Organic Farming

Nuffield College University of Oxford

Organic Farming in Modern Economies

Organic farming continues to play a important role in agricultural production in the modern world, and its importance is increasing over time. This statement is most obviously true of developing countries and transition economies, where farmers simply cannot afford modern fertilisers and machinery. In many developing countries, agriculture has always been based on traditional organic farming techniques. In Eastern Europe - particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union - there has been a collapse in fertiliser use following the withdrawal of subsidies and structural changes in the agricultural sector. This shortage has been highlighted as a major cause of the decline in agricultural output in Russia since 1990, which is having disastrous economic and political consequences. A better understanding of organic farming would reveal the most effective substitutes for organo-nitrates, so that output could be increased in their absence.

There has also been increasing concern in the developed world about the environmental damage caused by agricultural chemicals such as organo-phosphates and herbicides. In some places this has prompted a move back towards organic farming, particularly in the European Community. But a widespread move towards organic farming would have profound consequences for the agricultural sector which have yet to be quantified. Chemical fertilisers would have to be replaced by much more complicated crop rotations and high levels of manuring - which would necessitate much more 'Mixed Farming' (that is, combined pastoral and arable production). We might need new cereal breeds which were inherently more resistant to disease, but which would probably be lower-yielding. European agriculture would become much more influenced by climatic variation and this would lead to a reorganisation of production across countries. These types of changes are difficult to predict in the absence of a model of organic production.

A New Perspective on Organic Farming

The aim of my research is to explain the variation crop yields in traditional agricultural systems, which rely entirely on organic technology. My primary motivation has been a desire to understand the pattern of European agricultural development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But my research interests are broad, and the research which I have undertaken has a wider relevance. For example, historical data are relatively scarce and there is no way in which we can generate any more observations. Hence much of my research has concentrated on how to squeeze the most information out of a limited number of observations. I have been working to link up different sources of data - and different types of data - in order to look at each problem from as many angles as possible. In this way we can hope to generate robust results. Therefore the methods which I have been developing have particular relevance to situations where the data are scarce - such as historical economies, transition economies and developing countries.

The fundamental question is to what extent the variation in yields is determined by exogenous forces (climate, topography, soil) and to what extent farmers could raise yields by artificial methods (crop rotation, manure, ploughing). The normal method of modeling crop yields used by plant scientists is to estimate a statistical model based on variables such as temperature, rainfall, soil type and fertiliser. This is known as the 'Empirical Method' (Day and Atkins, 1984). I adopt the same basic approach in my investigation, but my analysis is unusual in two ways.

First, I have been using a large sample of English farms from the eighteenth century, when the agricultural sector was based completely on organic methods. This is important because the data is entirely free from contamination by modern agricultural techniques (pest control, herbicides, chemical build-up in the soil, et cetera). Modern data from organic farms or experiments are of limited value because the data is generated in a distorted environment - many pests which would be endemic in an organic farming system have been virtually eliminated from the modern environment.

Second, my models include an exceptionally wide range of explanatory variables - such as the quantity of seed, number of ploughings and type of crop rotation. In modern farming systems these factors are unimportant compared to the impact of chemical fertilisers, so very little attention has been paid to modeling them. Moreover, since modern farmers do not rotate crops to any great extent, the modern data on the productivity of different rotational systems is very scarce. But ploughing practices and crop rotation are crucial in organic farming systems and we need to assess accurately their contribution to productivity.

There is currently a great deal of interest in organic farming right across Europe. But there is very little information on what the European agricultural sector would look like if it were completely organic. Our knowledge of traditional organic farming systems in developing countries is also quite weak. These issues are central to government policies on both domestic agriculture and overseas aid. The analysis of historical data can shed further light on these question from a novel source.