ORGANIC farming has moved from the hippie communes of Nimbin and hobby farms of Gippsland into the boardrooms, bank accounts, farming empires and bottom-line strategic thinking of corporate Australia.

A new survey to be released today by IBISWorld shows organic farming is a $655 million industry, growing at a phenomenal 12 per cent a year.

Organic produce also has emerged for the first time as a significant export earner, particularly organic meat sold to the US, with total exports valued at $66m last year.

IBISWorld analyst ­Caroline Finch said sales of organic produce still made up only 1 per cent of all income to farmers at the farmgate.

But by 2018, the IBIS report predicts organic farming will be a $1 billion mainstream agricultural industry, driven by continuing consumer demand for food that is healthy, safe, chemical-free and grown in a manner that is kinder to the environment and animals.

“Organic meat has been the big growth areas; it is something Australian producers can do really well because a lot of cattlemen and sheep farmers in the rangeland and outback areas aren’t using chemicals in the first place,” Ms Finch said.

“This is a very attractive space for producers to be in — and they are responding to the consumer demand — because it is one of the few areas of agriculture where you know your buyers are prepared to pay a premium for the food you produce.”

However, the number of ­organic farmers has not jumped despite the rapid growth in the ­organic industry, driven by major supermarket corporations Coles and Woolworths — which sell 60 per cent of all organic produce in Australia — demanding larger, more regular and more quality consistent consignments of ­organic food.

To fill the gap, several corporate and large specialist organic producers have recently seized the opportunity to benefit from the higher prices paid by consumers for food grown without chemicals and fertilisers on officially certified organic land. Organic produce sells at between 1.5 and two times the price of conventionally grown food.

“Australia has the largest area of organic farmland in the world at an estimated 12 million hectares, with the majority of rangelands used for organic cattle production,” the IBIS report says.

“As the industry undergoes rapid change, the type of farmers is also changing; over the past five years larger organic farm businesses have emerged to meet the demands for organic produce by large retailers and supermarkets.”

One such rising organic producer is former Air France and Virgin international pilot Paul Martin. A former Broken Hill boy, he returned to the outback three years ago to become pastoral manager for listed agricultural corporation Tandou, running a flock of 7000 organic Dorper breed ewes on 111,000ha of certified organic lease land owned by the company near Menindee Lakes in far western NSW.

Every year, the company aims to sell 10,000 organic lambs to local and export markets — with some of its organic lambs ending up in Woolworths, and the rest in the US.

Hardy Dorper sheep, originally bred in South Africa, are ideal for outback conditions such as the grassy downs, billabongs, baked claypans and bluebush of Tandou estate because they shed their wool and don’t need to be shorn, and thrive in environments where merinos or other European meat sheep would not,

Mr Martin said his lambs are fetching $6.50 a kilo as organic sheep, compared with $6 for conventionally reared produce, ­almost a 10 per cent premium.

“It means we get abut $148 a head rather than $132; that’s a big difference when you are running a big operation like ours,” Mr Martin said yesterday.

“And by default a lot of this rangeland western division lease land is organic because there is no need for fertilisers or chemical to be used on this country, because we don’t need to dip, jet or drench Dorpers for flies, worms or ­anything because they are so hardy,” he said.

“So for a company like Tandou, running an organic sheep business to earn the price premiums there for both export and local markets from organics makes good financial sense.”

Organic Farming may be solution to World Hunger

It's been a good year for Saskatchewan's organic farmers. First, prices for some organic crops are quadruple those of conventional grains. Second, due to the vagaries of the rail transportation system, organic growers have had more success getting their crop to market this year than conventional farmers. And since they do not use chemical inputs, costs are lower, resulting in higher net income.

Actually, it's been a good year for organic agriculture worldwide.

The organic approach is gradually shedding the "it can't feed the world" myth. In fact, report after report came out this year saying it may be the only way to feed the world, even as the population rises by 50 per cent over the course of this century.

According to the final report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, there are strong environmental arguments in favour of agroecology, a type of organic production that reduces the use of external inputs and maximizes resource efficiency through intercropping, recycling organic residues and agroforestry. (Find the report at www.srfood. org.) Agroecology also offers social and health benefits. Diverse farming systems contribute to better nutrition by providing varied diets for communities that produce their own food. Because agroecology reduces the cost of farming by minimizing expensive inputs, it improves the livelihoods of farming households, particularly the poorest. And because it is knowledge-intensive and generally more labour-intensive, it creates employment opportunities in rural areas.

