Organic Farmers: Contributing to the Resilience of the Food System? - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 197

::: you know these modern farmers like to clean things up all the time and um take out

old trees and unproductive land and put a fence up and spray out the blackberry and stuff.
Whereas we've left areas [ ]. So now it's

a block of gorse, um, with flowers and stuff. It upsets the neighbors but I don't care. Bee
keepers should be pleased, because they're moaning about a lack of pollen sources in the
winter time (male, organic mixed farmer).

::: ] it's quite steep, three or four hectares [ :::

There was a strong feeling that if you were organic you not only had dirty looking
sheep, you were also alternative in other ways - had long hair, wore sandals and
probably smoked marijuana - demonstrating both the older age on average of
sheep/beef farmers and the more traditional values. The views of the latter majority
group demonstrate how they think it is important to make the land productive and
for it to look tidy, as the flowing quotes indicate.
But you know, generally our farming policies are all pretty kosher with what you are allowed
to do, if you had to pull us up on some things I would say, they might say we're working too
much steep ground but you know it's very minimal, the damage that's done there. We're
actually developing ground that was in gorse and manuka and stuff that's now becoming
productive land (male, conventional sheep/beef).
We had this goal of a tidy farm, well run and efficient [ ]. This farm - we're fortunate

considering the shape with the layout but it wasn't really the tidy farm we wanted and
probably, because of our financial restrictions, some areas aren't yet. You know [

:::

]Ienvy
the people that buy an ugly block and have got the finances - they can just put a bulldozer
through the whole thing and start again (male conventional sheep/beef farmer).
These examples illustrate what are deemed to be acceptable farming practices in the
good farming model and how they are presented visually on a farm can determine
the acceptability of certain ways of farming or orcharding. In the kiwifruit industry
organic is a socially acceptable way to be a kiwifruit orchardist, but in the dairy and
sheep/beef sectors there are preconceived negative ideas about what organic farmers
and their farms are going to be like, which acts to discourage many farmers from
using organic practices.

:::

10.8 Some Statistics: Comparing Organic and Non-organic

Farms Across Three Different Sectors

The context in which farming takes place needs to be taken into account as it shapes
the diversity of the options available. Tables 10.1 and 10.2 demonstrate how it is
likely that organic farms are more visible in the kiwifruit sector than in the pastoral
sectors of dairying and sheep/beef, 17 whichever way it is considered - by number
of farms, or by area. This is accentuated by the fact that a kiwifruit orchard is much
smaller than a pastoral farm, being more intensive, so there are many more orchards

17 Note the figures in the following tables are derived from so many different sources that when
making comparisons between values from different sources, the values given must be regarded as