Is Organic Agriculture Taking Over?

A few days ago, the USDA released a new report on the amount of farmland and farm production that is certified organic.  I've seen a number of news stories tout the main result from the report summary:

“Certified organic farms operated 4.4 million acres of certified land in 2015, up 20 percent from 2014”

Given the price premiums for organic, I suspect there have been some more conversions over the last year, but I see several things wrong with the way this statistic has been covered.  First, what happened to the rest of (non-organic) farm acres in the US?  Are they up or down?   Second, Politico noticed something interesting about the result:

“Organic acreage might be up 20 percent from 2014, according to the USDA’s 2015 organic census, but it’s not quite the good news the industry was hoping for. The vast majority of the bump — 96 percent of the new acres — is thanks to the certification of 700,000 acres in Alaska. Organic Trade Association spokeswoman Maggie McNeil says the new Alaska acreage stems from a single rangeland certification . . .”

Finally, to get a real sense of the impact of organic production on the agricultural landscape, we need to put the figures in perspective.  As it turns out, organic still represents a very small segment of the farm sector.  I took the latest USDA organic report and tried to mesh it with other USDA data to figure out what percent of the acreage is organic for a given crop, and what percent of the value of production is organic.  I somewhat randomly picked a number of fruits and vegetables to compare and then also pulled out the major commodity crops.*  

The above figure suggests that 22.7% of all acres devoted to growing lettuce in the US were certified organic.  For eggs, 3.6% were organic.  For wheat acres, only 0.7% were organic.  Only 0.1% of beef cows were organic, and 001% of hogs and pigs were organic.  

It is important to note that the amount of acreage devoted to lettuce, carrots, apples, and snap beans is tiny compared to corn, soy, and wheat.  For example, in 2015, about 1.2 million acres were devoted to lettuce, carrots, apples, and snap beans - an amount that is only 1.4% of the amount of land devoted to corn alone.  The point is that even though fruits and vegetables seem to have a higher share devoted to organic than commodity crops, because commodity crops account for the vast majority of land farmed , the total or overall share of cropland in organic remains very small.  For corn, soybeans, and wheat acreage combined, only 1% of the land is organic.

Here's a similar figure but calculated instead as a share of the value of production (i.e., the share of dollars).  

One might expect that organic would represent a larger share of the value of production since prices of organic are higher.  Indeed, this is the case for eggs and apples.  However, it is important to realize the organic yields tend to be lower.  Thus, we tend to not get as much output (or quantity) for each unit of land in production.  So, in the case of lettuce, for example, 22.7% of the acres are organic but only 13.6% of the dollars come from organic.  I suspect this is a result of lower yields for organic despite the fact that organic commands a price premium.  

*Note on the calculations and comparisons: Which numbers should be used in the comparison wasn't always clear, and it also wasn't clear whether the regular USDA production numbers include organic or not (I assumed they did in my calculations, an assumption that, if wrong, would make the organic % higher than it actually is).  The organic report provided values for vegetables grown in the open and under protection; I summed the value of production for both types but because no acreage is provided for the production "under protection", the value is not included calculations.  For non-organic fruits and vegetables, I summed the production for both fresh and processed.  All that said, I tried to make the comparisons as fairly as I could. 

Beyonce, Meatless Monday, Gluten, and Organic

Here's the episode of the John Stossel Show on Fox Business in which he asks me about Beyonce, meatless Monday, gluten, and organic.  My segment starts at just after the 30 min mark.

Organic Yields and Nitrogen Use

David Tribe has an interesting post on organic crop yields.  In short, he asks: from where does the nitrogen come?  For organic crops, it's often manure.  But, where does that come from?  Often from animals fed conventional grains made possible by synthetic fertilizers. He also raises an interesting point about the need to count cover crops as an input into production of commercial organic crops when considering overall productivity.  

It is an important point that has been addressed by others such as Adam Merberg who humorously noted now synthetic nitrogen is "laundered" to make it fit for organic agriculture:

“However much nitrogen exists in manure today, much of it has been fixed industrially before being taken up by corn plants and laundered through the guts of conventionally-farmed animals. Vasilikiotis does not explain how that manure might come to be in an organic world. To do so would require demonstrating the potential for sufficient biological nitrogen fixation”

A while back, I discussed some of the issues involved in comparing organic and non-organic crop yields, and included the following figure and explanation:

“Here is the basic point conveyed in the picture above: a non-organic farmer is free to use any of the practices available to an organic farmer (e.g., no-till or low-till farming, cover crops, etc) but an organic farmer can only use some of the practices that are available to a non-organic farmer. Thus, the range of possible production practices, costs, and outcomes for organic must be a sub-set of that of non-organic.

