Origins of Organic Agriculture 3.0

Organic Agriculture 3.0 is the term coined by  IFOAM, the international federation of organic agriculture movements, to describe the next stage of the development of organic agriculture. Personally I am not too find of it as it sounds more like a software update rather than a serious debate on how organic agriculture could, and should develop in the future. However despite the silly name the IFOAM have raised some serious issues that need to be addressed and the debate is crucial, if a little hazy at times.

Organic Agriculture 3.0 comes from the idea that modern organic farming has seen three crucial stages in the last 100 years. Obviously organic farming has existed ever since humans started to grow fruit and vegetables and raise animals. This classification deals with the period when farmers expressly rejected the ideas of chemical based farming systems.

Under this classification Organic Agriculture 1.0 started in the 1920s as reaction against industrial agriculture, based on the agricultural courses of Rudolf Steiner and the Club of Rome’s report “The Limits of Growth” it was in the words of Thorsten Arnold in his interesting article Organic Agriculture 3.0 The History of “Yet another debate” about the future of organic agriculture

“Organic 1.0 was characterized by a colorful and incoherent movement that was innovative but failed to link into the mainstream food system.”. In other words a bunch of conservationist, anti industrial artistos, artist and Arts and Crafters. In the UK the Soil Association was registered in 1946 following the publication of “The Living Soil” by Lady Eve Balfour, the niece of former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, in 1943.

Events of 1968 and it’s influence on parts of a Western middle class generation combined with the publication of Rachel Carsen‘s the Silent Spring 1962, and the Club of Rome’s Report “The Limits of Growth” 1972. Added a new energy to the nascent organic movement, this time with a clearer environmental rather than conservationist motivation. IFOAM was founded in 1972 to promote organic agriculture on a global level.

Organic 2.0 was the end result result, Whole Food shops and organic small holdings started to pop up in and around University towns, empty rural communities woke up to find they had been invaded by pot smoking neo ruralists, Maoists and the simply mad.

The organic message, or at least the anti pesticide part of it, started to filter its way into middle class consciousness. The market for organic produce became to take shape. With the growth of the market came the need for actual verification, it is one thing to say a product is organic and another to prove it, private certifiers and national, and in the case of Europe trans national, legislation defining the minimum requirements for organic agriculture took shape.

By the early 1990s a clear if contested legal regime was discernible or organic agriculture on a global level. Retailers and food processing companies now had a clearer idea of what organic was, and wasn’t. Organic in effect moved from ideologically driven to standard driven. This move is seen as the defining moment for the emergence of Organic 2.0. It has not been an uncontested process. National and European organic legislation is by it’s very nature a compromise between the principals of organic agriculture and the commercial realities of the market place, and the practicalities of agriculture and the food transformation and retail requirements. A classic example down here is the required distance between an organic grape vineyard and an industrial one. The legislation requires the equivalent of four rows of vines. If the Tramontana is blowing at the time of spraying, chemicals can be carried up to 12 klics from the point of spraying, to say nothing os what is in shared water supplies. Clearly a 12 klic boundary is just unpractical unless you live on an island that is 100% organic in the middle of the Med, but is 4 rows of vines a mere fig leaf?

Stealing Thorsten Arnold words, and diagram again “Today, private and national standards co-exist in many European countries, with private standards being widely recognized by consumers as more stringent and small-scale, whereas national standards cater to industrial organic production and processing.”

With the global organic market now rapidly approaching 100 billion euro organic remains a niche market, but a sizable one. The large food transformers have not been slow to realise that there is money in organic muck. In 2017 Amazon bought the controversial but emblematic US Whole Food chain, but as has been tracked for over a decade the US large and medium sized sectors have been bought up, similar acquisitions programmes can been seen in Europe. The end of Hippie Food roarer the headlines, forgetting that while dope smoking hippies grew carrots and made tie dye T shirts, their speed snorting brothers and sisters wrote computer code all night, and their coke snorting brethren got into advertising, media and PR.

Dr. Phil Howard, an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State working with the Cornucopia Institute in the US has produced this chart on who owns what.

