Differentiating Organics: Performing Multiple Objects to Organize Singular Markets for Organic Tea and Biscuits in the UK - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 70

by an inspector, this is the nature of a free-lance inspector. The more trainings and
diplomas (certifications) the inspector has, the more jobs s/he can take on per year.
This means that the same inspector may return to the same farm for two or three
different standards. Put differently, the enactment of cross-certified organic consists
of both farms and inspectors.

4.6 Multiple Organics - The Case of UK Cereals

In contrast to Tanzanian tea, finding organic cereals grown in the UK on supermarket
shelves is easier. They are mostly found in a processed form, such as in a breakfast
cereal, muesli, biscuit or bread, or, less visible, in meat, dairy and other animal-
based products (most cereal production is for livestock feed). This makes cereal
an excellent case to consider the organization of markets in an organic context: as
commodities which serve as inputs to many agricultural and processing practices,
their organic status travels with them throughout a multitude of possible supply
chains, and therefore illustrate the tensions between singularized organic goods and
traded commodities.
As this type of agriculture emerged out of a rejection of agricultural orthodoxy,
the notion of an organic by default as described in the Tanzanian case does not
exist in the UK. Indeed, for most of the past century agricultural policy in the UK
and the EU has favored so-called high-input-high-output systems at the expense of
alternative modes of farming (policy support for organic farming was introduced in
1994). Thus, it is a conscious choice for farmers to move from highly industrialized
and intensive farming systems based on agrochemicals to a low-input system that
is often and mostly extensive. Traditionally, this meant that small, family-run farms
would convert to organic farming and their products would be marketed at a price
premium to consumers who shared the organic ideals (Conford and Holden 2007 ).
However, with the rapid expansion of the organic markets after a number of food
scares in the 1990s and the introduction of financial support for conversion and
for the environmental benefits delivered through farming, organic farming became
an interesting economic proposition to a wide variety of farm arrangements and
sizes. 8 Thus, the performances of organic farming range widely from (a diminishing
number of) traditional, small niche organic farms to extensive single enterprise
operations and large, industrialized and relatively intensive businesses. Moreover,
especially large estates converting to organic production adopt a parallel production
process (cf. Mutersbaugh 2005 ) where only about half of the farm is converted to
strategically spread risk between variability in organic production and fluctuating
oil prices. Yet, what all of these performances have in common is their approach to
growing cereal crops.

8 Arrangements range from stockless arable and a wide variety of mixed farms, as well as