How much organic food can we grow?

Flemmich Webb

Beans: Organic food boom

Organically grown food may suit discerning shoppers and upmarket restaurants, but can UK farmers produce enough for us all? 

The boom in organic food has been a rare highlight in an otherwise challenging decade for UK agriculture. Foot and Mouth disease, bird flu and BSE have all damaged local farmers at the same time as globalisation has opened up new and cheaper food markets.

Happily, our growing love affair with organic produce has been good news for British farming. Today, organic food market is worth more than £1 billion – small wonder, then, that record numbers of farmers are applying to convert to organic production.

Organic saturation

But that may not be the whole story. Recent figures in The Grocer from TNS Worldpanel revealed that the growth in organic food sales to March 2007 was only half that of 2006. Given our appetite for all things organic, why is the boom already starting to slow?

One explanation is that the demand for some organic products is increasing at a faster rate than UK growers can supply. In 2006, an average of two thirds of primary organic produce sold through supermarkets was sourced from UK growers. Despite an increasing call for organics, this was same percentage as the previous year. The clear implication is that we’re having to source greater amounts of organic produce from abroad.

Supply and demand

Nick Gosling runs a 270 acre dairy and arable farm that supplies milk and dairy products to organic box scheme supplier Abel & Cole. Over the past three years, Gosling’s milk order has increased from 3000 litres per week to 16,000 litres per week and demand is still rising.

This should be something to celebrate. But Gosling is struggling to find organic grain to feed his cows —currently the UK imports more than half of its organic cereal feed.

“All my cattle-feed suppliers are saying that they soon won’t be able to guarantee me a supply of grain,” he says. “Certain ingredients will be lacking, so we would have to bulk up the feed with something cheap, such as straw, which means the milk won’t be of such good quality.”

Organic imports

Greater provision of organic produce would solve many problems. But Martin Haworth, director of policy at the National Farmers' Union, says it is unrealistic to imagine that all our organic food could come from the UK. “There’s no possibility. We can’t even produce all the conventional food we need in the UK — we’re currently 64 per cent self-sufficient.”

Jody Scheckter, owner of Laverstoke Park farm in Hampshire, points to the two year organic conversion process as a stumbling block. “Many farmers have converted but it takes time to get life back into the soil,” Scheckter says. “After the past 20 years of hardship, farmers are tending to concentrate on short-term survival and how to make money.”

Gosling agrees: “I think we could be self-sufficient in some organic foods but not all. The supermarkets will realise that there is a demand that can’t be supplied and will find a middle way — not organic food, but food grown in a healthier way by using less chemicals, for example.”

Organic for all

Others are more bullish about the future. With just 3.5 per cent of the UK’s total agricultural land used for organic food production, they argue there is plenty of scope for development.

“Potentially there is enough land to feed the country sustainably,” says the Soil Association’s campaigns director Robin Maynard. “But farmers want secure markets — they need to know whether the organic movement is a sustained trend or a passing fad.

“They are understandably cautious and quite slow to switch habits. But if we can show that there is sustained public support of the values inherent in organic farming — such as health, climate change and animal welfare — then farmers will switch over.”

Consumer choice

This is where consumers have an important role to play — choosing to buy locally sourced, organic food will continue to bolster confidence in the market. Nevertheless, depending on our food choices, total self-sufficiency may be unfeasible. After all, many popular foods that don’t grow here, such as bananas and coffee, will always have to be imported.

The challenge for the UK organic industry, says Maynard, is to continue to source quality organic materials to meet the increased demand. “People [recognise] there are hidden costs to what has been thought of as a cheap food policy,” he says. “Organics may cost a bit more but it’s money well spent.”