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Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World pp 187–211Cite as

Organic Farmers: Contributing to the Resilience of the Food System?

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Abstract

Advocates of organic practices claim that organics should play a greater role in growing our food. If this is so, we need to ask how such practices contribute to our food system (Campbell 1997) in a way that will enable it to better feed the people on our planet with safe food produced in a sustainable and resilient way. It is widely acknowledged that the context in which food is produced is changing rapidly and food producers are facing enormous challenges in very uncertain times (Urry 2005; McIntyre et al. 2009; Pretty et al. 2010; National Academy of Sciences 2011). According to Darnhofer et al. (2010a, p. 546) present and future uncertainty “may increasingly require farmers to keep their farms flexible to be able to respond to new challenges as they arise.” If the practice of organics lives up to the rhetoric associated with it from its beginnings as a social movement, then it will have a lot to offer in the present and future in terms of its contribution to the possible pathways to adaptation and flexibility it offers to agricultural practices in general.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, Organics New Zealand claims “… organic production is the foundation of better crops, better livestock and better futures” (www.oanz.org.nz).

  2. 2.

    AsureQuality is commercial company 100 % owned by the New Zealand government to provide food safety and biosecurity services to the food and primary production sectors, http://www.organiccertification.co.nz/

  3. 3.

    In 1998 MAF, as part of the government’s user pays policy, spun off two companies Asure New Zealand and AgriQuality, with AgriQuality having a specific company CERTENZ responsible for organic certification. CERTENZ achieved ISO 65 certification in 2001 that gave entry into the EU (www.organic-register.com). In 2007 Asure New Zealand and AgriQuality merged to form AsureQuality (www.stuff.co.nz/business/38232, “Food safety merger plan” will cost few jobs’).

  4. 4.

    For examples from other countries see Seppänen and Helenius (2004) (Finland) and Guthman (2000) (California, U.S.A.).

  5. 5.

    See www.argos.org.nz for more information.

  6. 6.

    Hence the ARGOS study complies with the assertion that trans-disciplinary approaches are needed to study sustainable agriculture (e.g., Cousins et al. 2007; McIntyre et al. 2009; Hunt et al. 2010).

  7. 7.

    Pollan also talks of “Big Organic” and “Little Organic” (Pollan 2001, p. 34).

  8. 8.

    See a collection of responses to GM in farming provided by organizations such as the Soil Association.

  9. 9.

    We have also demonstrated that practices and attitudes within a particular management system are not uniform in our paper, “Are conventional farmers conventional?” (Fairweather et al. 2009b).

  10. 10.

    Growing kiwifruit organically was very difficult until the development of ultra-fine mineral oil sprays for the control of scale (1993) and the approval of their use in organics (Tomkins et al. 1996). These examples illustrate the cross-fertilization and transfer of technology that can occur from IPM practices to organic.

  11. 11.

    Darnhofer et al. (2010b) have produced a study of resilience based on the New Zealand kiwifruit industry.

  12. 12.

    ZEPSRI is the single desk-monitoring organization for the export of kiwifruit from New Zealand. It is regarded as a monopsony.

  13. 13.

    Fonterra is New Zealand’s largest dairy company, a cooperative which is one of the world’s largest exporters of dairy products (http://business.newzealand.com/common/files/Dairy-industry-in- New-Zealand.pdf).

  14. 14.

    However, all results are so variable that the low statistical power of these comparisons could be masking underlying differences.

  15. 15.

    We use the term farmer in the generic sense to include all types of primary producers, such as orchardists.

  16. 16.

    Each day in the milking season a farmer gets a docket when the milk is collected giving the quantity of milk solids produced that day and comparing total production up to that time with the last year and so on.

  17. 17.

    Note the figures in the following tables are derived from so many different sources that when making comparisons between values from different sources, the values given must be regarded as approximate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit, Lincoln University, 84, Lincoln, 7647, New Zealand

    Lesley Hunt & John Fairweather

  2. Centre for Sustainability: Agriculture, Food, Energy, Environment (CSAFE), University of Otago, 56, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand

    Chris Rosin

  3. Department of Sociology, Gender and Social Work, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Hugh Campell

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  1. Lesley Hunt
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  2. Chris Rosin
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  4. John Fairweather
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Correspondence to Lesley Hunt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems, Division of Organic Farming,, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria

    Bernhard Freyer

  2. Department of Community Sustainability,, Michigan State University,, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Jim Bingen

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Hunt, L., Rosin, C., Campell, H., Fairweather, J. (2015). Organic Farmers: Contributing to the Resilience of the Food System?. In: Freyer, B., Bingen, J. (eds) Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9190-8_10

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