Organic Farmers: Contributing to the Resilience of the Food System? - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 199

environmentally friendly production methods that maintain cultural landscapes”.
As the context in which farmers are to achieve this feat is increasingly complex and
uncertain, it is an understatement to say that this is going to be difficult. In this paper,
we have shown how the presence of organic practices in farming supply chains can
bring greater diversity and choice and with the constant interplay between farmers,
a farming sector can change and become more robust and resilient.
In New Zealand the presence of organic farming has challenged mainstream
agriculture (Stuart and Campbell 2004 , p. 234) and its visibility was boosted
in New Zealand's history at crisis times - the recognition of declining soil
fertility at the beginning of the twentieth century and during the depression of the
1920s and 1930s. Declining soil fertility was linked to many social ills including
“declining nutrition, colonial dependency, and reductionist technical solutions to
environmental problems” (Stuart and Campbell 2004 , p. 235) and, as far as its
adherents were concerned, practicing organics was going to protect the growing
population. However, in some parts of the world when organic products started
moving into the national and global market place, questions arose about whether
the suppliers of these markets could really be organic, so certification was pursued
by the organic sector to support its own legitimacy. Alongside that we have shown
that in fact the definition of what it means to be organic has been negotiated and
changed over time (Rosin and Campbell 2009 ). It is not static and the practices
involved become influenced by and influence non-organic farming practices.
We suggest that organics is part of a farming supply chain and as such its presence
enables and nurtures diversity (Folke et al. 2003 ; Darnhofer 2010 ; Darnhofer et al.
2010b ). The existence of diversity makes visible and possible new options to act
(Ison et al. 2000 ; Ondersteijn et al. 2006 ). If farmers are going to learn from each
other their practices have to be seen as thinkable, as in the realm of possibility, so
it is better if their practitioners and their farms appear as socially acceptable, at
least to some. Whichever way the sectors are compared it is apparent that organic
practices will be far more visible in the kiwifruit industry than in the sheep/beef and
dairy sectors - not only because of the higher participation of organic practitioners
but also because kiwifruit orchards use much less land (and so there are more of
them within a fixed area) and are more concentrated in a particular region of New
Zealand (the Bay of Plenty). We have also illustrated how organics is more socially
acceptable, even taken-for-granted (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 , p. 127) in the
kiwifruit industry and organic orchards can be considered good, and seen as one
example of the right thing to do (Bourdieu 1998 , p. 8). In the dairy industry it has
obviously been difficult to get farmers to convert to organics. Fonterra have been
stating how quickly it wished to grow the number of organic dairy farms but have
not been meeting their targets. The numbers they wished to achieve were specifically
mentioned in annual reports two years in a row (2005, 2006) and as the targets have
not been met organic dairying is no longer being encouraged.
Organics keeps visible the possibility of how things can be done in a different
way. (Some organic dairy and sheep/beef farmers told us that they were just doing
the same thing as their father or grandfather, thus keeping active that memory. This
may be seen as redundancy as retaining institutional memory of how things used