Though easier to implement on smaller-sized farms, De Schutter says agroecological techniques can also inspire reforms in how large production units operate.

He argues that the one-dimensional quest to produce more food, which is the rational for high-input industrial agriculture, "crowds out" other objectives such as supplying diverse, culturally-acceptable food, supporting smallholders, sustaining soil and water resources, and raising food security within particularly vulnerable areas. That's why his report calls for the world's food systems to be "radically and democratically redesigned."

The idea that we need to poison the land and food with chemicals to produce enough to feed the world is wrong-headed.

We already produce more than enough food. In fact, according to the Canadian resource expert Vaclav Smil, the current agri-food system could feed more than 10 billion people with no additional inputs.

This could be done by increasing water and fertilizer efficiencies, reducing post-harvest losses, reducing food waste, and eating healthier diets.

The problem of hunger is not one of supply, but of poverty. Most of the extreme poor are small farm families in low-income countries.

This is also where most of the additional 3.7 billion people expected by century's end will live. The hunger problem can be solved by helping these people to produce more food for local use. And according to De Schutter and others, the best way to do this is through agroecology, which works particularly well on the small holdings that produce about half the world's food supply.

He also explains that the policy of producing everhigher volumes of food for export from high-income countries has a crippling impact on small producers in low-income countries, which is a major cause of rural poverty and hunger. So the idea that farmers in Canada, the U.S. or Europe need to increase chemical inputs to boost production in order to feed the world is mistaken. It's a myth told to build agribiz profits, not to feed the poor.

Way back in the 1980s, Saskatoon's late great ecologist Stan Rowe was a voice crying in the wilderness when he "risked martyrdom by voicing the thought that maybe, just maybe, good agricultural practice requires a decrease in production, not an increase." By removing the burden of sole responsibility to feed the world, farmers in Saskatchewan and the other exporting countries can switch their focus to restoring ecosystem functions and producing the best quality, pesticide-free foods. We need to start paying farmers for ecological services, not just food. The money can come from repurposing perverse subsidies on fossil fuels and farming, estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be over $2 trillion a year worldwide.

Organic farming grows to 1,200 hectares

NASHIK: The state government has increased the organic farming area in Nashik division from 800 hectares to 1,200 hectares to promote the form of agriculture and discourage use of chemical fertilizers.
Two years ago, the area under organic farming, which largely depends on techniques such as crop rotation, green manure, compost and biological pest control, was 100 acres. The state government mooted organic farming clusters in 2012-13 and set up eight clusters of 100 hectares each. Now, it has added four more clusters in 2013-14. Four more will be set up in 2014-15.

Beetles that taste like mustard

Flea beetles outwit their host plant’s mustard oil bomb and use it for their own purposes

Almost all herbivorous insects are specialized to feed on specific host plants and have adapted to their chemical defenses. Flea beetles are important pests of cabbage and other cruciferous plants, such as mustard, horseradish and rapeseed. These plants use a sophisticated defense system, known as the mustard oil bomb, to get rid of their enemies : If plant tissues are wounded, glucosinolates and an enzyme known as myrosinase come into contact, and, as a result, toxic metabolites are formed which deter most insects. This defensive mechanism, however, has no negative effect on flea beetles, according to scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. Flea beetles are even able to sequester glucosinolates without the mustard oil bomb being set off by the plant’s enzyme. Moreover, the insects use their own myrosinase and can utilize the plants’ defensive chemicals for their own purposes. The beetles’ mustard oil bomb is likely to fend off predators.

Plants defend themselves against herbivores by employing a large arsenal of chemical substances, so-called secondary metabolites. In return, many insects have counter-adapted to plant defenses and can feed on their host plants without any problems. The “arms race” between plants and insects is behind the amazing variety of different species; variations emerged in the course of co-evolution of those two major groups of organisms. Some insects − leaf beetles or tobacco hornworms, for example − even utilize plant metabolites for their own defenses.

