As with any blanket labels or buzzwords, nothing ever really tells the story of the food you eat succinctly. When we have to make a sale, we explain things to the best of our abilities because we need a quick way to explain what we do on our customer’s terms. To the credit of most customers, folks are asking more and more about where their product comes from and how it came to be.

People are looking for certainty, and believe they find this in a label, in a catchphrase. What feels like knowledge of a product is actually trust in an institution, and the better we are at recognizing how much trust we place in society, the more we realize the discrepancies between who we place our trust in. If you don’t work to learn about your food, you are not in the wrong, you are just electing to place more trust in society. It’s up to you whether that trade-off is fair.

No one can really say that one method of farming is inherently better than another, each farm in each region, serving its own purpose, must do what it takes to operate sustainably and in line with the values of the owners and customers. Consider Bardwell only has 142 goats milking right now. They’re all on one farm, rotating on open pasture, being treated with the utmost care, because none of us would be doing something this difficult and expensive if it weren’t following a sound ethos. For our purposes, that’s how we want to do it to make the kind of product we make. There’s little room for saying one method of farming is better than the other, because there are logistical restrictions inherent in any different products from different regions.

As logic goes, this isn’t just a slippery slope of rationalization foregoing hard-line standards. Standards and labels are useful for the casual customer, for the store shelf, when a message must be compressed, when, as is totally understandable, we can’t research every product we eat.

Because I get to talk to our customers every day, I try to find the best way to communicate this succinctly, and generally tell people that there isn’t a label or certification for how we farm because something like 2% of the country farms like we do.

In actuality, nobody farms like we do, only we could, because we are the only farm on our property, with our land, our climate, our demands and our employees. Our certification is our brand, our product is our proof. Unless you’re pulling it out of the ground, you don’t know everything there is to know about your food. You just have to trust.

We place trust in others every day constantly. If you’re buying organic, you’re putting trust in the store, the USDA, the refrigeration case, the farm, the shipping, the packaging, the stocking, the advertising, the business. There is no such thing as certainty in mass society, there is only trust, where knowledge and expectation meet.