Organic food: expense only because of low sales volume?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been thinking of joining a CSA, because I love farm-fresh local organic produce, but it’s so damn expensive to buy somewhere like Whole Foods or a farmer’s market - frequently double the cost or more. But if I join a CSA (I’m thinking of this one, because they offer half-shares, which makes more sense for one person - Mom belongs to this one, and splits a share with a friend, and she loves it), the produce will cost the same, or even cheaper, as conventional produce in a supermarket.

So why the price difference? Cutting out the middlemen should be part of it, and getting only what’s in peak season should be part of it. But is organic produce really twice as expensive to, well, produce as conventional chemically fertilized produce? Or is it partly a function of the much lower volume of organic produce grown in the U.S.? If everyone ate organic, would it become a lot cheaper than it is now? I don’t know where to begin doing the math on this one.

(Thoug I did notice, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, that the organic farmers’ markets there were much cheaper than the ones here. But then we were basically on top of a huge produce famring region.)

2

Just a brief stab at an answer,and only one aspect of organic programs;the certification,“paperwork” involved is staggering and for a small producer a major PITA.All the inputs have to be certified,i.e. say you get manure from an outside source,it too must be verifiable as organic,and sometimes the next step up the chain as well.

3

“Carson O’Genic”: Funniest name to come up in a long while! :stuck_out_tongue:
Nothing on the OP, though.

4

More labor intensive, smaller yield , less demand, higher shipping costs, I’m sure there are other factors.

5

Economies of scale are gigantic in the food business. They’re probably the biggest factor.

There are attempts now to scale up the size of organic farms to try to achieve cost reductions, but there are real questions over whether they can be organic in the way people think of as “true” organic. (There was a big article on this in Business Week earlier in the year.) It’s next to impossible to make organic farming larger than an individual farmer (or small co-op) can give attention to. If the market for organic food grows, it may have the paradoxical effect of driving prices up, because you can’t increase the size of organic farms quickly and that would mean more people competing for a limited resource. There is no way that we can turn over all the farmland in the U.S. to organic farms. Check the article for reasons.

6

Wal-Mart is making a big push into organics, so look for the prices of organic foods to start coming down. For all the evil that Wallyworld does, they force their suppliers to be as efficient as possible.

7

I got nothin’ on costs, but I can tell you we subscribed to a CSA for a couple of years. For a two-person family it was an unhappy & disheartening experience. The produce was wonderful, but …

Week 1: We get 10 lbs of magnificent turnips, a romaine-lettuce-head-sized bunch of beautiful flavorful fresh-picked basil, and 4 celery heads. We try to eat & give away as much as we can. We eat 5 turnips each, have basil on everything (even breakfast eggs) and get through 1 celery head.

In other words, we consume about 1/4th of the fresh organic goodies from the nice farmer we know & care about. They were far tastier & presumably healthier than the store-bought kind, and we enjoyed making a real production out of cooking & eating, but there’s only so much two people can eat.
Week 2: Farmer sez the basil’s coming in now, so we get three romaines-worth. And 2 lbs of small potatoes, plus 15 lbs of turnips. And 5 celeries & 2 lbs of carrots. We eat as best we can, building recipes around what we got. And we barely eat 20% of it, not to mention the stuff still left over from week 1.

Repeat for another 16 weeks, with the particular veggies & spices changing with the seasons. We got some familiar stuff, and lots of oddballs as well. What to do with 15 lbs of broccoli rabe (which is nothing like broccoli) or 12 lbs of kale, or even 10 lbs of parsnips?
My bottom line: unless you are feeding 10 people 2 or 3 dinner-style meals every day, running a restaurant, or are an avid home canner, the reality is that a CSA is impractical. You get waay waay too much of a couple things, way too much total quantity, and not enough variety compared to what we’re used to. You also cede all control over what you eat to the vagaries of what they planted & when it’s ready for picking.

Finally, because you know the people involved, and how hard they labored to produce each fruit or veg, you feel terrible when you end up pitching 3-week old stuff to make room for next week’s oversupply. So you try to savor each item, be it weird or vastly too much or whatever, and the ultimate reward (in addition to some superb meals) is a guilt trip as the rotting excess parsnips sit there sullenly rebuking you for wasting precious hand-grown food.

The third year we subscribed again, but told him to keep the money & give our food share to a shelter. That felt a lot better.

8

You should read the article I cited.

