U.S. has huge appetite for organic food: industry

U.S. has huge appetite for organic food: industry Share on Facebook
United States farmers are having a hard time keeping up with Americans' voracious appetite for organic foods, say industry leaders, who want federal officials to boost spending on crop research and market development.

by Reuters - Saturday, 28 April 2007

Organic food sales grow by as much as 20 percent a year and were forecast for $16 billion during 2006, or nearly 3 percent of all U.S. food spending, the Organic Trade Association said at a pair of congressional hearings.

"In the United States, the buzz about organic has become a steady hum," said Lynn Clarkson, an organic farmer and member of the OTA board. "Organic foods are increasingly sold in mainstream retail establishments, which together represent roughly 46 percent of sales."

Clarkson told a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on Tuesday that organic production was climbing "but not at a rate to meet the consumer demand" so imports are rising. Mark Lipson of the Organic Farming Research Foundation presented a similar assessment at the House of Representatives Agriculture subcommittee hearing last week.

According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, there are at least 8,500 organic farmers with more than 4 million acres of crop and pasture land.

A "fair share" of USDA research and outreach spending should be $120 million a year, 10 times current outlays, said Lipson.

Two Iowa counties offer real estate tax breaks to farmers who convert to organic crops. Woodbury County, home to Sioux City, also looks first for locally-grown organic when it buys food for its correctional facilities.

"A major problem has been supply," said Robert Marqusee, the county's rural development chief. He said organic farming keeps young and small farmers in business while fuel ethanol, the Corn Belt darling, puts "industrial farming on steroids."

Organic farming means growing crops and livestock without use of antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides or genetically engineered seeds and animals. Fields must be free of chemicals for three years before their crops can be certified as organic.

"The conversion process may be quite daunting," says the OTA, but USDA provides scanty advice for growers wanting to go organic. It recommended USDA provide more expert advice to growers, put more money into research, strengthen crop insurance coverage for organic farms and hire more people to write rules for the expanding array of organic products at home and double-check organic production overseas.

Kathie Arnold of the National Organic Coalition, a group favoring stringent standards for the sector, suggested the government "provide financial and technical support" to farmers during the three-year transition to organic.

California Democrat Dennis Cardoza, chairman of the House Agriculture subcommittee on horticulture and organic agriculture, said USDA's National Organic Program "must be adequately staffed" so it can keep pace with a sector that grows at 10-20 percent a year. He said Congress "must work to ensure that organic agriculture is better integrated with USDA as a whole."

Related Links

A Major Reason Why Organic Food is Better: Healthy Soils & Animals Mean a Healthy Diet

The Guardian (London)
By Robin Maynard

Food is seen as something entirely separate from its means and source of production - so long as people follow a "balanced diet" reflecting a nutritionist's chart of proteins, carbohydrates and their daily fruit and veg official thinking is that all will be well. Little consideration is given to whether the nutritional quality of our food is affected by the manner the crops and animals from which it is derived are raised; and virtually no thought is given to the vitality of the soil.

Farming has gone through huge changes over the past 60 years and Lawrence noted a crucial development linked to the decline in mineral levels in food - the use of chemical fertilisers to maximise crop yields, so replacing traditional methods for building soil fertility, such as rotations of different crops and livestock.

Artificial fertilisers derive from the reductionist science of the 19th-century chemist Liebig, who identified the basic minerals needed by plants by incinerating them and analysing the remaining ash. Liebig believed that by adding these back to the soil after cropping, fertility could be maintained indefinitely. The modern "'magic mix" of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium boosted crop yields beyond farmers' wildest dreams.

Certainly, the resulting crops looked bigger but, as research showed, they were not necessarily better. A healthy soil is made up of more than eroded geology - a spoonful can contain more bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and other species than there are people on the planet. Artificial fertilisers and pesticides significantly reduce
the numbers of these microscopic soil inhabitants. A 21-year field trial in Switzerland comparing organic and non-organic farming showed dramatic differences in soil microbiology, with populations 85% higher in the organically managed field than in that treated with artificial chemicals.

Maintaining the populations of these myriad micro-organisms is fundamental to organic farming: the benefits for consumers of food raised from this "living soil" have been confirmed in an extensive study in 2001 which found that, on average, organic food contained higher levels of vitamin C and essential minerals than conventional produce. Just last year, research by the University of Newcastle confirmed that organic cows produced milk 50% higher in vitamin E, 75% higher in beta carotene (vitamin A) and two to three times higher in antioxidants, as well as having higher levels of omega-3 essential fatty acids.

The foundations for a healthy diet are laid back at the farm: in the health of the crops and livestock and, fundamentally, in the health of the soil upon which they are raised.

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