Organic Farmers: Contributing to the Resilience of the Food System? - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 189

filter between different practices and are open to influences external to both. For
example, all kiwifruit growers - organic or non-organic - have to prune their
vines and manage their canopies, all dairy farmers milk their cows and along with
sheep/beef farmers manage the grass supply to feed their stock. Organic farms
and orchards are not found in only one geographical area and they are very much
in the minority; they co-exist with farms and orchards using other management
systems.
Farmers look over the fences of the farms they pass in their cars, and orchardists
over their boundaries at their neighbor's properties. They talk to each other about
each other and may modify their practices accordingly (Hunt et al. 2005 , 2006 ), as
illustrated in the following two quotes taken from interviews with ARGOS farmers
and orchardists.
Interviewer: So how do you know how your farm is doing financially?
Farmer (male): The end result, I guess.
Interviewer: And what's that? What measure can detect all that?
Farmer (male): Whether it was profitable, isn't it?
Farmer (female): But that's not really how you tell.
Farmer (male): Yeah, I know. Mmmm (pause).
Farmer (female): So, um, your stock would be a measure wouldn't it? Whether the
neighbors have poorer stock than you - you can compare your stock with his. You know
if you're doing something better. A lot of its watching neighbors over the fence, isn't
it? It's seeing whether you're doing something that's good or whether they're doing
something that's bad. (conventional sheep/beef farmers).
Ah well, the fact that it's organic, there's an awful lot of people that are sort of looking over
the fence, watching what's going on. (male, organic sheep/beef farmer).
In ARGOS we are developing a concept we have named “breadth of view” (Hunt
et al. 2009 , 2011 ; Rosin et al. 2009 ) to describe the awareness a farmer/orchardist
may have of the extent of the impact of their farming practices on social and
environmental wellbeing. This developed partly out of noticing in interviews that
many organic kiwifruit orchardists claimed that growing organically meant the
world became a better place because it was being supplied with a healthy, “good
for you” product and improved the environment: “It [growing organic kiwifruit] is
for the good of the planet as well as the environment as well as myself - it's not
just for the good of my ego” (male, organic orchardist). In a survey, organic farmers
(Fairweather et al. 2009a ; Hunt et al. 2011 , pp. 173-178) assessed themselves as
having a broader social and environmental breadth of view than their conventional
or integrated counterparts. This attribute may contribute to farmers being more
open to change (Rosin et al. 2009 ). Often, because of their physical distance
from other organic practitioners, their social and business/supply networks were
more geographically distant and often international indicating that they were more
likely to come across new ideas and different ways of doing things. However, new
practices were often constrained by organic certification bodies struggling to keep
up with the products and technologies available, particularly in areas of farming
fairly new to organic certification in New Zealand such as sheep/beef and dairy
farming.