Thirty years ago few people had heard of organics farming. Now farmers gain certification. But certification is costly.
When I first went to work on an organic farm – actually a commune – in 1970, organic growing was in its infancy. I had not heard of it before I began farming, but it sounded like a good idea.
At that time there was little information, most of it came from the Rodale Press from the USA and the magazines were slow in arriving and quite old by the time I got to read them. At least a real farmer taught me, a man who had learnt his craft in Devon (England) and for whom organic growing was simply the way things were done.
We sold anything that we produced and, yes, it was spotty and perhaps grotty. There was no such thing as certification and we sold to a fruiterer in Ryde (A western suburb of Sydney Australia) and were paid a fair price.
Each day the paper reported the prices of fruit and vegetables in that morning’s wholesale market. We were paid these prices. If ordinary commercial growers were getting 20 cents a pound for green beans - that was what we received.
Any thing was grist to the mill, a couple of pumpkins growing wild in the compost heap, and lemons growing near a deserted farmhouse across the way as well as our small crops.
By 1995 when I began an organic farm, everything had changed; probably for the better. To be able to sell our produce as organic we needed to be certified. Certification protects the buyer as well as the industry as a whole and we were proud to be able to gain certification quickly.
To be certified we had to have our soil tested as well as send off some examples of vegetables to be tested for non-allowable inputs and residues. Most importantly, an inspector, a member of the certifying body and himself a grower came to check us out. He spent part of the day with us looking at what we had done, what we were doing now, and asking probing questions about our philosophy and practical methods.
The down side is that this is an expensive process and certification – in Australia at least – for the small almost subsistence grower – the cost of certification becomes a major expense. By 2000 when we were selling our organically grown chilli peppers on the conventional market, it became too much.
We grew chilli peppers quite early but found that: our organic outlet in Brisbane could not sell them, did not want them; an organic outlet in Sydney was keen and gave us a great price $12 a kilo but only wanted 2 kilos a week. We had a ton of them. A conventional agent in Melbourne offered $5 a box.
I was quite happy to sell my organic vegetables on the conventional market, my costs were low my inputs few and my profit margin satisfactory.
