organic. They use no chemical fertilizer, no artificial pesticides or herbicides. By no means are all the small, innovative, farms organic. But many are. According to the “Vermont in Transition” report  by the Center for Social Science Research at St. Michael’s College there were 283 organic farms in Vermont in 2007.

Maybe more than that now. The trend has been for more growth in organic vegetable farms, small dairies (often making their own cheeses), and livestock operations. In recent years, more customers have been demanding – or at least preferring – organic foods, finding them both healthier and more flavorful. If organic is not the wave of Vermont’s agricultural future, it is certainly one of them.

And now, a specter is haunting the organic food world, an evil conspiracy conceived in corporate boardrooms and about to be snuck through Congress “in a week and a half…before people realize what is happening” as a bill that would “outlaw organic farming.”

At the behest, it seems, of the Monsanto Company, the large-scale manufacturer of herbicides and animal growth hormone. Proof of the connection? The husband of the chief House sponsor of the bill “works for Monsanto.”

In the words of one commentator, the Bill, H.R. 875 “is called the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, but a more accurate name is THE END OF MOM AND POP FARMING IN AMERICA 2009 aka DEATH TO ORGANIC FARMING.”

The death, even, of small family gardens if their owners sell a few tomatoes or a radish to the neighbors.

Such is the word that has gone forth over thousands if not hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of emails to people all over Vermont, all over the Northeast, and beyond. The word has been received by thousands of Vermonters and others who care about organic food, who want to support their local growers, and who are wary of  ”industrialized agriculture.” It has prompted them to act, to follow the email’s plea to “(g)et on that phone and burn up the wires. Get anyone else you can to do the same thing. The House and Senate WILL pass this if they are not massively threatened with loss of their position…. They only fear your voice and your vote.”

It’s all nonsense.

OK, there’s a germ of accuracy here. There is a bill, H.R.875. It is called the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. Its chief sponsor is Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat. She is married to Stanley Greenberg, the prominent Democratic pollster.

But Greenberg does not “work for” Monsanto, in the common sense of that term, meaning “employed by.” His polling firm,  Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, has done polling for Monsanto as well as scores of other major corporations and organizations including the Chicago Cubs and the National Basketball Association. Adrianna Surfas, DeLauro’s spokesperson, said Greenberg last polled for Monsanto in 1999.

A check of campaign finance records at Open Secrets.org indicates that Monsanto’s political action committee did not contribute to DeLaruo’s re-election campaign last year.

As to the legislation, it is not going to be passed by both houses in a week and a half. It is not likely to pass either house at all, or to emerge in anything like its present form from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

And if it were to pass in a week and a half or tomorrow morning and by the end of the year it would not outlaw organic farming, backyard gardening, or much of anything else, except perhaps unclean and unsafe food.

Which is a real problem, according to many officials and observers, starting with President Barack Obama. Just last month, hundreds of people were sickened by eating contaminated peanuts.

“The organic food program is under the (Agriculture Department),” Surfas said. “The food safety system as a whole comes under the (Food and Drug Administration ). This bill is focused on reforming FDA. This legislation has nothing to do with anything under USDA  jurisdiction.”

Surfas of course works for DeLauro. Steve Etka and Bill Deusing do not. Etka is the legislative director for the National Organic Coalition and Duesing is the Interstate council president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Both of them say DeLauro is a supporter of organic farming and her bill is not a problem.

“It’s a gross exaggeration,” Etka said of the on-line attacks on the bill. “It’s amazing how some of the myths about food safety can be blown out of proportion. It’s easy not to read the whole bill and just see little snippets.”

The furor started, Duesing said, when “apparently one woman down in Atlanta got everyone excited in the wrong way.”

The woman, Linn Cohen-Cole, who describers herself as an independent agriculture consultant, is also a columnist for an on-line outfit called Op-Ed News. It was apparently her column, dated March 9, that sparked the internet campaign against the legislation.

Both Deusing and Etka said some aspects of DeLauro’s legislation worried them.

“Our big concern is always anything that drives toward a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Etka.”I don’t think the DeLauro bill does that, and she certainly does not intend for it to do that.”

So will everybody now calm down?

Probably not. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this kerfuffle is how it illustrates, yet again, how the Internet empowers some (probably) well-meaning but ill-informed zealots to confuse a great many other (definitely) well-meaning citizens to get into a tizzy over nothing.

The anti-establishment tendencies, healthy up to a point, that motivate some in the “alternative” agriculture” community are likely to resist mere factual accuracy. As Steve Etka put it, analyzing his own followers, “folks that go into organic farming often see themselves supporting an alternative approach to agriculture that has not traditionally been supported by the USDA, where the corporate model ahs been dominant. So they see themselves as having to fight against that model.”

Even, sometimes, when it isn’t there.