Why Does Organic Cost More?
By now most Americans have some appreciation that food grown organically is better for our health and better for our environment. But it’s often hard to measure quantifiably, how much more valuable it is when it comes to the cash register and a fixed budget for spending on food. I have often balked at prices that in some instances may be as much as 50% more than the same item commercially grown, but personal experience has convinced me that the chemical burden of non organic foods is a major factor affecting my families health and bad news for the long term viability of our planet.
Occasionally, I talk to someone who firmly believes that organic food is just another marketing scheme to get people to pay more for essentially the same things. These are mostly people who don’t consume organic food and probably never will. But there is enough research that shows that even a week of eating all organic foods drops the level of toxic pesticide residues in our blood stream radically. What all these foreign chemicals do to us is a subject that is still under study, but clearly, our bodies were not designed to consume these chemicals and we now know they have a profound effect, especially on babies and children. Organic production methods do cost more due to numerous factors, deciding whether it’s worth it to you and your family is a personal decision.
Reasons why organic costs more:
- Organic farming is substantially more labor intensive. It relies on crop rotation, mixed planting, composting, biological pest control, and mechanical cultivation.
- Organic farming is also more intelligence intensive. An organic farmer has to continually evaluate the needs of his soil and plants and cannot rely on simple, quick fix, chemical solutions.
- Organic farming requires integrated land management which means that the same crops cannot be produced repeatedly on the same soil. Manure, essential for the production of adequate compost means that farmers must typically include livestock as an integrated part of their operation.
- Organic farming is generally more suited to smaller scale operations with multiple and diverse crops and therefore cannot benefit from the economies available to large scale monoculture agribusiness or government subsidies.
- Costs of Regulation. In 2002 the U.S. created the National Organic Program (NOP) It sets standards of practice and requirements which farmers have to meet in order to be approved as a USDA Organic Provider. It takes a minimum of 7 years of exclusively organic cultivation before a farmer can apply for certification and begin to recoup his higher costs. The application is complicated, expensive and requires an intimidating amount of record keeping. There is little funding available to help a small farmer make the transition to Organic cultivation.
Clearly there is a blatant disparity in the funding of “chemi-culture” versus organic agriculture. The 
majority of government farm subsidies originally developed to help small, depression era farmers survive, now go to large commercial farms, with average incomes in excess of $200,000 and a net worth of nearly $2 million. Approximately 90% of farm subsidies support production of only 5 crops (wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice) none of which are grown organically and most of which use genetically modified seed. These crops and their method of cultivation require larger amounts of water, an increasingly dear resource, and contaminate both land and ground water with nitrate runoff and toxic herbicides and pesticides. The cost to the environment is huge compared to the lower resource use of organic agriculture which remains virtually unsupported.
Additionally, these subsidies indirectly encourage poorer diets by reducing the real cost of corn syrup and cheap oils used in almost all highly processed foods. Making these relatively unhealthy foods so cheap leads to parents making choices that it’s cheaper to buy soda and processed snacks than the much healthier whole fruit or vegetables, which are not subsidized. Farm subsidies are a hotly contested issue with far reaching implications for our way of life and I don’t pretend to have any solutions, but it is a factor that definitely affects the cost of organic foods in America.
Originally designed to safeguard small farms, farm subsidies now promote over production of the most commercially advantageous crops. This overproduction brings down prices which are then balanced with expensive programs to restrict planting to bring prices back up to normal levels. This artificial deflation and inflation of prices comes with a heavy price for the American consumer who pays some $25 billion in taxes and another $12 billion in higher food prices annually for programs that distribute most of their benefits to an elite group of wealthy producers.
Because of the vast imbalance with subsidies given to large scale agribusiness only a tiny portion of available farm land is devoted to organic methods. According to Wikipedia, only 0.8 percent of total world farmland is under organic standards for cultivation. Surprisingly, much of that production is in China, the EU and Australia where organic farming is subsidized and the smallest percentage relative to arable land is in America. While this percentage has risen significantly in recent years, organic farmers are not a well represented lobby in Congress to further their interests. When you choose to buy organic products, you send a message to farmers and hopefully to our politicians, that this is something that consumers are willing to pay for and gradually, this should increase the number of American farmers willing to take the risk and make the investment to produce foods using recognized organic standards.
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