There is not enough true organic food grown in the U.S. to satisfy Wal-Mart’s needs, even if all the other stores were to give up on organic. Only “organic-style” foods, grown on a larger scale without the individual attention that people assume happens when they buy organic, is possible, and even that doesn’t yet exist.

Prices for organic will not come down when Wal-Mart enters the market. Quality will. Or at least the definition of organic will change. It yet remains to be seen if people will tolerate that.

9

It doesn’t have to be that way. Organic farmers are in the minority right now, but their numbers are increasing.

Nor does it have to be more labor intensive than conventional farmer. Indeed, Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening magazines have been arguing for years that it’s actually less labor intensive than conventional farming methods.

10

Sorry, but I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe that you can scale it up to the volumes needed.

11

I don’t see why not. In all the years I’ve been reading about organic farming, you’re the first person to state that it’s more labor intensive than conventional farming. Also, farming methods are constantly evolving, so it’s not as if we’re limited to a single method.

When organic farming first started gaining notority people claimed that organic farmers would never be able to make a profit, and yet, today, most of them do.

12

Part of the problem is that consumer have become accustomed to getting whatever fresh produce they want, whenever they want it. I’d bet that the majority of people, under 30 to 35, don’t even realize that there are growing seasons. Then of course we’ve got companies, like the Heinz example above, turning out “organic” prepared foods.
I think the whole “organic” thing is more hoopla than health benefit and often just another way to bilk the consumer.

13

I should be clearer: there are various levels of organic farming, as indicated above. Organic farming methods can be both cost effective and labor saving. However, it becomes increasingly harder to achieve both as you strive either for more purism or try to scale up to mass market sizes.

Again, please read the article I cited for examples of how hard this is and why organic is going to mean a variety of different things to different consumers, sellers, and producers in the future. Is Stonyfield Farm what people mean by organic or does it have to be done Butterworks Farm style? If the latter, you cannot have organic as in local farms selling local products to local consumers in a mass market. It currently cannot be done.

14

Organic farming just means that no synthetic additives are used. Other than that, an “organic farm” is free to use all the modern technological agri-factory methods that are available.

15

That hasn’t been my mom’s experience at all. She gets a very nice variety of stuff, and half a share is just about right for her. She is a vegephile, but not a vegetarian. (About the same as me.) And I love to try new recipes and such, so I think it’s going to be a lot of fun - I’m really leaning toward doing it.

As for the romaine-size bunch of basil? Pesto all the way, baby! Simple to make, and freezes fabulously. Homemade pesto from organic basil in February will taste mind-blowingly wonderful.

16

My friend moved from California to New Zealand last year. He started by complaining that he couldn’t get everything he wanted all the time, but then realised that only being able to eat what was in season was actually making his family healthier.

The things they have to do to make everything available everywhere all year do not make for the tastiest, most nutririous produce.

17

This is true - especially for things like tomatoes. Also, it applies to the things they have to do to make the produce suitable for the requirements of major supermarket chains -breeding for uniformity of size and shape, durability in transit, long shelf life, single large yields - placing the emphasis on these attributes moves the focus away from the considerations that make a cultivar good to eat.

Also, there’s a psychological component - if you only eat produce in season, it seems to taste better because you’ve had a break from it and have been looking forward to eating it again.

18

A few years ago a frozen food chain in the UK called Iceland had a founder and boss called Malcolm Walker who suddenly decided that organic was good. Pretty odd as Iceland is fairly downmarket.

Anyway the organic stuff was barely noticably more expensive than the ‘inorganic’ produce.

My understanding is that farmers see very little of the retail price of food.

19

Eva Luna, here in Piedmont NC, we have an amazing support network for small farmers, the one’s who do CSA. At that level, it is more cost intensive to provide organic produce. The farmers apply sustainable, and innovative, agricultural practices, which go beyond an “organic” label. This costs more, but is better for the land and health of the area. It takes more effort for a small farmer to get up and running than by conventional methods, to build up the soil, and get more areas under tillage, to further production, so a CSA share is really an investment in the farmer’s future, and, a vote for wanting better food sources.

At this point, no, I doubt that organic methods of farming can feed the world, as bloated as the population has become, but, we are at a starting point for a learning curve with it. And we have to start somewhere. My own self; in this area, I have the luxury of eating less, and sustainably raised food, to survive. I’m thankful for it. So many sustainable Ag/organic farmers I know here are dedicated to teaching in other countries/having interns from other countries to learn better methods of supplying food .

One local, very devoted Ag agent here has compiled a very informative web page for our area. Lots of good info there.