Franziska Beran, head of the research group “Sequestration and Detoxification in Insects” at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues study flea beetles (Phyllotreta). The small pest insects, whose name refers to their impressive jumping ability, prefer to feed on the young leaves of all cabbage species and their method of feeding causes a characteristic pitting damage. They are despised by gardeners and farmers. Before she started working on her PhD project at the Berlin Humboldt University, the young scientist completed an internship at the AVRDC-The World Vegetable Center in Taiwan, where she first learned about the devastating damage this beetle species causes on cabbage cultures in Southeast Asia. Her PhD thesis focused on how the insects aggregate and she asked if they use pheromones and plant odors as olfactory cues. She found out that male flea beetles emit a pheromone that attracts conspecifics; however, the attraction occurs only in conjunction with plant volatiles. At the core of her analyses were the degradation products of glucosinolates, plant metabolites that are responsible for the all-too-familiar smell of cabbage.

For their current project, the scientists compared glucosinolates in the host plants to the volatile degradation products that are formed when beetles feed on the plants, damaging plant tissues. The plant defense mechanism − called the mustard oil bomb because the degradation products that are formed are toxic − consists of two components: the glucosinolate and the activating enzyme myrosinase. Usually, the glucosinolate-myrosinase system is a highly efficient defense strategy cabbage plants deploy to deter herbivores. However, it does not repel the flea beetles, which readily infest the plants. Analyses showed that volatile degradation products were present when plants were infested with flea beetles, but the substances were not emitted by the plants. It appeared that the flea beetles themselves were emitting the volatile glucosinolate metabolites. Further experiments revealed that flea beetles can take up and store an amount of glucosinolates equivalent to almost 2% of their own body weight. Although cabbage plants contain a large variety of different glucosinolates, the beetles sequester only some of them. Franziska Beran made a surprising conclusion: “The beetles have evolved their own activating myrosinase which specifically hydrolyzes the glucosinolates which they have sequestered from the plants.”

The research results indicate that flea beetles not only survive the cabbage plants’ mustard oil bomb unscathed, the insects even utilize selectively sequestered glucosinolates for their own purposes. Aphids are known to deploy a similar strategy. However, unlike aphids, which suck the phloem by tapping individual plant cells, flea beetles are chewing insects that wound leaf tissues. Such wounding  should activate the mustard oil bomb but does not. Why this is the case and why flea beetles are able to sequester intact glucosinolates is still a mystery. Somehow the insects manage to inactivate the plant’s myrosinase. The researchers want to find out where the beetles store the glucosinolates, how they control their own mustard oil bomb, and why they can hydrolyze glucosinolates without being poisoned by the resulting degradation products. Particularly interesting is the question: Why do the insects sequester glucosinolates and how do they control glucosinolate hydrolysis with their own enzyme? “On the one hand, either the glucosinolates or their degradation products may play an important role in the beetles’ communication with conspecifics. On the other hand, they may have a specific function in the insects’ defense against their own enemies,” Franziska Beran hypothesizes. She also wonders about the beetle larvae which live underground and feed on roots. They are exposed to many predators and pathogens and a good chemical defense is definitely advantageous.

Behavioral studies will now also be used in order to elucidate the ecological function of glucosinolate sequestration in flea beetles. Better understanding of insect adaptation to plant chemical defenses will likely contribute to better control of mass occurrences of agricultural pests that are a major problem worldwide. [AO/FB]

Nearly two million organic farmers worldwide

A recent report from Organic-Market info about the latest edition of the FiBL-IFOAM survey on organic agriculture worldwide, which was launched at BIOFACH 2014.

Helga Willer, editor of the yearbook "The World of Organic Agriculture" 

There are 1.9 certified organic farmers in 164 countries, who cultivate 37.5 million hectares and have a worldwide turnover of 63.8 billion  US-dollars: that’s what the organic movement had achieved by 2012. The global trend remains positive, but the aims of the organic movement go far beyond that. The 2014 edition of the FiBL-IFOAM study “The World of Organic Agriculture” recorded by the end of 2012 more turnover (10% growth in the USA, the biggest organic market), more organically operating farmers (+5%) and more organically managed land (+0.5%).
At BIOFACH both "The World of Organic Agriculture" as well as the new study "Organic in Europe" were presented. For more information about these handbooks see right margin.