Drawn in 2106 Dr. Phil Howard, has since noted major acquisitions by Kraft Heinz, ConAgra, Pepsi, Campbell, Danone, Unilever and General Mills. For a full list see the Cornucopia Institute’s Who Owns Organic Page

And so onto the challenges of Organic agriculture and the Organic 3.0 idea. In 2015 IFOAM looked at the stagnation of the organic farming sector on a global level. Particularly they saw that the growth in organic production has been slow and farm conversion to organic practices are stagnating. Even if the current growth of 5% per year is sustained until 2050, the organizations concluded that the impacts of organic agriculture would remain insignificant with respect to the movement’s goal The ideas behind Organic Agriculture 3.0 is about bringing organic out of its current niche into the mainstream and positioning organic systems as part of the multiple solutions needed to solve the tremendous challenges faced by our planet and our species.

For all the talk and hype about farmers markets,organic shops such as Bio Coop, et al the organic sector has seen it’s single largest expansion by the embrace of the supermarkets and the corporate take over by the large food processors of the larger and middle sized organic transformers, as seen above. The present demands and practices, particularly of the large food retailers, with their demand for consistent quality and quantity, consistent supply, and penalty clauses for non compliance is not suited to organic agriculture, which by it’s very nature is seasonal. How should organic agriculture respond. Certainly by demanding that the big retailers learn to understand the cycle of organic agriculture, but, as the debate is now raging in France should organic agriculture embrace aspects of industrial production such as heated green houses in Brittany to extend the tomato growing season? How does that sit with the legislation, which while vaguely worded states that organic agriculture should respect the seasons?

After a hesitant start there were a number of initial approaches to the various issues of how to spread organic agriculture and also to broaden the appeal of organic to include other related issues of sustainability. As noted above private cerifiers and national organic standards are often not the same. national organic standards are the base line for both but a number of private certifiers, Demeter  Syndicate SIMPLE, have much higher standards. Many organic small holdings such as ourselves go way above those in terms of sustainability, food miles, low carbon foot print. Raising organic standards to embrace other sustainable factors, the “Pur et Dur” approach while satisfying the innovators would too little to increase the organic agricultural sector as the entry barriers would be set much higher. However lowering organic standards would equally devalue the organic brands and it would get lost in the sea of “sustainable” branding increasingly being launched by food transformers and retailers- Greenwashing is all the rage in the food sector and beyond.

The on going debate about whether to try and broaden the movement, by reaching out to more industrial farming sector that are starting to move towards more sustainable methods or remain more purist has been raging for decades. In the UK the Soil Association, who are by far the largest private certifier of organic agriculture saw 4 of its Trustees resign over what they saw as the Association’s embrace of a “corporate mentality”. One of the resignees, the journalist Pat Thomas wrote “However, I remain resolute in my belief that the organisation has lost its way, has lost its unique voice in the food and farming landscape and has largely abandoned ‘organic’ in both the philosophical and practical sense of the word, in order to be part of an already overcrowded field of ‘healthy-eating’ charities.” see Soil Association has disowned ‘O word’, say resigning trustees.

The other factor is that the organic message on soil management is increasing penetrating more industrial farming practices. Just the other week I was down at our local agricultural central buying store to pick up some organic soil, I was amazed at the quantity of organic fertilisers they had in stock. Apparently Fraysinnet, the large French chemical company has been training local grape growers in organic soil management techniques to move them away from old fertilsers and towards more organic practices. Obviously they are doing it for long term profit but any such movement is welcome and should be embraced by the organic movement not poo pooed.

After a series of debates around issues of tweeking existing rules on social and animal welfare the IFOAm came up with a suitable fudge.

In 2016, IFOAM responded in a paper that gives direction to Organic 3.0. In recognition that “promoting diversity that lies at the heart of organic and recognizing there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach”, IFOAM identified six features that Organic 3.0 should address (IFOAM 2016, p3).

1. Feature #1: A culture of innovation where traditional and new technologies are regularly re-assessed for their benefits and risk.
2. Feature #2: Continuous improvement towards best practice, for operators along the whole value chain covering the broader dimensions of sustainability.
3. Feature #3: Diverse ways to ensure transparency and integrity, to broaden the uptake of organic agriculture beyond third-party certification;
4. Feature #4: Inclusiveness of wider sustainability interests through alliances with movements that truly aspire for sustainable food and farming while avoiding ‘greenwashing’;
5. Feature #5: Empowerment from the farm to the final consumer, to recognize the interdependence along the value chain and also on a territorial basis; and
6. Feature #6: True value and cost accounting, to internalize costs and benefits and encourage transparency for consumers and policy-makers.

. I will return to the issues around this as this only really touches the surface but was written to help me understand some of the history and ways of classifying it- the hippy insults are all mine however.