Solving agriculture’s plastic problem isn’t easy — particularly for organic farmers — but some growers are finding ways to be less wasteful.
It was around 2018 and David McDaniel was disgusted. He was starting to reckon with the sheer tonnage of plastic used on his and his wife’s 181-acre Earth Dharma Farm in northern Maine. Sheets of black plastic mulch covered his soils to suppress weeds while floating row cover, a woven plastic, protected his vegetables from frost.
One spring, he walked under one of his plastic greenhouses to pick up a roll of old floating row cover. Upon touching it, a cloud of particles erupted into the air. What McDaniel had just inhaled — and was probably all over his fields — was microplastic dust. “If you actually see this stuff turn to dust in front of you, if you know about the dangers of plastic and all the chemicals in them, it will revolt you.”
Reliance on plastic is an unfortunate reality of modern farming. One September 2025 study estimated that U.S. farmers account for 2.7% of the country’s plastic use, going through nearly 1.6 million tons every year. And ironically, organic farmers in northern latitudes like McDaniel are especially reliant on products like mulch so they can extend the growing season as well as avoid using herbicides.
Much agricultural plastic is used only once and ends up in landfills — but it could also cause harm long before then; scientists are learning that, when it breaks down into tiny microplastics in the field, these can harm the health of earthworms, breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and perhaps even contaminate crops themselves.
Yet breaking farming’s plastic addiction is easier said than done. Agricultural plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle because they’re so dirty, though recycling options are growing. Scientists are developing biodegradable versions of products like mulch, but so far, few viable alternatives exist. Until broader systemic solutions are put into place, some organic farmers are taking matters into their own hands. By finding more sustainable alternatives and changing their practices, they’re decreasing their reliance on plastic little by little.
“We do still use plastic, but we don’t use anything that’s single-use anymore,” said Chad Gard, co-founder of the 35-acre Hole in the Woods Farm in Culver, Indiana. That said, “it’s a genuine problem that doesn’t have simple answers.”
“If you actually see this stuff turn to dust in front of you, if you know about the dangers of plastic and all the chemicals in them, it will revolt you.”
McDaniel, the farmer in Maine, has first-hand experience with the challenges of recycling agricultural plastics. Around 2018, he joined the board of a regional recycling center and became the chair of an agricultural plastics recycling committee as part of the University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension, in an effort to develop recycling programs. But, except for one company willing to buy used greenhouse plastic — one of the cleaner agricultural plastics as it never touches the soil — he struggled to find practical solutions. And many kinds of ag plastics were simply too dirty.
“Any ag plastic is going to have some dirt, rocks, gravel … and some silage and haylage and that kind of stuff,” which typically amounts to much more than the 5% maximum contamination rate that most recyclers can handle, said Jean Bonhotal, a waste management specialist at Cornell.
Bonhotal was part of a landmark recycling effort led by Cornell University that, between 2013 and 2016, collected 2 million tons of plastic from farms across New York state. Some of it was melted down into plastic lumber or pellets to make products like parking lot stoppers, while nearly 816,000 pounds was sent to a company in New York City that processed it into trash bags. But for the most part, “things just didn’t last more than, like, six months,” Bonhotal said. Much of the collected plastic had nowhere to go and is probably still in fields or ended up in landfills, she added.
On top of contamination, which harmed the integrity of the final products, fluctuations in oil prices often made it cheaper for manufacturers to use fresh virgin plastic instead of recycled plastic, making recycling economically unviable. Two chemical plants tasked with converting agricultural plastics back into oil — for energy or to make new plastics — also floundered when dips in oil prices made it cheaper to buy new crude oil instead, Bonhotal said.
However, some recycling programs for the least-contaminated plastics are managing to persevere in spite of such challenges, including the low cost of virgin plastic resin. The Ag Container Recycling Council (ACRC), which has been running since 1992, collects used containers for pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. The council’s members — largely agricultural chemical companies — fund the collection of the plastics, and collectors make additional cash by selling the material to recycling companies. The resin then gets turned into products like drain pipes, plant pots, and underground electrical conduit.
Much of the collected plastic had nowhere to go and is probably still in fields or ended up in landfills.
Since its inception, the program has recycled roughly 260 million pounds of plastic from thousands of farms and other chemical users across 47 states, said Mark Hudson, ACRC’s executive director. In some states there are also recycling programs for used drip irrigation tubing, plant nursery pots and trays, and twine and hay wrap, Hudson said. “There definitely is a growing network of both companies and associations like ours who are trying to help solve this problem.”
