Organic Farmers: Contributing to the Resilience of the Food System? - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 193

(Davison 2010 )). Two hundred and thirteen (213) registered meat export companies
(current September 2010 (New Zealand Meat Board 2010 , p. 34)) then compete
with each other in international markets to sell meat. Within these companies there
are probably only several that sell organic meat. Non-organic farmers often do not
commit to contracts to a particular company but shop around for the best price, with
the result that a processing company may not have a consistent market supply and
can end up being at the mercy of the market demand at the time. The competition
may benefit the buyers at the top end of the supply chain but the meat producer, the
farmer, who is at the bottom of the supply chain has to take what is left over after
all others in the chain have had their cut.
In a sense, some organic farmers in New Zealand cannot exist economically
without the other farmers. Though we have shown that organic farmers and
orchardists do not appear to make any more or any less profit than others 14 (Greer
and Hunt 2011 ), we also know that in the dairy and the kiwifruit sectors the
premiums paid for organic are decided by the industry not by the premium obtained
in the market. This rather negates the usefulness of this comparison. The data from
ARGOS have helped industry to decide what premium maintains an equivalence
between farmers whether organic or not. However, it indicates the dependence of
organic farmers and orchardists on the much larger, less alternative majority in
these two sectors. In other ways organics is also dependent. Fonterra was growing
its organic dairy suppliers in order to provide a wider array of products for the
market, adding to its resilience. ZESPRI similarly, uses organic kiwifruit to expand
its product range and to extend its marketing season because the organic fruit has
had longer keeping qualities.
A sector without organic practices would miss out on possible and alternative
resilient practices to conventional or normalized practices that organics make visible
and thinkable (Bourdieu 1990 , p. 59; Shucksmith 1993 , p. 468). Organic practices
have the potential to increase the biodiversity of birds and plants as well as soil
fauna and other soil characteristics. We have shown how farmers and orchardists
who practice different management systems such as organics, work to make a supply
chain or field of agriculture more resilient. Different parts of the supply chain can
enhance the resilience of producers who may produce less diverse products such as
in the kiwifruit and dairy industries, whereas the large number of competing com-
panies marketing meat products may reduce the resilience of the sheep/beef farmers
by keeping product prices low. Just as importantly, the practices of organic and non-
organic farmers can be exchanged and the diversity, availability and redundancy of
these practices add to the resilience of the supply chain at the farm level. The extent
to which organic farmers are likely to influence the resilience of a given supply
network is a factor of their relative level of acceptance as 'good farmers'.
The good farming literature suggests that the status of good farmer is awarded
by farmers to other farmers who follow cultural rules established over time by the
farming community and government policies/regulations. Because ARGOS studies