Organic Farming Today

This book addresses the major aspects of contemporary organic agriculture in Canada in terms of managed systems where soil and water conditions are optimized and where both plants and animals are bred and managed for both productivity and low maintenance.  Through study of soil, plant and animal management, organic agricultural systems can adapt to changing environmental conditions.  In this way, organic agriculture can be highlighted for its potential adaptability to climate change and incorporate intensification (quantity) and quality where more food is grown with less space. 

Organics is multidisciplinary and systems-oriented.  So, how then do we compare Organics to current conventional systems to make productivity, distribution, sustainability, and social interaction all part of the equation?  Even within the equivalent volume of produce, how do we weigh the values of nutrients, the postharvest preservation and the flavour and texture translated into prepared food? The answers are not easy to study and these may remain as topics for future research and chapters.  The complexity of successful organic systems is not easily developed, communicated or taught.  However, students need to grasp the interconnectivity of organic systems and how many small synergistic systems can outperform large centralized efforts in both dollars and sustainability at multiple scales.  In the following sections, the text will examine the major roles of organics and how the systems are evolving at the level of the individual farm, the community and the food system.

The soil is the basis of organic farming whether based on cropping system, livestock or a mix of both.  Soil was traditionally managed with combinations of crop rotations, composted livestock manure and grazing systems.  The major impetus for creation of “organic agriculture” was to see if chemical substitutes could sufficiently replace the traditional systems.  In effect, according to 150 years of data from the Rothamstad plots (Jenkinson 1991), plants can grow equally well in each system with a tradeoff between micronutrients and biomass; however, there was not such an equal comparison in the sustainability of soils.  Soil carbon increases with periodic application of livestock manure to an asymptote between 6 and 8% soil organic carbon (SOC) depending on the texture of the parent soil material and cropping systems.  Plant-based agriculture can similarly maintain SOC with practices such as cover crops, legumes and pasture species, but increasing SOC in degraded soil is much slower.  The Rothamstad data (Jenkinson 1991) demonstrated that the use of chemical additives alone does not support the soil physical and biological processes.  With chemical nutrients as the sole additive, the soil carbon slowly declined leading to subsequent increase in bulk density and acidification, depending on the associated cropping systems, soil particle size, landscape and climate.  

If there was one objective where people could benefit from this publication, it would be for people to realize the difference organic agriculture makes to the soil, the environment, the farmer and the community on local and global scales.