Report on Organic Farming Systems Research Conference, March 2011

David  Granatstein

doi:10.7273/000002569

The USDA held a national conference to examine findings from U.S. research on organic farming systems, including two key types of research—long-term farming experiments and nationwide economic producer surveys. The agenda can be found at http://www.ers.usda.gov/ConferenceCenter/OrganicFarmingSystems/. A number of the presentations were captured as webinars by eOrganic and will be available on their web site in the near future. USDA has set a specific goal to increase the number of organic farm operations by 25% from 2009 to 2015. This is in their strategic plan for the first time, and represents the leadership of Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary USDA, a person very involved in crafting the Organic Food Production Act of 1990. Organic agriculture has a much higher profile in the current administration largely due to Dr. Merrigan's role. The conference was intended to highlight the results of some of the long-term studies in the U.S. (many funded by USDA) as well as the recent USDA surveys of organic producers. Increasing (or maintaining, in the face of budget cuts) support for organic agriculture funding was likely an unspoken goal of the event. Dr. Cathy Woteki, USDA Chief Scientist, described how organic research is embedded in the USDA priorities, and said that non-earmark funding for organic is holding up so far in the President's budget. WSU was well-represented at the conference. Recipients of USDA OREI grants were encouraged to attend and present posters if they were not on the agenda. For WSU, these included organic grain (Steve Jones group, western WA; Ian Burke project, eastern WA) and organic apple (Mark Mazzola, USDA-ARS). The WSU organic farming special research grant was represented by David Granatstein with 2 posters. John Reganold delivered the opening presentation on comparing organic and conventional agriculture – what can we measure? Mykel Taylor (with co-author David Granatstein) spoke on preliminary findings from the USDA ARMS survey on apple, the first ever done on a specialty crop. Anne Schwartz, organic grower and WSU advisory board member, was part of the regional perspectives roundtable, representing Tilth Producers of Washington. The conference featured corn-soybean systems to a large extent, probably more than is representative of organic agriculture on the ground. Most of the long-term studies were in these systems, and a number of them appeared to be quite similar and duplicative. The long-term trial at USDA Beltsville showed how the organic system built up N mineralization potential over time and also increased N2O flux from some of the organic rotations. Weeds were the first drag on yields, followed by nitrogen. In Iowa, their organic plots generally yielded as well as conventional. Protein levels in corn and soybean were also the same between systems. The organic soils were higher in particulate organic matter and had greater nutrient use efficiency. For 2010, the organic plots had lower production costs ($100/ac) and higher sales ($100/ac

Report on Organic Farming Systems Research Conference, March 2011

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