Panora, Iowa – The organics industry needs more farmers like Earl and Jeff Hafner.
Father and son, the Hafners are in the process of converting their Guthrie County, Iowa, crop land and pasture ground to organic production. They also have converted their 200-head beef cow-calf herd to organic grass-fed production.
Exploding consumer demand for organic food is outstripping supplies of organic grain, dairy products and other commodities. Growing demand, along with environmental concerns, also are driving producers like the Hafners to go organic.
Annual retail sales of organic food products now total about $13 billion in the United States, said Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of the Organic Trade Association in Greenfield, Mass. Organic fruits and vegetables are the biggest-selling products, she said, but organic meat, dairy and poultry products are among the fastest-growing in popularity.
Since the mid-1990s, when major retailers began to sell organic fluid milk, demand for it has skyrocketed.
“Now, it’s available everywhere,” DiMatteo said.
But the U.S. organics industry is struggling to keep pace with demand, said DiMatteo. Too few acres of cropland are devoted to organic production. Too little livestock is being raised without the use of antibiotics or growth hormones. And too few farmers are willing or able to farm without the use of synthetic fertilizers and chemicals.
In Iowa, organically certified acreage has grown to encompass an estimated 100,000 acres, and there are now more than 400 organic producers, said Maury Wills, who oversees organic certification at the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship in Des Moines.
But that is not enough, he and others said. Demand is soaring not only at the consumer level, but also among organic food and livestock feed manufacturers – a sector that now numbers more than 60 in Iowa.
Organic cattle producers, for instance, sometimes are hard-pressed to find enough organically grown grain to feed their livestock.
“We have huge demand for organic food products … but what we don’t have is enough organic producers,” Wills said. “It’s just a need and a cry for, hey, we need more organic acreage.” It takes three years of chemical-free crop production for farm ground to be certified for organic production.
