The Real Price of Organic Farming

After a brief investigation into the technical differences between organic and conventional farming practices last week I think it is apparent that organic farms can be sustainable. In fact, many of the studies I cited last week point out that organic farms are often more environmentally friendly than conventional ones. Still, as this article on the Ethicurean rightly observes, there is a price to pay for being organic, and that price might be undesirable labor practices.

Why is this? The answer is that organic farms for the most part use less machinery and chemicals to solve the problems of farming and instead do things by hand. In other words, these farms employ workers to do things like weeding, setting pest traps and keeping animal quarters clean than do conventional farms.

According to this study (PDF form) I found by the University of Maine, hired-labor is one of the two factors that make organic dairy farming so expensive compared to conventional methods. It also notes that organic farms use considerably more hired-labor than non-organic farms.

What does this mean? It means that while organic farms may be a good move towards sustainable farming they are still a costlier one. Because organic farms require a lot of labor they are generally more expensive to maintain and that is one reason that organic food costs so much. The increased labor demands of an organic farm can also result in practices that are out of line with human rights ideals and labor union groups. Because organic farms have to compete with farms that have significantly lower labor needs, they often employ non-unionized and immigrant labor which is cheaper overall than union workers. This study (PDF form) titled “Farm Labor Conditions on Organic Farms in California” showed me that the average non-organic farm provided better benefits and wages to its workers than did organic farms of the same scale. The question we have to ask is can organic farms be both sustainable and humane?

After reading up about the issue of labor in organic farming I was naturally a little discouraged to find that human rights and sustainable organic practices were in some senses at odds with one another. However, I was excited to stumble upon the Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, which is the only organic strawberry farm in the country that has a contract with the United Farm Workers Union.

Their statement on the issue of labor which can be found here on their website is one that makes the difficulty of working within the parameters of both organic and humane work practice sound easy. Furthermore it shows that even though the difficulty may in fact be great, it can be done and there is no question that it is the right thing to do.