Going organic is new mantra of mango farmers

SURAT: A few farmers in south Gujarat have begun growing organic mangoes, as this improves the tree's immunity against pests without using fertilizers or pesticides. These farmers believe organic mangoes will have easier access to new markets, even after the ban on import of Indian mangoes by the United Kingdom.

Organic farming assures farmers good returns with lower production costs. Organic products also have high demand. Farmers don't need to search for markets, as customers book in advance and buy produce directly from them.
Of the 57,000 hectares under mango cultivation in Surat, Navsari and Valsad, nearly 2,800 hectares are under organic mango farming, according to agriculture experts.

"My entire mango produce has been booked in advance. My regular customers find these mangoes the best in taste and quality. I had 250 mango trees earlier and have now planted 800 more. I don't use any fertilizers or pesticides," said Nilkanth Pandya, a farmer in Surat.

Pandya's customers book his crop in advance at Rs 1,500 per 20kg, which is almost double the price of the mangoes in the market.

"Organically grown mango plants have higher immunity against diseases and the output is also good," Pandya added.

Ramesh Patel, a certified organic farmer from Jokha village near Surat, said, "I don't need to go to the market to look for customers. People buy mangoes directly from my farm. And the price is higher compared to regular mangoes." Patel has 2,000 mango trees on his farm. These started giving fruits last year.

"Organic methods help improve the tree's immunity. It boosts microbial activity which keeps the tree in good health for a long period. Organic farming is gradually attracting farmers of the region," said Nikunj Patel, deputy director (Bagayat), Navsari.

Mahesh Patel, a farmer from Jokha village near Surat, is has 2,200 mango plants on his 10-acre farm. "Organic farming is also financially beneficial for horticulturists. It is better for the consumers' health too. More agriculturists are taking up organic mango farming now," said Mahesh.

"Farmers are getting good results from organic mango farming. It accounts for 5% of the total production in South Gujarat now," said J J Pastagia, programme coordinator of Krushi Vigyan Kendra of Navsari Agriculture University, Surat campus.

Domesticated animals provide vital link to emergence of new diseases

Research at the University of Liverpool suggests pets and other domesticated animals could provide new clues into the emergence of infections that can spread between animals and humans.

Pets and other domesticated animals could provide new clues into the emergence of infections that can spread between animals and humans. The study showed that the number of parasites and pathogens shared by humans and animals is related to how long animals have been domesticated. The findings suggest that although wild animals may be important for the transmission of new diseases to humans, humanity's oldest companions -- livestock and pets such as cattle and dogs -- provide the vital link in the emergence of new diseases.

The study showed that the number of parasites and pathogens shared by humans and animals is related to how long animals have been domesticated.

The findings suggest that although wild animals may be important for the transmission of new diseases to humans, humanity's oldest companions -- livestock and pets such as cattle and dogs provide the vital link in the emergence of new diseases.

Using data sourced from existing studies and information collected together in the Liverpool ENHanCEd Infectious Diseases (EID2) database, the researchers cross-referenced all known cases of parasites and pathogens in domestic animals with the length of time they have been domesticated by man.

In dogs, which have been domesticated for over 17,000 years, there were 71 shared parasites and pathogens, and in the 11,000 year association between humans and cattle, 34 have accumulated.

Epidemiologist, Dr Marie McIntyre was part of the study team. She said: "We don't have enough knowledge of how new diseases get from wildlife into humans.

"This study shows that domesticated animals can play an important role in that process and that diseases have been shared in this way for thousands of years."

The research examined 'centrality', to determine which domestic animals are in the middle of a web of shared infections. These animals are most active in spreading disease to other domesticated species. This 'centrality' linked directly with the length of time since domestication.

The EID2 database used in the study was created by University researchers in the Institute of Infection and Global Health to bring a 'big data' approach to emerging diseases. It contains information from more than 60 million papers, pieces of electronic reference material and textbooks on the spread and emergence of pathogens around the world, and can be cross-referenced with data on climate change, which also affects the spread of some diseases.

Dr McIntyre said: "Using data in this way can help us address the major threat of new diseases and the spread of existing diseases caused by climate change.

"Vast amounts of research are being carried out in this field, yet it isn't easy to search or draw patterns from it. As with this research into domestic animals, a database can help by bringing huge amounts of evidence together in one place."

SOURCE:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140516092301.htm