Organic Farmers: Contributing to the Resilience of the Food System? - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 186

interplay between the meanings/standards of organics and the contexts in which they
are practiced”. Rosin and Campbell ( 2009 ) suggest that the changes in organics are
more complex and involve relationships with markets, economics and politics. That
is, they are positioned within a wider agri-food system and have a strategic function.

10.4 Description of ARGOS as Empirical Basis

for Arguments

The findings reported in this chapter are taken from the Agriculture Research Group
on Sustainability (ARGOS) 5 research project (2003 to 2012). The objective of
ARGOS is to advance understanding of sustainable agriculture through the trans-
disciplinary comparison of different management systems (conventional, integrated
and organic) in three main sectors of New Zealand agriculture (sheep/beef, dairy
and horticulture). 6 Farms or orchards were selected at 12 different geographical
locations in each sector, with each location having a cluster of farms representing
different management systems - organic, integrated and conventional management,
as a way of accounting for ecological variation in analyses of the data. Each
farmer or orchardist was interviewed at least twice (Hunt et al. 2005 , 2006 ;Rosin
et al. 2007a , b ) and provided values for many economic, social and farm/orchard
management variables. Farms and orchards were also assessed ecologically.
ARGOS sheep/beef and dairy farms tend to be generational family farms,
whereas the orchard businesses are mainly individually owned but managed by
different combinations of owners, managers and pack house employees. ARGOS
farms and orchards are all operated as commercial-scale businesses, supplying
international markets with their products and so the organic farmers within ARGOS
could be said to form part of Pollan's “Industrial Organic” (Campbell and Coombes
1999 ; Pollan 2001 , p. 32). 7

10.5 Studying Organic Farming in Isolation Limits

the Understanding of the Breadth of Its Contribution

We are not going to argue for or against different views of what ways of farming are
or are not organic. Instead we will assert that organic farming is encompassed within
a much larger farming field/arena/domain of many different farm management

5 See www.argos.org.nz for more information.
6 Hence the ARGOS study complies with the assertion that trans-disciplinary approaches are
needed to study sustainable agriculture (e.g., Cousins et al. 2007 ; McIntyre et al. 2009 ; Hunt et al.
2010 ).