Undermining the organic idealists

To clear a wheelbarrow-path to the early apple tree, the rosy Worcester Pearmain, took a visit from a kind friend with a strimmer, scything slowly through chest-high grasses and rank meadow-weeds. The tree, unpruned, unsprayed from year to year, was a story-book picture of plenty, heavy with flawless fruit in the midst of all that riotous vegetation.

To anyone who looks at nature, the idea that a crowd of different plants growing together often seems to do better than a plot of just one kind, will come as no surprise. It fits with the simplest traditional ways of growing food for a family, and equally with organic systems such as permaculture and companion planting. But the notion that plant diversity brings higher productivity is also thoroughly scientific, as some important trials have been proving.

One of these is a European project called Biodepth, which ended its first phase last year. Born of concern with the current mass extinction of species by human activity, it set out to study what happens to plant ecosystems if biodiversity is lost. Scientists in seven countries, including a team in UCC, set up grassland test plots in which they mixed plants in a varying range of botanical groups and species, from mono-culture - just one kind - up to the full range of local diversity (a "natural" corner of a Co Cork field could have about eight or nine species).

They found that the fewer the different species in the plot, the less substantial was the leaf-mass, the greater the insect attack and the more nitrogen was finally lost from the soil. Now they will test what happens when the plots are stressed by drought or nutrition problems. The plots with most species seem certain to have the best insurance against failure.

Last month, the science journal Nature reported on one of the biggest farming trials ever conducted, in China. This compared the results of growing hundreds of hectares of a single, hi-tech variety of rice against the older, traditional practice of planting several different kinds in one field. To wide amazement, the mix of strains yielded almost one-fifth more rice per acre and virtually escaped attack by rice blast, the fungus that usually needs repeated chemical spraying.

Such results help to challenge the ruthless forces that are pushing the world's farmers into relying on fewer and fewer seedstrains, engineered and patented by transnational corporations. And in Ireland, the agricultural "progress" that ploughed up our semi-natural grasslands and replaced them with chemical-dependent, rye-grass mono-cultures seems even more ecologically doubtful. It certainly hasn't been good for nature, reducing the diversity not only of plants but of insects and birds - but has it been all that good for the farmer either?

As trials of diversity multiply, the case for organic farming gets better and better, matched by rising consumer demand for guaranteed healthy food. Those who have given decades of their lives to proving that organic methods work, and building up the standards of the movement, should feel on top of the world. Who would ever have expected to hear an Irish Minister for Agriculture roundly endorsing organic food production and promising millions to help 70,000 farmers convert from conventional methods?

It seemed almost too good to be true, even allowing for the gulf in motivation between Joe Walsh, Minister for Agriculture, and the average organic practitioner. What Walsh and his department colleagues mean by "organic" is unlikely to reflect a great depth of conviction: - theirs is not an ecological culture, still less a holistic one. Rather, they will go for the least amount of change that enables our farmers to lay hands on a booming market, notably that for organically-produced lamb, beef and poultry.

Consumers aren't experts in food production. What most understand by "organic" is a straightforward absence of poisons and genetic modification. But even if they have no idea of the strictness and detail of real organic standards, or the effort that goes into policing them within the organic community, they have, somehow, taken in the idea that its farmers and growers can be trusted. Their evident integrity is what makes organic food "safer".

Governments can have great problems with promoting what amounts to a radical subversion of agribusiness, a whole philosophy lived for real. They see the public demand, but quail at its implications. In the US, "organic" standards proposed by the US Department of Agriculture would allow closed animal factories to be considered organic, and leave loopholes for future use of genetic engineering and food irradiation. They are assailed by protests from a militant organic movement.

In Europe, after eight years of discussions with organic farming groups, the final EU standards for organic livestock production are so minimal that no country has yet adopted them. No country, that is, except Ireland.

Early this year, at the Department of Agriculture's request, the three organic certification bodies in Ireland (Irish Organic Farmers' and Growers' Association, Organic Trust and Demeter) agreed one set of standards for organic livestock production: 85 pages with specific details on soil management, feedstuffs, veterinary treatment and so on. They were not at all extreme, but were quite firm, for example, that "organic lamb" has to have been born on a registered organic farm and not just lodged there for its last couple of months.

To be told, out of the blue, that the EU standards would be used instead, was a bitter disappointment. Quite as wounding was the department's decision to set up a new inspection body and take over the certification that the "organic three" had been carrying out. Its sudden hijacking of expertise and authority appalled the 1,000 farmers at the core of the organic community, and seemed to confirm their worst fears of an opportunistic manipulation of the "organic" label.

There has been a quantum leap in official thinking: few will sneer now at the market success of "the muck-and-magic brigade". But it's a leap that can't be allowed to tear free from the roots and the soil of organic philosophy. It's more than just a label.