NOC remembers and honors Joan Dye Gussow, a gardener, tireless advocate, and former member of the National Organic Standards Board.

Longtime NOC advisor Elizabeth Henderson has these words to share about Joan:

Memories of Joan Gussow

By Elizabeth Henderson

Through my work as an organic farmer and one of the first to organize a CSA, I came to know Joan. In 1997-98, when I was between farms, moving from Rose Valley to what became Peacework Organic Farm, I attended as many organic farming conferences around the country as I could to collect information for Sharing the Harvest. At each conference, I gathered CSA farmers to learn as much as possible about what was working or not working, and visited nearby CSA farms connecting with over 300 CSAs. Between conferences, I spent time in my hometown. I grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, NY, and married my high school sweetheart Harry Henderson. After his death in a senseless car crash – on a summer day with no rain, or ice or other possible excuse, a driver slammed into us while we were stopped at a traffic light, killing my husband – I continued to visit regularly with my in-laws who played a central role in raising our son. And Croton is almost directly across the Hudson River from Joan’s house in Piermont. So on those visits to my father-in-law, I often drove over the Tappan Zee Bridge to visit Joan. We had long, wonderful conversations in her kitchen. I toured her garden before and after the floods and admired her persistence in raising the level of the entire garden.

I was thrilled when she agreed to write the forward to Sharing the Harvest. The first edition came out in 1998 when we estimated that there were about 1000 CSAs in the US. By the second edition in 2007, that number had more than doubled and there may be as many as 7,000 today. As a pioneering advocate of buying from local organic farms, Joan instantly grasped the significance of CSAs.

In her foreword, she wrote:

“Across this country, a movement is spreading that acknowledges a long-ignored reality: Most of what we pay for our food goes to companies that transport, process, and market what comes off the farms, not to farmers themselves. The people who actually grow food don’t get paid enough to keep on doing it. …If we hope to keep on eating, however, we need to keep farmers in business; and if we want to keep farmers in business, it’s time for all of us, ordinary citizens and policy makers alike, to begin learning how that might be done. Sharing the Harvest is a great place to start.”

Joan’s words are as urgent today as when she wrote them 28 years ago. Family-scale farms continue to go out of business and USDA just cancelled the grant that would have enabled the CSA Innovation Network (https://www.csainnovationnetwork.org/), a network of CSA networks all over the country, to support more diverse farms in creating CSAs, and where you can download a free pdf of the book.

I will be eternally grateful to Joan for her encouragement to me as a farmer and as a writer, and for transforming the discipline of nutrition from the reductionist academic analysis of the food on our plates into a training program for active participants in the international movement to wrest power over food from corporate industrial domination and return it to the people who eat and do the hard and joyous work of growing healthy nutritious food.

The New York Times has published this tribute to Joan.

NOC Honors Joan Dye Gussow