Profitable Organics

A comprehensive study finds organic agriculture is more profitable for farmers than conventional agriculture. WSU scientist, Dave Crowder gives us an overview of the research.

CROWDER: John Reganold, who’s my co-author, and I actually kind of started working on this project a couple of years ago because there’s been several studies that had come out about the yield differences between organic and conventional crops and it showed that organic systems typically produced crop yields that are about 15 to 25% lower than conventional systems and so we went into this saying yields are just one component of economics

He says they wanted to look more broadly at how organics were doing economically.

CROWDER: We gathered a lot of studies that had been published in the literature from different crops in different countries and looked at the financial performance of the organic and conventional systems and we found that organic systems were typically 20 to 30% greater profits than conventional systems despite getting that 15% lower yield.

One important aspect they touched on was the incentive to change systems.

CROWDER: Our study didn’t really try to predict the future change in the market. We did show there’s room for organic market to grow even if the premiums decline but this transition period that farmers have to go through is still a big barrier where you have to kind of manage your land organically for three years but you’re not getting those price premiums. So that’s till a big barrier to entry to the market.

And that’s Washington Ag Today. I’m Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.