But the drawback of such recycling programs is that they usually convert ag plastics into other, single-use products that eventually get thrown away anyway. Another challenge is that many farms aren’t anywhere near recycling centers or collection points. And importantly, there are few outlets for the dirtiest agricultural plastic of all: mulch. Some biodegradable mulches exist, but they’re not approved for use in organic farming because they contain materials like fossil fuel-derived substances alongside materials derived from biological sources like plants or fungi; the National Organic Program requires them to be 100% bio-based.
Studies are lacking on whether and how plastic mulches influence long-term soil health, said Lisa DeVetter, a fruit horticulture expert at Washington State University. In an effort to give farmers more options, she and her colleagues are developing a new biodegradable, sprayable mulch that consists only of plant-based materials: shredded paper and sugar gum. Though this meets the certification criteria for organic farming — and research suggests it has some benefits for crop growth — it’s expensive, and not yet effective in suppressing weeds, DeVetter said. “We’re just not at the level where we feel confident that it’s going to work on grower farms.”
In the absence of good solutions, McDaniel became quite jaded about solving the plastics problem — and was glad when he and his wife got the chance to shift away from producing vegetables that require mulch and floating row cover and to growing garlic and winemaking instead. “I no longer have to deal with plastic mulch,” he said. Garlic can be mulched with straw, and because vines are long-lived, he plants grasses underneath them to suppress weed growth.
Gard, meanwhile, said that many farms his size use plastic landscape fabric to suppress weeds. But although that fabric can be used for multiple years, it sheds microplastics and wasn’t effective against the kinds of weeds that grow on his farm. Gard ended up turning to old-school weeding techniques like dragging rakes or wire weeders through the beds on foot or using a tractor cultivator. He’s also planted clover around multi-year crops to deter weeds. “You can keep things fairly weed-free … as long as you keep up with it and don’t get behind on things,” he said. But the extra work is offset by not having to use plastic mulch, which requires equipment to lay down and remove, he added.
They are developing a new biodegradable, sprayable mulch that consists only of plant-based materials: shredded paper and sugar gum.
For growing young seedlings, Gard switched to a paper pot transplanter system that was originally developed for Japanese sugar beet farmers. This consists of a durable plastic tray that lies underneath a chain of paper pots that expand out into 266 cells, one for each seedling. A special hand-pulled machine is used to plant these into the soil with appropriate spacing between plants. “The paper chains decompose right there in the field,” Gard said. Though more expensive than plastic pots, they save him a lot of work. “Transplanting a bed of lettuce would take us four to six hours before, and it takes about 10 minutes now with the paper pot transplanter.”
Gard has even tackled the plastic packaging for produce, opting for home-compostable corn-based produce bags, paper packaging, and plant-based clamshells. Though they are more expensive, “We’ve cultivated a customer base that values the plastic reduction,” Gard said. Through tweaks like these, he’s been able to rid his farm of virtually all single-use plastic; the plastic piping he uses for irrigation lasts multiple years.
Many farmers, however, remain reliant on single-use plastic due to its convenience and low cost. “Farmers make very little money and overhead, so they need every edge they can get,” McDaniel said. In his view, there should be subsidies to help farmers buy more sustainable glass greenhouses or hay choppers to make biodegradable mulch, for instance. Extended Product Responsibility (EPR) Laws, which make manufacturers responsible for the entire life cycle of their products, would also help.
In Oregon, which recently introduced such a law for plastic packaging, members of the ACRC are exempted, as they’re already paying to have their chemical containers collected; such frameworks could incentivize more companies to join recycling programs like the ARCR’s, Hudson said. Technological improvements in recycling that allow products to be recycled back into the same products — and not just into other single-use items — would do wonders to make recycling systems truly circular. “Very hopefully, within the next two or three years, we’ll be able to recycle our plastic into new containers,” Hudson said.
In the meantime, it’s left to farmers — especially organic farmers, devoted to sustainability yet reliant on certain plastics — to push for wider changes. If customers can help cover the extra cost of plastic alternatives, “we can get to a point where we don’t use so much plastic,” Gard said. “But somebody needs to lead the way and show that it’s possible. And if it’s not organic produce farmers, who’s it going to be?”
