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Potential for organic farming 'unrealised'
A big grower says a report on the potential of organic methods may have underestimated it.
James Brown, financial director of Pollybell Farms, covering 5,000 acres south of Goole, made his comment following a report from Reading University.
It said an all-organic England and Wales might produce close to 70 per cent of the existing home-grown contribution to national consumption, although the mix would be different.
The authors took data from 176 farms, including Pollybell, which has been in organics for 10 years, and multiplied it up, taking account of varying soils and local climates.
Most previous estimates have suggested all-organic farming would produce between half and two thirds of the yields from modern mainstream methods and agribusiness has tended to quote the lower figure, so support for the higher one is significant.
Mr Brown said: "It is a big step forward to see a report based on empirical data."
But he added that the figures Reading had seen, up to 2006, were already being made out of date by advances in technology. Pollybell yields of brassicas, for example, were already being improved by camera-guided hoes, which use colour and pattern recognition to weed between crops.
The machines have also been proved on weeding in cereals but organic cereals pose other problems so the yield returns are not as clear.
Machinery like it promises to answer the need to weed without chemicals and challenges the Reading estimate that labour needs would be raised 70 per cent by organic methods.
The Reading team said production of chicken and eggs and pork would be reduced by two thirds on natural diets and milk by one third but cows and sheep would become more widespread because arable farmers would have to grow clover to fix nitrogen and would want some return from the temporary pastures. Beef production would exceed domestic demand and self-sufficiency would be achieved for lamb.
There is not much organic business to go by in rapeseed and sugarbeet but it seemed likely rape would suffer from weed competition.
Sugarbeet should not be a problem. Vegetable production would hardly be affected.
Mr Brown said: "From my experience, as far as it goes, I am not surprised by the report. I don't expect to see a fully organic world but I think conventional farming has a lot to learn from organic methods."
He said demand for Pollybell's organic broccoli, cauliflowers, cabbages and carrots, was still strong this season.
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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