Being an organic farmer implies following a set of rules defined by the USDA. These rules restrict the practices available to an organic farmer relative to a non-organic farmer. Organic farmers cannot use “synthetic” fertilizer, Roundup, biotechnology, atrazine, certain tillage practices, etc., etc. It is a basic fact of mathematical programming that adding constraints never leads to a higher optimum.”

What will it take to reduce obesity rates?

We've witnessed a lot of positive change in the past 30 to 40 years.  More convenient transportation, more air conditioning, less strenuous jobs, less smoking, less expensive food, etc., etc.  All of those changes are cause for celebration.  They are, however, also all factors that likely contributed to rising rates of obesity we've witnessed over the past several decades.

Here's what I had to say about it in the Food Police

“We can’t disentangle all the bad stuff we don’t like about obesity with all the other good things we enjoy like driving, eating snacks, cooking more quickly, and having less strenuous jobs. Yes, we can have less obesity but at the cost of other things we enjoy.

When you hear we need a fundamental change to get our waistlines back down to where they were three decades ago, beware that it might take a world that looks like it did three decades ago. I for one am not willing to give up power steering, microwaves, and inexpensive take-out even if my pants now fit a little more snugly.”

Now comes this paper from Åsa Ljungvall at Lund University in Sweden providing some further empirical evidence for this phenomenon:

“The empirical analysis is based on a panel of 31 high-income countries and data for the period 1983 to 2008. It finds a positive and statistically significant relationship between the level of economic freedom and both the level of, and five-year change in, BMI. Decomposing the freedom index into sub-indices measuring economic freedom in five sub-areas (government, legal structure, sound money, trade, and regulations) shows that freedom in the regulations dimension is the most consistent contributor to this result.”

It's tough to know whether this is causation or just correlation, but I do think it represents the tough trade-offs we face in life.  We could all be a bit thinner if we lived in North Korea.  I doubt many of us would be willing to trade our freedom just to drop a few pounds.  

Should organics be allowed to use synthetics?

That is the question asked in a Washington Post article by Tamar Haspel.  The article discusses an important debate within the organic community about the role of technology and "naturalness".  

She hits on a big barrier that currently exists that hinders further adoption of organic practices by many farmers:

“A couple of months back, I talked to one of those conventional growers, Richard Wilkins. He rotates his crops (corn, wheat, soy and vegetables), plants cover crops and pays a lot of attention to the health of his soil. When I asked him if he ever considered growing organically, he said, “I’m too much of a believer in the benefits of science and technology to go organic.””

She also points out the overly romanticized concept of "natural".

“Amy Hepworth, an organic farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley, also believes in the importance of soil health and working with nature but says that science and technology, deployed judiciously, can help her with that, sometimes with fewer adverse effects than natural substances. “Natural doesn’t mean safe,” she says.”

and

“Every toxicologist or environmental scientist I’ve ever spoken with says that the idea that natural substances are inherently better for planet or people than synthetic ones is simply false.”

Ultimately, Haspel suggests a "third way", which she acknowledged is already being followed by many "conventional" farmers

“And then there are synthetics, the man-made substances used in conventional farming. “When you say pesticides and chemicals, we’re so indoctrinated that it feels like we’re saying the word poison,” says Hepworth, “but we need confidence in agriculture beyond organic. The most sustainable, responsible system is a hybrid system.” She’s working on crafting just such a system.

A hybrid system. A third way. A best-practices standard. Michael Rozyne, director of regional food distributor Red Tomato, calls it simply “something bigger.” He says that “lumping all non-organic growers into a single category, merely because they use synthetic pesticides, doesn’t do justice to the portion of those growers who are farming using many organic practices, high-level integrated pest management and all sorts of natural controls, who are paying attention to erosion, pollution, and farmworker safety.” ”

and

“It would also help disassemble what Hepworth calls the “two-party system,” in which it’s all too easy to believe that organic is good and conventional is bad. That idea has contributed to the us-and-them mentality that seems to dominate discussions about our agricultural system. “There’s been a lot of judgment of conventional growers,” says Rozyne, “as if they all farmed the same way.””