Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Ongoing changes in mainstream agriculture, particularly those driven by the environmental
and human health agendas of reducing pesticide use and environmental contamination are
likely to narrow the gap between organic and conventional research needs. The focus of much
conventional research on finding new, acceptable input products to solve technical problems
will have to be replaced by research of the ecological and social aspects that will allow inputs to
be reduced. This change should allow wider application of research on organic farming to con-
ventional systems and
vice
versa
. In the past, the conventional sector has sometimes claimed
that zero N or zero agrochemical treatments in variety trials are relevant information for
organic agriculture. This shows a misunderstanding of the systems concept of organic farming
which means that crop production in organic systems is more a function of past cropping and
environment than of current management, a concept described by Olesen (1999) as the
'memory' of the system.
Research in organic farming - peer reiews and publication
It is relatively easy to quantify research effort in terms of amounts of government money spent
on organic farming. It is harder to quantify the outcomes of this research and more difficult still
to estimate its value to the industry. Conventionally, research output in UK universities and
research institutions is on the basis of refereed publication output. The number of refereed
journal articles produced annually with the words organic, biological, ecological or biodynamic
farm, farms, agriculture or farming in the title, keywords or abstract has increased dramatically
since 1980. The number of refereed publications cited in the Science Citation Index on organic
farming increased from 21 in 1981-1985 to 286 between 1996 and 2000 (Watson and Atkinson
2002). This clearly ref lects an increase in research funding but may also ref lect a greater accept-
ance of the importance of understanding the underlying biology and socioeconomics of organic
systems. Although publication in high impact factor refereed publications may be a suitable
indicator of scientific quality in fundamental science, it is less useful in applied science (as
defined by OECD 2003). Several researchers have highlighted difficulties in publishing work on
organic farming systems in refereed journals (e.g. MacRae
et
al
. 1989). Two journals were started
explicitly to allow publication of such work: the
American
Journal
of
Alternative
Agriculture
(1986) (now titled
Renewable
Agriculture
and
Food
Systems
) and
Biological
Agriculture
and
Hor-
ticulture
(1982). Neither of these journals is highly rated through the conventionally used impact
factor system that depends on citations in other refereed journals. Publication of studies of
organic farming has become much more common in mainstream agricultural systems journals,
although there is still concern among scientists over publication of truly interdisciplinary work,
especially research that aims to integrate the social and natural sciences.
To this end, the
International
Journal
of
Agricultural
Sustainability
was started in 2003.
A 'fit for purpose' criterion may be much more useful in trying to assess the value of applied
organic farming research to end-users. With respect to organic farming, much of the research
has been reported in conference proceedings and other forms of grey literature as illustrated
by the inclusion of over 100,000 abstracts on organic research on the CABI publishing website
(CABI 2006). Grey literature has been one of the most prevalent routes of knowledge transfer
in organic farming (Woodward 2002a). There are often long lags between expenditure and
final output from research, estimated by Barnes (1999) of 16 years and upwards. Participative
approaches to research may cut this time lag significantly with regard to stakeholders. Preprint
archives with full-text papers can speed up the communication to other researchers considera-
bly (e.g. Taubes 1996). The recently established web-based archive Organic Eprints (Organic
Eprints 2006) is an open, international archive for research in organic agriculture that accepts,
for example, preprints, published papers, reports, project descriptions and popular articles.
The main objectives of the archive are to facilitate the communication of research papers and
