What you can say when marketing organic 2020 - Flipbook - Page 6
Telling the organic story
Our farming and food production systems have multiple and often ‘hidden’ problems that
need solving. Some argue you can’t fix everything all at once, but organic does a pretty
good job! The true strength of organic is how it attempts to tackle these multiple problems
and reduce any trade-offs – by taking a holistic “whole system” approach.
But this is a complicated concept to get across. We recommend taking a narrative or visual
approach to tell this organic ‘story’; the way organic standards tackle a wide range of often
hidden, interrelating problems in the food system. It is about how simply looking for an
organic label can make a very complicated choice, somewhat easier. The claims in this
booklet are here, not so much as standalone facts, but to help you to convey this story, or at
least a feel for it, using language that has been verified and can be backed up by science.
If you plot sustainability as a flower, where the degree of positive impact on different components of
sustainability are shown by the size of the petal, then organic farming has been found to have a more
balanced, full flower shape compared to non-organic farming.
Yield
Soil quality
Nutritional
Quality
Minimise
energy use
Minimise
pesticide
residues
Biodiversity
Minimise water
pollution
Reduce worker
exposure to
pesticides
Profitability
Employment
of workers
Ecosystem
services
6
Total costs
Figure 4 in Reganold, J. P., & Wachter, J. M.
(2016). Organic agriculture in the twenty-first
century. Nature Plants, 2(2), 15221.
https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2015.221