Reuters Financial Report / Mar 30, 2000 / By Barbara Hagenbaugh
WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The number of U.S. farm acres dedicated to producing organic vegetables, fruit, herbs and livestock surged nearly 50 percent from 1995 to 1997, the U.S. Agriculture Department said Thursday.
The USDA, in an early release of a report due out next month, said farmers partly went organic because of the higher prices they received for their products -- sometimes double the going rate for conventional crops.
Farmers also are factoring in decreased costs related to not using pesticides as well as environmental benefits in their decision to turn their cropland into organic acres, USDA said.
"Organic farming became one of the fastest growing segments of U.S. agriculture during the 1990's, and producers, exporters, and retailers are still struggling to meet consumer demand for a wide range of organic products," the USDA said in the April issue of its "Agricultural Outlook" magazine.
In 1997, the most recent year of available data, nearly 1.35 million acres of U.S. cropland were certified organic, up from 918,000 organic acres in 1995, the USDA said. Nearly one-third of U.S. herbs, mixed vegetable and buckwheat crops were grown organically.
But the USDA said U.S. farmers are still well-behind their European counterparts. Only a fraction of one percent of all U.S. farmland was certified organic in 1997. European farmers had converted 1.5 percent of total farm acres to organic in 1997, the USDA said, with as much as 10 percent of the farmland in Austria dedicated to organic production.
The U.S. organic industry sold more than $6 billion of products, from food to clothing, in 1999. It is estimated that organic sales will increase by another 20 percent this year.
Earlier this month, the Agriculture Department unveiled its revised version of proposed nationwide standards for food and clothing marketed as "organic" -- a label that currently falls under a hodgepodge of state, regional and private certifier standards, giving rise to confusion about its meaning.
The USDA bowed to public demand to ban crops that were genetically altered, irradiated or grown with the aid of sewage sludge in its regulations, which USDA officials hope will take effect by the end of the year.
Other findings in the USDA report included:
Organic food sales accounted for between one and two percent of total U.S. food sales in 1997; More than half of the U.S. organic vegetables grown in 1997 were produced in California. Other major organic vegetable states included Colorado, Washington, Arizona, Oregon, Minnesota, New York, Illinois and Florida; and Vermont had the highest percentage of organic vegetable acres out of total farm acres in the state. Nearly one-quarter of Vermont's farmland was organic in 1997, due in part to the state's organic farming group that has been promoting organic farming for more than 30 years, the USDA said.
Copyright 2000 Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved.:
