Marin Organic, the nonprofit that has championed organic agriculture in the county, announced yesterday that it will cease operating.  It has “served its purpose, achieved its goals and completed its mission,” the nonprofit said in a statement. When the organization was created in 2001 to promote organic agriculture, 13 organic farmers and ranchers tended a mere 400 acres of certified organic land in Marin. The county now has over 40,000 acres of certified organic land and dozens of producers. Jeffrey Westman, the organization’s executive director for the past two years, announced in September that he would resign by the end of 2015. “That sparked a discussion about what to do next and where we really wanted to go,” he said. But those talks turned to the fact that their current programs—like the Farm Field Studies program, which brings children to working farms to learn about agriculture—didn’t align with the core, founding mission, Mr. Westman said. He said he also felt uncomfortable with how much time he had to devote to fundraising. “I felt that we were a scrappy, lean organization doing great work,” he said. “But way more of my time is dedicated to finding money than it should be. So we looked around the table and said, ‘Do we really want to constantly write grants and hunt for money to do this work, or is it time to let someone else do it?’” The Farm Field Studies program will be taken over by the Agricultural Institute of Marin, which runs numerous farmers markets around the county as well as Alameda and San Francisco. The University of California Cooperative Extensions in Marin and Sonoma will run the Farming 101 Program, which offers classes to beginner farmers. The gleaning program, which collected excess crops from farmers to donate to schools and food relief organizations, was more a labor of love than a funded program. But Mr. Westman said he was in talks with an organization in Marin called ExtraFood, which gives extra food from businesses to nonprofits that serve low-income and vulnerable populations, to take over that work. No final decision has been made as to whether Marin Organic will cease to exist entirely or remain as a fiscal sponsor for other groups.