Organics Are Strong

Washington State has been growing and enjoying a top spot in the organic industry and David Granatstein, WSU Sustainable Agriculture Specialist has been keeping tabs on that growth.

GRANATSTEIN: One of the things I've done in my job at WSU is to try to track the organic sector. Try to understand what's going on, what do the numbers look like, what are the trends, what are key pieces of information that can help people make good decisions. So we've done that now for over ten years. We work with the certifiers we get the data directly from them.

That data shows some pretty incredible numbers.

GRANATSTEIN: Produce is about a third of organic sales nationally so it is a major, major driver. It's how a lot of people as consumers get into it and just increase what they consume over time. If you look at our rank, we're number four in terms of the number of certified farms, we're number nine in terms of certified acres and we're number two in terms of the value of farm-gate sales of organics.

Granatstein says some of Washington's commodities take top spots in organics.

GRANATSTEIN: We are the number one organic producer for apples, pears sweet cherries, blueberries, juice grapes, green peas that are frozen, sweet corn and maybe onions. We're number two in peaches, wine grapes, carrots, other vegetables. Probably number one in hops, probably number one in some herbs like mint.

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