OF&G :: The Blog

This week we’ve seen a few news outlets grabbing eagerly onto another story knocking organic farms.

The two highlights of this story, based on research from the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (part of Leeds University), is that organic farming produces about half as much food as non-organic and that the wildlife benefits don’t compensate for this.

Once again, we’re seeing narrowly focused findings (first published in the journal Ecology Letters) being extrapolated to bash organic farming. It’s quite unbelievable that a positive, in the form of better wildlife numbers and diversity on organic farms, is being cynically turned into a negative. Linking yields and wildlife simply serves to confuse the debate about where our food is going to come from in the future.

Organic farms generally don’t produce the yields of non-organic farms. Duh! That’s never been a secret. It’s not a fault, it’s a reality of letting nature produce what it can cope with. Yes, we need to solve the issue of future food supply, but there are complex societal changes that have to take place, such as altering our diets and not chucking millions of tonnes of perfectly good food in the bin each year. No farmer wants to see that, organic or not.

With huge doubt about the future availability of key elements, particularly phosphorous, we will have little choice but to look to using natural techniques and inputs to produce food.

Some will say the answer lies in genetic engineering of crops. But there are so many pitfalls that way it’s hard to know where to start recounting them. Top of the list though: farmers won’t own their seeds, multinational companies will, and with those seeds in their ground, the farmers will be tied to those companies for good because of genetic copyrights; plus, the technology has a long way to go, with lots of failures along the way – can we afford that gamble when there are people to feed?

This rather negative reporting about organic farming also fails to take into account the whole range of reasons why organic farming makes sense. We don’t need to spell it out here. You are, we suspect, an informed readership.

Of course organic farming goes on improving. Crop yields are getting better with plant breeding and selection. Wildlife IS better served by organic land management.

And let’s not forget all of the studies that have gone before this one showing greater wildlife benefits. Are they all suddenly discounted?

More would be achieved by investing in research to improve methods of farming that are sustainable. Scientists are human; they can have agendas which are sometimes dependent upon who’s funding their work. However, in this case it would be a good bet that they’ve done their research, come up with some not-so-earthshattering findings, and someone, somewhere has done an anti-organic hatchet job.

Oh well. The people we represent have broad shoulders. They have to; organic farming can also be more labour intensive, you know… (Oops, have I just tipped-off the Daily Mail to another ‘scoop’?)

I stumbled across this piece from Kitchen Garden on on weed management in organic gardening. Despite being focused on domestic situations, it’s actually a really nice and straightforward overview of the kinds of issues and solutions that organic farmers and growers use on a larger scale.

If you’re not a farmer and never understood why weeds are such a large part of the discussion around producing fields of organic crops, this might prove an interesting (and pretty brief) read.

As the fallout from the strange FSA report on nutrition in organic and non-organic food continues to rumble round the media’s opinion pages, it’s good to see a rational argument now and then.

That’s exactly what we get from Exeter farmer, David Garaway, [via thisisexeter.co.uk] who has done a good job of explaining why getting excited over nutrition is only a very small part of the reason for being (and buying) organic.

The distance our food travels is important to many people. Some of it does silly trips up and down the country going from farm, manufacturer or packer to depots spread around the country and often back again to reach stores a few miles from where it started.

Some of it comes from all over the world; sometimes unavoidably, sometimes just because it can be hauled in cheaper from abroad.

Organic directory website, OrganicLinker.com, has now launched a food miles calculator to allow shoppers to do a quick check of the distance produce might have racked-up to reach them. The aim, according to site owner and food miles calculator developer, Mike Sharp, is to encourage more local sourcing of food, preferably direct from the producer.

Mike told us: “People often do not fully understand the impact on the environment of buying fruit and vegetables from abroad. By buying local, not only are you helping to cut down on carbon emissions, but you are also supporting your local economy and grower.”

Of course the argument isn’t simple. It’s entirely possible that a product grown in its natural climate and transported to the UK could use less carbon than an equivalent grown here in a heated poly tunnel. But the answer to that is to buy local and seasonal. But while we’re all wrestling with how far our food-buying consciences will let us go in changing our eating habits, you can at least take a quick peek at the miles involved and decide quite how guilty you should feel!

Our roving Development Officer, Steven Jacobs, has sent back a couple of images from his time at Cereals 09 to share with us all.

He says that tea, biscuits and chat are the largely the order of the day on our stand:

The Organic Farmers & Growers stand at Cereals 09

Organic cereals are high on our agenda at the moment, with our National Organic Cereals 2009 event on the near horizon, so Steven took time to catch up on the trial plots that have been grown for this show.

Trial plots of organic wheat

In the picture you can see Dr Richard Stanley of Campden BRI Better Organic Bread. The crop is organic wheat populations (different varieties each complementing the other) as part of the wheat link project run by Organic Research Centre. That’s Zoë Haigh, of ORC, behind the wheat.

New research suggests that the production of organic bread results in 25 per cent lower CO2 emissions than its non-organic counterpart.

We like this kind of thing, not just because it’s good for the promotion of organic food, but because any credible scientific study that gives us hard data to back up what we believe to be true is always very much welcomed!