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’?)

As all of the doom and gloom headlines predicting the recession-related death of the organic sector start to fade into the mists of time, we may now being seeing some more reliable figures that tell something closer to the true story.

We said all along that, not forgetting the pain of pig and poultry producers, the sector as a whole was operating on a fairly even keel. Yes, there has been hardship, along with the rest of the economy, but we haven’t seen anything like the wholesale shutdown of organics. And nor would we have expected to.

Now research body, Organic Monitor, has taken a look at the figures over the longer term and highlighted some of the patterns around Europe, as reported here by FoodNavigator.com.

What the data seems to highlight is that some UK retailers pre-empted their organic customers by assuming they would buy less organic products and promptly whipping many lines from the shelves. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of falling sales, of course. But as demand failed to follow their sales prediction charts down to the bottom of the cliff, they’ve had to ramp-up their offerings again.

Organic Monitor suggests single digit growth for organics across Europe in 2009. I think anybody in the industry would have taken that if it was offered as a guarantee at the start of the year. While UK organics was apparently among the worst hit, it’s still kicking and preparing to take on 2010 with renewed vigour.

We’re not sure how it happened, but some of us here missed the news that the National Institute of Agricultural Botany and The Arable Group had merged.

So, given that we missed the announcement last month, we thought it worthy of a mention here for anyone else who was too engrossed elsewhere to pick up on it!

It does seem to make sense for two leading bodies in agronomy and research to come together and realise the benefits of such a collaboration.

You can read more about it, including comments from the key players, here.

Interestingly, following on from the last post, a new Defra-backed report has emerged which suggests that shoppers have a perception of organic food and farming that is beyond the practical requirements of the regulations.

The study, carried out by the University of Exeter, reports an ‘expectations gap’ between the reality of production and processing and the knowledge and understanding of shoppers. Read the Farmers Guardian report here.

This is not entirely surprising and is the kind of communication failure that we all hope will be addressed by the OrganicUK initiative (see previous post).

Unfortunately, whenever we read something like this you can bet it will be spun quickly into a story about organics misleading consumers. Again, that’s probably our own fault as an industry for letting ourselves get into that position. Now is the time to take serious steps to address the problem. It’s a bit of a shame, though, that Defra will fund this kind of research, but doesn’t seem willing to find money for the OrganicUK bid to the EU to help us move on from the problem.