"Organic farming may indeed, as its practitioners have long claimed, be better for the environment and produce tastier food than its rivals." - The Economist
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Organic farming
Golden apples
April 19th 2001
From The Economist print edition

Organic farming may indeed, as its practitioners have long claimed, be better for the environment and produce tastier food than its rivals

THE language of organic farming has a quality that George Orwell might have admired. The plants and animals it produces are no more “organic” than those of “conventional” farming, and its methods (natural pest control, crop-diversification, manure and compost) are more “conventional”, at least from a historical viewpoint, than the synthetic pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers that have displaced them. Behind this linguistic confusion, though, there is a substantial debate. Is organic farming just a sport for dilettante hobbyists, or could it have a significant role in the future of agriculture?

Sales of organically produced food, though small, have been growing fast over the past decade (in America, by 20% a year; in some European countries by as much as 40% a year). Until now, however, data to back up the field’s claims both to be environmentally sound, and to produce better quality food, have been sparse. But a paper just published in Nature by John Reganold and his colleagues at Washington State University, Pullman, suggests that for some sorts of crops those arguments are, indeed, correct.

Dr Reganold looked at apples. Starting from scratch, he and his team planted 12 experimental plots of apple trees and tended them for six years. Four plots were managed conventionally, four organically and four by hybrid “integrated” methods that attempt to have the best of both worlds. The researchers measured changes in soil quality in the plots, looked at the performances of the growing trees, estimated the energy input per hectare of orchard, calculated the profitability of each method and””perhaps most important of all””conducted blind-tastings to see which fruit appealed most to the consumer.

That organic methods resulted in better soil was little surprise. Gardeners have known for millennia that digging plant and animal waste into the earth improves it. Quantified in scientific terms, “improvement” means an open  structure that soaks up water and allows that moisture to move around inside the soil so that it can be taken up by roots. Measured by that other shibboleth of conservationists, energy use, organic farming was also better. It was 5-7% more efficient than the other two systems.

As far as the performance of the trees went, there was no difference between the three methods. All the trees were equally healthy, grew equally fast and yielded similar amounts of fruit. During several years of the experiment that fruit was russetted (which does not affect its flavour, but is deemed unsightly by enough American consumers to affect sales). The russetting, however, affected all three plots to the same degree. And russetted or not, people preferred the organically grown apples, describing them as sweeter and less tart””a verdict supported by chemical analysis.

They were also more profitable, though that profitability rested on the willingness of customers to pay a premium for organically produced crops. In the case of apples from Washington, that premium is high””around 50%. Using this figure, Dr Reganold estimated that a new commercial organic orchard, run in a similar way to his, would break even after nine years; for a conventional orchard, the figure would be 15 years. But the organic method would still be attractive if the premium were lower. Only if it dropped below 12% did conventional methods break even first.

Dr Reganold reckons that similar results would apply to other perennial crops, such as other fruit trees, berries and grapes. And, since perennials account for 16% of American agriculture, green methods may yield more greenbacks than many sceptics have previously believed.